Yet, despite the completion of a mission undertaken abstractly, a process that Camus so elegantly criticized, there is no real closure in the completion of the egoist, nationalist, everything-but-human-scaled undertaking. Just ask the families of those who died as a result of the man’s decisions. The physical product is that a sixty-year-old man was allegedly shot to death, and half the world considered this potential fiction to be a relief and a closure. Yet it added to our thinking, and produced amazing results. We shall express the results of this day’s physical events and feelings in the form of a question:

Why the hell are we not producing energy through conversation?

Consider the following, all of which are true within the same scope:

(a)    all conversation between humans, regardless of cognitive development, language and all other variables between speakers, is a circular activity, a loop.

(b)   all electrical circuits (circuit being essentially the same word as circle) are circular, constantly and simultaneously sending and receiving, much in the same physical way as conversation.

(c)    an eardrum is a vibrating membrane, a thing that produces vibration while serving as an amplifier and translator of other sources of vibration, such as the human chest cavity and vocal cords or the beating of an insect’s wings. Eardrums send to the brain just as they receive from the outside world, and as such hearing is perceived in a circular way.

(d)   a speaker is a vibrating membrane, a thing that produces vibration while serving as an amplifier and translator of electrical impulses, sending as vibration what it receives as electrical impulses.

(e)    electrical current can be generated through the motion of magnets around a pole, as in a car’s generator or any electrical motor. The motion can be delivered as electrical impulse through wires, like the ones hooked up between electrical amplifiers and speakers. Speakers, vibrating because of magnets attached to them, behave much like the human eardrum, which is a mirroring of the chest cavity and vocal cords.

With all this is mind, it stands to reason that sound like that produced through production of the human voice should be translatable between a vibrating membrane and an electrical generator through a simple wire that can communicate electrical impulses. This writer is not an electrical engineer or physicist, so the reader will forgive any steps that have been skipped here; in fact, the skipped steps are the challenge to be presented in this discussion. Therefore, if we can move electrical motors with our constant vocalizing, even if it takes the help of a tiny battery-powered translating amplifier, and we have the means to store power in batteries –even rechargeable ones –then it stands to reason that we should be able to produce as much electricity needed to do our stuff as the noise in the world can deliver.

Once we employ materials that can elegantly produce this power without too much waste, sound, and in particular speech (but why not also airports, train tracks and commuter highways?), would be a huge source for energy-producing vibration. We’ve taught a car to get power from its own brakes; why can’t the human voice have a part in producing power? Crowded bars could become as productive as coal-burning plants. All microphones employed in every application could be producing at least enough locally-stored power to essentially run all the machinery related to its use, if not concentrated with other devices to produce sources of power to be redistributed. Entire power grids could be localized –to a ridiculously local scale –around sources of sound. Loud places like malls and bars could support quieter places like dentists’ offices, bank branches and homes. Even the vibration produced by heavy objects driving over bridges could somehow be redirected to magnetic generators. Power companies could not only be exposed as being wasteful and inefficient, but rendered entirely unnecessary. We will leave the other implications up to the reader’s imagination.

The issue here is the use of energy sources that we already have, and our intention is to live in greater connection with all things, and to eliminate waste from our ecology. We should develop the maturity and habits of mind to make real cost-benefit analyses, such as the following. The human voice is produced by a living human. If we apply the rules of phenomenology to economics, then not even humans are off the hook from scrutiny about the means of their production. A living human takes water and food to produce. Water must be delivered through pipes (which take immense energy and material expense to produce and install) from sources that must be located, tapped and purified through immense expense of material and energy. Food is produced, prepared and delivered by equally immense means that the average person is just beginning to perceive, which have been explored admirably by Pollan (mentioned because he’s popular now) and his colleagues and predecessors.

So the human voice is expensive enough a thing. Human speech is already a thing with a big carbon footprint, and so forth. Not even the cynical Stalinists or other people with currently acceptable or unacceptable points of view have dared (in large numbers) to look this deep into efficiency, but we have to learn how to look this hard, if we’re going to make accurate analyses that can hope to produce elegant solutions. There are now seven billion very expensive human products walking the earth and consuming exponentially more resources and energy than we produce. With intentions based on living in connection with all things, why not take one of our necessary by-products and make something of it?

