Balls of Rice

Category: Books

  • To Call Them To Wander

    I wrote a book. I italicize because the word wrote is being generous, I mostly sent the ideas to my fingers who pressed the buttons in a specific order to make words that form sentences that sometimes made sense. As for book, it is more a short collection of opinion and rage that at times adhere to a common theme, than an actual book. Five years ago someone jokingly told me that I should write a book and five years ago I was stupid enough to think this was a good idea.

    To Call Them To Wander was a project that saw me through many lonely nights in a time where I sorted through my values and beliefs more than I sorted through my underwear. And the idea organization likely demonstrates this well. Owing to the help and encouragement from a few key friends it is now finished and ready to distribute in the modest quantities that are willing to read it.

    At the end of the process I didn’t even like the writing anymore. I haven’t read it in nearly six months and never plan to read it again. I’ve already found several grammar mistakes. But if you are interested in reading a paper copy or a free digital copy, then please see here.

    I never claimed it would be great, but now I can at least claim that the experiment is complete. Thank you for your support and patience.

  • Failed States

    When history is crafted in the service of power, evidence and rationality are irrelevant.

    -Noam Chomsky, Failed States, p100

    I am in the business of joy. Lowercase j. I am directly employed by Santa himself to greet the masses of joyless souls and bring the rapture of new merchandise to their lives. Running a business as if it were a business makes sense, as long as a service is provided or goods are traded for money. People convinced they they have a right to demand things in the form of a Christmas list because they believe that forced giving is the thoughtful thing to do, are running their lives like a business, taking advantage of situations and people and money. This does not make sense.

    In structure, the political counterpart to a corporation is a totalitarian state. There are rewards for loyalists, and quick punishment for those who “cross party leaders.” The antidemocratic thrust has precedents, of course, but is reaching new heights. It should surprise no one familiar with history that it is accompanied by the most august missions and visions of democracy.

    -Noam Chomsky, Failed States, p238

    Running a government as if it were a business frightens me. It makes humans commodities and necessities marketable. More regard for the dollars earned than the humans living in conditions where it is impossible to earn enough for basic human comforts. The past and the present have been crafted in the service of power. The connection between the system governed by the powerful and wealthy and the consumerism of this season is not coincidental. Someone, or a series of someones, have carefully crafted this holiday season that is loved by so many into a two-month shopping obligation. Our love for one another that is best expressed through fellowship and merriment has been changed so that we feel the only way to express it is through the giving of unnecessary items. And it has only strengthened their position of power. They have taken what we love more than anything and inverted it into another means of profit. Power is a business.

    Among the most salient properties of failed states is that they do not protect their citizens from violence—and perhaps even destruction—or that decision makers regard such concerns as lower in priority than the short-term power and wealth of the state’s dominant sectors.

    -Noam Chomsky, Failed States, p38

    Violence can be demonstrated in many ways. A boot stamping on a human face forever. An army occupying another country to control the energy reserves and elections to stifle the power of a population. Several levels of government building a handsome yet useless multimillion dollar sidewalk ignoring a housing crisis that continually worsens. Poverty is violence.

    Our state has used garlands and lights and parades to help us forget that it has indeed failed. And these lights and garlands have trained us to continue to support the failed state through red Santa hats and a marketable ‘Christmas Spirit.’ Either each year the situation becomes more grave than the last, or each year my cynicisms mount even higher than Santa’s pyramid of elf skulls that he compiles at year end, a physical exposition of the slave labour that his capitalist methods require.

    We can demonstrate our power by running our lives as the human lives they are, not as the businesses that they are told to be. We can take back the power from the failed state by refusing to participate in the season that characterizes their abuses and violence more than any other time of the year. We can go a year without ‘celebrating’ to show that our Joy (capital J) is founded in something more than a self-serving system that they created for us to mindlessly follow. We can buy nothing and be better, more generous, less selfish people because of it.