We encourage the reader to take this idea and make hay of it. Don’t patent it, or else you’re no reader of mine. Make some money off it, maybe, but not such that others can’t as well. The people who control energy production and provision serve power. But power is power, and not life, and one can only serve life or something else besides life. What do you serve? Power is most frightened for its survival when those who need power’s abilities lose that need. A sixty-year-old man was allegedly shot to death this week because of decisions he made as a result of dealing with his own environment’s economic and power pressures, and added to a circle of pain and killing that those of us still alive will have to deal with for the rest of our lives. Again we end up with a circle; this one produces only negative results. With that in mind we say to our audience: if you find something wrong with this discussion about making electricity through yacking (about politics, perhaps?), don’t dare take it as an excuse to leave. Rather take it as a reason why this discussion so badly needs your involvement and input.

The piezo effect, for one, and various perspectives on producing work in general, have already set up a mirror for this investigation. Go figure it out! Have fun!

Lately the season had been making him feel his face thickening with age. He was beginning to squint from the glare on his fleshy cheekbones. He looked over to the north past his own barn and saw the neighboring barn at the bottom of the slope. His mind called it a barn out of habit, but he didn’t know what it was.

The thing was long, two stories high, aluminum skin painted white, with tools and vehicles drawn up against it, just like John’s, but upon looking at it, he knew right away that it didn’t belong there –it didn’t belong in his understanding of things. There was no difference between his own barn and that one, but it was very clear that that one was not human, did not serve humans, was not tenanted by humans.

John listened. Except for the faint sucking in the air of dawn pulling the night back over the edge of the world, and the low crunch of corn remains, there was no sound. Inside that thing there were no cows or chickens to be heard, nothing was being dismantled or fixed or adjusted. John Jordan had been a little shocked until now, but now the silence terrified him. Before his eye wandered to the left of the other barn, toward the house, he turned, afraid of what he might see.

He’d forgotten what he was doing out there. He turned back toward his house, but the other barn followed him. How long had it been there? Why hadn’t he ever noticed before that it was so unnervingly other? What living thing was in control of it? Ideas he’d never even perceived before were now demanding that he recognize and solve their problems. He came in the house and kicked off his boots. The video game in the other room was hooked up to a speaker system and the sound of virtual guns going off was like bombs dropping on the house. He poured himself some coffee, unsure what it would even taste like this time of day, when it was fresh, and sat down at the kitchen table at the right of his wife Sharon, who was surprised to see him.

“You already got the boat up?”

John just stared at the steam climbing out of the coffee and tugged at the gray hair on his chin. Sharon reached over and slapped his arm, then became worried and squeezed gently where she’d slapped.

“Hey. Earth to John. What’s wrong?”

He looked up at her, trying to make her out, as if from under water.

“Did something happen to the boat?”

Sharon was something he knew for sure, and so was the boat.

“The boat! Right. No, I didn’t.”

Sharon withdrew her hand and sipped her coffee.

“Oh.”

“I uh … have you noticed anything strange around the lake?”

“Well no –like what? The Odekirks are selling their house and they’ve had quite a few lookers coming by,”

“No,”

Her hand came back up to his shoulder, pressing.

“Oh god John, this morning Suzanne called and said their old dog Trina, the German shepherd, drowned in the lake last night but they couldn’t find the carcass. Did you find it?”

“No.”

“Oh thank god.”

She seemed to go through some inventory written in minute letters down her eyelashes.

“Then what’s wrong?”

John drew his hand up from the hair on his chin to his right temple, pressed gently and frowned deeply. He summoned the half measure of courage afforded by having a companion.

“Cmon, I’ll show you.”

A series of explosive noises boomed out of the video game through the floor. He took her hand and they went outside. The sun was out now, but hung back and left the hard blue sky open to the birds making their broad southward arcs over the marshes toward their autumn places. Some wild turkeys were stepping around and staring at nothing at the edge of the small woods that met the lake at a narrow point on the other side of the house. John took Sharon up to the top of their rise, to the middle of the gray field. He pointed out the white metal barn.

“The tree?”

“No, the barn.”

Sharon looked, then her hand flew up to her mouth, where a fingernail rested clinging to her bottom lip.

“Oh my god.”

She looked at John, the sunlight blotting out the far side of her face.

“It’s not- whatta you think it is?”

He looked at her.

“I dunno.”

She looked back at it, then back at him, with an incredulous look.

“This seems ridiculous but –John, it scares me.”

“I’m scared too.”

“Whatta you think it is?”

“I dunno. But I think we should leave it alone.”

“We should find out what it is, if it’s dangerous or not!”

“Dangerous? It hasn’t moved yet in all this time.”

“Well we should still make sure!”

“I’m not gonna go looking around it.”

“Well, no! I meant we could go ask other people.”

John snorted out a stifled laugh.