  • Sleepy Time Me

    I am at a sleepy time in my life. My sleeping patterns resemble those of recovering drug addicts and unemployed video-game enthusiasts. I sleep away my spare time to thrust myself into a subconscious entertainment that no one but me can witness, full of Muppets and fight scenes, made intriguing by long, survival-driven plots or political and humanitarian undertones. Sleeping until 10:30, living in a yawn-burdened semi-reality during the day, highlighted by a nap in late afternoon or early evening, and always capped off pleasantly by laying on my side on the frosty hardwood floor. Sleep is my guilty pleasure, taking away from my already minimal amounts of hard work and productivity.

    Often I fall into the trap of television and internet, especially when living in a home with the perks of entertainment and nourishment, the tools that aim to stifle creativity. I find myself tired and mentally lazy, sitting in front of a television watching the unwatchable until ten minutes later I snap out of it and try for an activity that doesn’t make me feel guilty. I often try this activity, writing or reading or pool or baking or cooking, and end up laying on the couch, staring upwards, hoping for a Muppet to sweep me away into better realities. I can’t write, so I sleep.

    And when I read, I find a piece of writing that makes me choke on my unpreparedness. Unprepared to read something that perfect. (“And love, as we all know,” the Kilraine fortune called after him, “makes the world go ‘round.”  As in Vonnegut’s short story, Money Talks, where a woman’s $12-million fortune tells a man what makes the world go ’round.)  Something I wish so badly that I had written which should motivate me to want to create until I come up with a something that I could deem as worthwhile, but usually motivates me to cursing my own artless endeavours and to lay back down on the couch for a nap to make me forget that I have devoted my past several years to a craft that is impossible to be pleased with. Creation of anything is the gateway to guaranteed insecurity. Sleep is the cure.

  • Quote of the Month: October 2011

    Read this book.

    “Our culture of illusion, is, at its core, a culture of death. It will die and leave little of value behind. It was Sparta that celebrated raw militarism, discipline, obedience, and power, but it was Athenian art and philosophy that echoed down the ages to enlighten new words, including our own. Hope exists. It will always exist. It will not come through structures or institutions, nor will it come through nation-states, but it will prevail, even if we as distinct individuals and civilizations vanish. The power of love is greater than the power of death. It cannot be controlled. It is about sacrifice for the other—something nearly every parent understands—rather than exploitation. It is about honoring the sacred. And power elites have for millennia tried and failed to crush the force of love. Blind and dumb, indifferent to the siren calls of celebrity, unable to bow before illusions, defying the lust for power, love constantly rises up to remind a wayward society of what is real and what is illusion. Love will endure, even if it appears darkness has swallowed us all, to triumph over the wreckage that remains.”

  • Giftedness is a Bluebeard

    Listing your talents as an adult is inevitably prideful. In the rare cases where it is necessary, like in a resumé, in a drug abuse support group, or on the adult playground (i.e. social networks), if you come up with a skill too quickly, then you likely think that you are better at it than you actually are. If you hesitate, then you look as if you are trying to be overly modest. If you can’t think of anything, then you are fooling yourself. Moderate giftedness is the immense swimming pool in which most people find themselves wading, and where their fingers and toes become wrinkly from being in for so long.

    I maintain the idea that some people have obvious physical skills while others have less obvious human skills. Some can be considered artistic or mechanical or athletic, something that can be measured in items created or matches won, or something apparent that fills a person’s time as an occupation or a hobby. Those with the physical gifts are praised highly for their abilities; they are considered the greatest of our species and are known for making humankind better by continually improving at their trade. Humans with skills that cannot be charted or counted, those with social abilities, an emotional giftedness, are often attributed as ‘nice people’, or ‘very kind’, or ‘fun to be around’. As children, in classroom exercises where we would appreciate our peers with words on a paper, we would write, ‘Nic is very athletic!’ to those that we didn’t think were nice, and ‘Nic is very funny and nice!’ to those that we didn’t think were gifted. Now as adults we praise those with obvious gifts and tell the rest that they are ‘very funny and nice’. The unclassifiable gifts are regarded as less important. It is those with the quiet gifts, the talents that do not boast, that can define a people. Gifts that aren’t physically noticeable but relational, intellectual or emotional competencies are the translucent cousins to the categorizable gifts of the often labeled ‘talented’ humans. If you don’t have an obvious physical talent, then I will ensure you with a motherly kiss on the forehead that you are still special and gifted. That although we may not be noticeably appreciated as often as the musician or the cook, that we are of equal acclaim in the fabrication of our species.