“Who? Katy? Dan?”

Sharon looked again.

“It looks like,”

“The Odekirks?”

“Hush –it looks like nobody’s home.”

“Has there ever been anyone home?”

Sharon went pale.

“John, now you’re just asking ridiculous questions to scare me!”

“No I’m not! Let’s go back inside.”

“How could it’ve just been there and we didn’t notice?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’re they doing with it?”

“They? How do we know it’s a they?”

“Stop it!”

Inside the video game had stopped exploding. Katy came running into the kitchen with her brown hair brushed straight down and with her various sweaters and her backpack on. She used the same tone of voice with her mom as her mom did with her.

“Cmon mom, time for school!”

It put off Sharon, but it reasoned that her daughter figured it was the one correct tone for the phrase. Katy ran back out just as soon as she’d come in, and her footfalls rumbled through the floor. She returned with Dan, six years older and three heads taller than her, by the wrist.

“Morning dad!”

“Good morning.”

“Did you eat yet, Dan?”

Katy answered for him.

“No! He was playing shootemup all morning.”

“I noticed.”

“No, it was only for a half hour after I’d been up for an hour already.”

Katy shakes her head.

“It’s still all morning!”

“No it isn’t. Compared to the total time I was up, it was only a third of the morning.”

“Ah, stop debating. We’re gonna be late, mom!”

Sharon loaded Dan’s hands with an apple and two of the big baked energy bars that were supposed to be reserved by treaty for John.

“No we’re not.”

She kissed John’s cheek and looked him briefly in the eyes, trying to dilute the worry in both their faces with some of the tenderness that she’d summoned into hers. Then she went out and started the car, the kids following.

“Bye John.”

“Have a good day, Dan. Take it one step at a time.”

“I’ll try.”

“Bye dad!”

“Bye Katy.”

John went back out and headed down along the side of the house right to the water, forsaking a second attempt at his ruined morning stare. He hooked up the boat hoist to the truck, got the little boat out of the cattails, cleaned it up and hung it in the rafters above the garage door.

Now he looks with scrutiny at the other barn again, as if surveying the land between an invading force and his own land. He feels exposed without the wall of corn that divided their two slopes, but on the other hand now he can be sure that nothing else was hiding in the corn.

The barn looks like any other, cheap and metal and just sitting there, but there’s no mistaking that it’s foreign. Its metal siding doesn’t mean the same thing as that on other barns. The lines of its roof are full of cryptic, eerie information. Even the way its weight sits on the ground conceals some terrifying secret message.

What creature would have such a thing, and what use could it possibly be serving? Are they invisible humanlike things?

Was it some temple to a god that’s supposed to have died thousands of years before the ground was cleared for the humdrum Christianity that consoles this rolling country? The thoughts come to John as if through communication –they don’t feel at all akin to his anemic imagination.

At least the barn appears to be made to blend in, and has never moved or done anything since he’s lived there. So there’s no reason it’d do anything now. John can’t communicate with whatever it is, but he decides to try to keep feelings of hostility down, so it won’t react. But how can he keep his family in line? What do the kids know? If he and Sharon can hardly speak in front of it, how will he know if one of them sees something different?

In the afternoon Sharon returns from work with the kids. John’s getting used to seeing Dan’s shadowed head in the car as it approaches. It’s been four months since they took him in so Sharon could take his mom, her sister, to a live-in rehab clinic for alcoholism. Their mother had left money for such a necessity in her will. Katy seems to like having more crew to captain around the house, and more ears to listen to her inventions.

Dan is bright and respectful, very collected on the outside, for his age and his circumstances, but he’s quite a contrary kid when he gets back from school. It takes a while for him to let down some of his defenses and feel safe again.

“Katy, do you want apple slices or pear slices?”

“I want apples.”

“Okay. Dan, are you hungry?”

Dan’s already gone into his room and closed the door. Katy trots into the hall and bangs at the door.

“Dan!”

He responds but she doesn’t hear him clearly.

“Dan!”

The door swings open.

“Just a second!”

“Do you want apples or pears?”

Sharon bends out from the kitchen into view.

“You want a snack?”

“I don’t need anything.”

“I’m already at it.”

He looks down his chest at Katy.

“What’re you having?”

“Apples. With peanut butter!”

“I’ll just have what she’s having.”

“Alright.”

Dan comes out of his room and sits down in the den across from the kitchen, on the end of the couch that he’s colonized. It’s the corner, and his claim on it, his refuge, has made it even cooler and darker than it was. Katy comes to a stop at her mother’s side, giggling.

“He said that again today at school!”

“What? That he’ll have what she’s having?”

“Quit it, Katy. I didn’t say anything.”

“We were at the bus stop with the big kids and Dan kept saying I like that, I like that, to everything they were saying.”

She keeps giggling.

“That’s funny cause I never said that.”

“Who was that, Dan?”

“Steve and Willy Swanson.”

“Have you made friends with them?”

“Not really.”

“It’s okay if you have! But I hope you won’t go hunting with them.”

“I don’t wanna go hunting.”

“Katy, don’t bother him. He’s trying to fit in and adjust.”

“I’m just saying, he’s like a broken record!”

“I never said that!”

“Let it go, honey.”

“I don’t wanna get censored.”

John comes in the house from the inside garage door.

“Hi kids.”

He crosses the den into the kitchen and gives Sharon a kiss on her jaw while she cuts up the fruit. Katy jumps up on him in greeting, then back off, like a kitten.

“Did you have a good day at school?”

“Yeah! Mister Blomquist said that half of us are stistically going to end up flakes.”

“How about you, Dan?”

“It was okay.”

“Okay is okay.”

Dan cracks a smile.

“Yeah.”

John looks furtively at Sharon, managing at length to catch her eye. Deciding not to wait for her to return a look that he’ll have to judge as agreement or not, he clears his throat.

“I wanna show you kids something outside.”

Katy jumps into her shoes.

“What is it? What’d you build us?”

“It’s nothing like that.”

Dan draws himself up in the sofa.

“What is it?”

“It’s,”

John looks at Sharon again, this time getting a look back like you handle it.

“It’s an issue of safety, and I wanna make you kids aware of it.”

“Okay.”

“You can just tell us. We know the property.”

“I know, Dan. But let me show you.”

John tries to look confident and leads the kids out the house, Sharon behind them. He takes them up to the rise, to the middle of the mowed cornfield, where he first saw it, and points to it. Sharon touches her lip, but doesn’t manage to cover her gaping mouth. It stands there in bold relief against the landscape, heavy on the ground. There’s no denying that the thing isn’t human. Its mystery blows across them like a wet gust.

John looks at Dan, worried most for him, feeling guilty for bringing him into more trouble. Dan stares at it for a long time, inscrutable behind his defenses. Katy looks up at John, rubbing her eye, with the look on her face of a child that wants to get it but doesn’t, and doesn’t care.

“It’s far away.”

John smiles faintly, but the smile fades before he meets Katy’s glance.

“Yeah, it is. Good thing too.”

Without words they all go back into the house, Sharon locking the door behind them. She distributes the sliced fruit and the four of them snack, staring at nothing, each with a coal of the thing still burning in their eyes. Katy is first to move. She drags her backpack down to the middle of the den floor, eviscerates it and lays down on her chest to do her long division.

“I just don’t understand. How could everyone let them stay that long? Haven’t we ever talked to anyone who lived there?”

That makes John reflect, regarding the cleanly bitten end of his green apple against the rough, pocked skin of his fingers. Sharon and he know everyone in this tiny town. If whatever it is has been working that land, he’d have at least met it at the grain elevator. But his memory is blank; the unanswerable mystery has punched out everything he might have known about that place on the other side of the cornfield, at the opposite foot of the rise.

After a while Sharon looks at John, her eyes wanting to bargain.

“What if it’s nothing?”

“I think we’ve all seen it. How could it be nothing?”

“It used to be nothing! You’ve scared everyone!”

“I don’t want it to catch anyone off guard like it did me!”

John finds Dan looking at the both of them, frozen as if fascinated by a film.

“I’m sorry, Dan.”

The words fall out of John’s mouth. He wishes there were a way for Dan to know what he intended them to mean, that he deserves parents he’s not scared of, that he deserves to live somewhere safe. John takes Sharon’s arm firmly and leads her into the bedroom. He sits on the edge of the bed, but Sharon remains standing, livid.

“You made me see it.”

“No I didn’t –I mean all I did was point it out to you.”

“You told me something that made me think of it that way!”

“No I didn’t!”

Sharon has an idea.

“You’ve gotta get the gun out, John. They could be dangerous!”

“What good would that do? What good is a gun against something that’s managed to live next to us for as long as any of us can remember without even being seen? What if they’re invisible?”

Sharon can’t get any paler, so now she starts tearing up, her eyes darting from one corner of the room to the other.

“You’re right! What if they’re already right here with us in the house? We need the gun! We can’t let them get in the house!”

She bolts to the closet and slides the mirror door open.