    Those of us with moderate talents, whether obvious talents or not, know of several acquaintances who seem to have incredible abilities in all things. People that can triumph every sport, can play several obscure musical instruments, can write all forms of literature, can speak seven languages, can bake an exquisite brie, can grow immaculate facial hair, have a glowing and linear smile without the help of dental cosmetics, can do a backflip on flat ground and are a great lay. And sometimes they are even extremely decent human beings. Obviously we always idolize these people, shake our heads at their dumb luck and good genes because they are somehow instinctually good at many of the obvious skills, and often better than we are at something we have spent a whole life practicing.

    The normal: the ones with moderate abilities in one or two things and the ones with the gifts that are not immediately identifiable can still be great with an understanding that greatness isn’t a list of abilities and talents, but rather that greatness is humility in those gifts of whatever degree in whatever domain.

    I was obviously born to draw better than most people, just as the widow Berman and Paul Slazinger were obviously born to tell stories better than most people can. Other people are obviously born to sing and dance or explain the stars in the sky or do magic tricks or be great leaders or athletes, and so on.

    I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives—maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn’t afraid of anything and so on.

    That’s what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn’t make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions.

    The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an “exhibitionist.”

    How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, “Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!”

    -Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard, Chapter 9, p74-5

  • A Purpose of Life

    I know a purpose of life. I found it on the couch yesterday. The purpose was not written on the couch in the form of a hot sauce stain, nor was it lost under the cushions like a clandestine gathering of quarters and dimes. But rather, I was sitting on the couch when I found it. I didn’t have to search very hard considering I was only away from the couch for about three hours the entire day. Purpose is slow. I didn’t have to search very hard at all, the purpose of life was actually mailed to me with a pair of shoes several months back. I’ve been carrying a purpose of life in my backpack around the continent with me and it took me at least six months to sort it all out. It was in a book.

    Today, I found the purpose of life to be this:

     “It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

    -Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan, Epilogue, p313

    Detail oriented people will notice the difference between the grammatical articles, definite and indefinite. This quote employs the indefinite article, a. The versus a. It would be neglectful of us to search for purpose as if there was only one to be found. The the. Vonnegut found one purpose and shared it through a novel. I can find one through reading his novel and sharing it with you. Finding a purpose doesn’t mean that it is easy to act out, and the fact that you found it doesn’t mean that you were already good at it. The fact that you aren’t good at it is maybe the way that you found the purpose in the first place, through noticing your own lack of ability in it. Purpose must be found knowing that you will find it again, or find a different one later.

    Tomorrow, the purpose of life could be this:

    “..all I can do is be friendly and keep calm and try and have a nice time till it’s over.”

    -Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan, Chapter 9, p202

    I can decide what a purpose of life is as often as I want, and you’ll have no choice but to read it. I can end the world today and start it back up like a gas burning stove. I can defy the laws of physics, I can reinvent how relationships work, I can claim to be the creator of the moon. I can do all this, not because I claim to be a god, but because I have a pen and a paper. Because of fiction. Because I have a blog. Because any asshole with a website has that opportunity. I am not spending time presenting my beliefs as the purposes of life, nor am I debating the legitimacy of those presented by Vonnegut, but I am simply offering the idea that purpose can be discovered, and when it is, it should be shared. But it takes more than a man and his medium to find a purpose, and if he shares that he found the purpose of life, then he is presenting the purpose as incomplete, or he is be doing it for egotistic reasons.

    Monday, the purpose of life could be to realize this:

    “The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody,” she said, “Would be to not be used for anything by anybody.”

    -Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan, Chapter 9, p202

    I have always wanted to have the authority and knowledge to definitively say what the meaning of life is, regardless of whether it were true or not, or whether it would be possible for a human being to know this anyway, or if there is an sort of purpose or meaning at all. I want to be a prophet or a man of great influence with the authority to write even a single purpose of life. If I discover even a single truth in my day and feel able enough to communicate it to even one single person, then I will be comfortable with what I’ve accomplished.

    Over the past two years, I have compiled a document of about twenty pages of significant quotes from books I have read. Sorted by author, categorized according to topic, this document is full of truths. It is full of different purposes of life, eloquently laid out by men and women of great ability; sorted and stacked by me. To claim there to be solely one purpose to life would be neglecting the great truths said by the great people of the past. It is impossible to sum up the purpose of human life in a single phrase, or single paragraph, or single book. But we can at least remember the times that we find a single purpose, and keep searching for more.

    Next week the purpose of life could be this.

    But I hope not.

  • Crime and Punishment

    Crime is a protest against the abnormality of social order—just that and nothing more, no other causes admitted, and that’s that!

    -Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, Part 3 Chapter 5, p253

    “Place your right index finger on the pad in front of you. Your right. Your index. Ok. Now place your left index finger on the pad in front of you. Ok, good. Welcome to America.”

    Crime, in its traditional sense, was evident in Mexico. Crime is easily noticed when it is hitting you over the head with a rock and holding a knife to the back of your friend. Or when it is trying to steal your camera in the middle of a busy street in Mexico City, with onlookers watching Crime trying to intimidate you as you wrestle with it for your camera bag.

    Crime is less evident in Chino, California however its presence is not naively denied. It sure seemed like a crime to cross the border from Mexico into the promised land as I was searched, questioned and as our Greyhound was stopped randomly in New Mexico to double check the illegal immigrant inventory on the bus. After three weeks in ‘lawless’ Mexico, arriving stateside makes me more nervous and uncomfortable than I did while being attacked in a country with a different language. Crime that hides is more worrisome to me than crime that sits out in the open.

    We are in a time where you can be a criminal for crossing an imaginary line on a map. This solidifies the fact that our form of social order is absurd; that what we have accepted as normal ways of interacting and behaving are not natural. In general, living according to a set of laws and rules created by man is against our nature as humans. Crime, when defined as it is in the quote above, opposing what can be considered as socially normal, is no more than a human acting as a human. When the laws and lawmakers are corrupt and the enforcers of those laws are breaking the laws themselves, then crime cannot be properly defined as what is against the law. Crime is the natural human response to being caught in a system of unnatural social order. If our social order was based on all of us standing in a straight line holding hands, the person that refuses to hold hands or stands ten centimetres ahead, is a criminal.

    Crime is more than an action punishable by law. If law didn’t exist, as they say it is in Mexico, crime still would. When social order is based on ‘the facts of society which remain relatively constant over time‘, then we must review what we have allowed to become constant, that is, what our social order is based on. Crime may be a problem, but the greater problem is the need to change the social order so that it becomes less necessary to protest it at all. Like any other type of protest, crime does not have the ability to directly to change anything, but it at least gives us the reminder of the abnormality of social order and our obligation to change it in whatever means possible.

    Like a first class criminal, I gave the US Government a copy of my fingerprints for their records. Forever archived. If crime is indeed simply the ‘protest against the abnormality of social order’, then I don’t mind if Border Control considers me armed and dangerous. A clear cut criminal.

  • Assurance in Laughter

    The laughter of humans enrages me.

    At least certain humans. The forced laughter, which I myself feign too often, is a pitiable thing. Emotionless, needy, facetious; not to mention it rings in the ear like the smash of glass on floor. So I find myself, four weeks into unemployment (and counting), sitting outside in the prairie-mimicking wind, trying to hold down the pages of my borrowed hardcover book, spine digging into the brick, tailbone making its groove in the fibreglass balcony, just to avoid fake laughter.

    I would rather a person pretended in any other action of emotion: crying, climaxing, tooth-grinding, yawning. Even a smile, under the same circumstances, lacks the obnoxious nature of laughter. One can laugh falsely to benefit someone putting themselves on the line with a sour joke, or to make themselves more comfortable in an awkward situation, or for attracting attention to themselves for their own benefit; the latter should be avoided more than the former, although all forms are cancerous.

    I have long held the belief that people only laugh when there is someone to hear it. Tree in the forest logic, I guess. Or, ‘I need to be acknowledged while enjoying my sitcom’ syndrome. Or something awkward and shallow. Subconsciously, no doubt, but when watching a movie alone, with others in the vicinity, audible laughter is often an attempt at grabbing attention. Laughter infiltrated by insecurity. I, on occasion, have laughed audibly while sitting alone in my bedroom, but this has occurred only in response to scenes such as this, and is muffled by my realization that only the scared laugh out loud while alone.

    There is no such thing as too much laughter, and I believe that all, even funeral home employees, would agree, and I am not yet a bitter and old enough man to be stealing the laughter from the scores of good-hearted people in the world. But when I hit the age of at least thirty, old and grey, expect a man ready to slay the joy and laughter of the masses. Can’t wait.

    I may be mistaken but it seems to me that a man may be judged by his laugh, and that if at the first encounter you like the laugh of a person completely unknown to you, you may say with assurance that he is good.

    -Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Memoirs from the House of the Dead, Chapter 3, p45

  • -George Orwell, Coming Up For Air, p188

  • We Must

    No living man can exist without some aim and the endeavour to attain it. A man who has lost his purpose and his hope not infrequently turns monster from misery…

    -Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
    Memoirs from the House of the Dead, p306

    I have become a charismatic preacher. I was bred for pulpit fist-slamming since I was a young Estevanite wearing turquoise pants, turquoise striped shirt and plastic necklace in which I could put my collection plate money. My first sermon was when I was in grade two, slapping the demons out of the neighbour’s dog Sandy. Then in grade nine, when I brought elderly women to tears. A real child preacher, they said. Real promise.

    And now, in everyday conversation and writing, I find myself using fire-and-brimstone phrasing. The fires of hell, the souls of sinners, the wrath of God, the tender touch of the Holy Spirit. But most of all, the ‘We Must’ phrase. We mustn’t let stupidity get hold of us. We must fight the good fight. We must search for more. We must, we must, we must.

    Certain writers and orators have the ability to express imperative ideas without using the ‘We Must’ phrasing, and these people have a definite gift. When I want to get my point across directly and bluntly, I fall upon this type of phrase, and without fail, it alienates and comes off as preachy to all. Certain literary intellectuals write entire novels to simply get a few ideas across without being preachy, and although it is far simpler to just write, ‘We must have an aim and endeavour to attain it’, Dostoevsky used brilliant detailed stories to get his ideas across.

    In editing a long piece of writing over a period of several years, certain segments become wordy, or tired, or old, and after reading and rereading the same paragraph one thousand times, the easiest thing to do is to take the idea out of the poorly written paragraph, highlight it all, press delete, and write a ‘We Must’ phrase to turn a poorly written paragraph into a poorly written, preachy, phrase. ‘We Must’ prevails.

    The executioner’s is a good life. He has money, good food, and vodka.

    -Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
    Memoirs from the House of the Dead, p240

    To demonstrate, here is a ‘We Must’ phrase for the previous quote. We must become an executioner, because an executioner has a good life. We must have money. We must eat good food. We must drink vodka.
    It is that simple. Take any sentence, turn it into a ‘We Must’ phrase, say it with conviction, slam your fist on the table or the wall next to you, and there you have it. You are a bonafide, charismatic, gospel preacher.

    We must learn to relay real ideas without using the ‘We Must’ rhetoric.

    God be with you.