“They’re not.”

John and Sharon start, each catching their reflections in the mirror and frightening themselves, Sharon doubly so because her eyes are only six inches from the ones looking back at her. They turn to the doorway. Dan meets eyes with them, and then immediately a look crosses his face like he’s just done the most crushingly embarrassing thing ever. John rises slowly and approaches Dan, his hand outstretched.

“Whatta you mean they’re not?”

He gently presses the youth’s shoulder. Dan shies away from his uncle’s touch.

“I mean –I don’t know.”

“No, Dan, it’s okay. Come here. Whatta you mean they’re not?”

Sharon advances on the both of them.

“Did you–”

She shoots a desperate look at John.

“Can you–”

Dan insists.

“I don’t know.”

John holds up a hand at Sharon.

“Stop.”

He tries again to communicate with Dan through his eyes, knowing nevertheless that he’s never had a tender eye. The tone of voice that Dan used couldn’t be faked, and he’s not one to draw attention to himself. John’s amazed and proud –and frightened –that Dan has seen what the others couldn’t.

“Won’t you tell us anything, Dan?”

“Let him be, Shar.”

“I’m curious!”

“You’re not curious, you’re scared.”

“Don’t tell me how I feel!”

But Sharon stops there. Her affect changes back to fear. Katy comes into the room, silent, looking worried and confused. She closes the door behind her and approaches the bed.

“What’s going on?”

John sits back down on the bed and pats the cover at his side. Katy springs up on the bed between him and Sharon, looking at them both.

“We’re just trying to understand something strange, baby.”

“Don’t worry, Katy. Dan, if they’re not in the house, where are they?”

Dan remains silent, strong enough within to reproach her with his eyes for being so foolish as to demand such. Beyond the bedroom wall and just around the rise stands the strange thing. It could almost peek down the lakeshore at them.

“Dan, if you don’t tell us what makes you say that, there’s nothing we can do.”

“Let him be, won’t you! There’s already nothing we can do. And besides, there could be nothing there.”

“I think Dan’s made it pretty clear that there’s something there!”

“He hasn’t said anything! You’re the one who said it’s probably nothing in the first place.”

“Well I changed my mind.”

“Well you changed mine too!”

John gets up and shoves past Sharon, steps toward the mirrored closet door, wanting to get the gun. He hesitates and turns around. Sharon glares at him silently, but he doesn’t even need her glare to know better. He’s gone beyond trying to protect Dan and taken the argument for his own needs. He’s being a coward.

“That’s a bunch of bull shit.”

“I know.”

He crosses back over and sits back down, shielding Dan.

“Then why’d you say it?”

“Let’s stop, alright? Dan’s liable to run away if we keep on like this. I didn’t know what do –I didn’t mean to cause all this –I just didn’t know what to do besides show it to everyone so we’d all be on the same–”

“But we’re not, John! Dan saw something more.”

John takes a breath, looks at Dan, then back at his wife.

“I admit that it felt to me like he did too. But we can’t force him to–”

“No, you’re right. We can’t force him to talk.”

Everyone watches as Sharon’s affect loses its sense of helplessness and takes on an unsettling authority.

“So let’s let that be the solution. Dan,”

She steps close to him, grasping his eyes with her own.

“Will you promise not to ever tell what you saw?”

“Shar,”

“Otherwise you’ll be the only one who –otherwise everyone won’t be on the same page. It’s like John says.”

“Let him talk, mom.”

“Katy, stay out of this, honey.”

Sharon is never like this otherwise. Katy, and even John, are becoming afraid of her.

“How’re we ever gonna be sure that he won’t tell?”

“Dan, do you understand what could happen if people –at least until we can figure out how to make them leave,”

Dan’s been silent since his last protestation, and he looks like he’s about to break into pieces. John abruptly stands up and grabs Dan away, puncturing the bubble of their four confined bodies and heading down the short hall to Dan’s room.

“Come on.”

They get in the door and John locks it shut before Sharon can catch them. Dan sits down on his bed. John waits, watching how he arranges himself, then joins him. Dan and he haven’t become close before now, and he pleads with his eyes, which Dan fearlessly meets.

“I’m sorry, Dan,”

Dan draws himself up in his rehearsed adolescent defense dance. Every small movement, every shift of weight, serves to prevent some past thing from getting through to him again.

“I’m sorry.”

“Stop saying you’re sorry.”

He looks away, rummaging with his eyes through the posters tacked to the wall.

“You wanna know what I saw, John?”

“Not really, Dan. I don’t know if it’d even get through my ears. I’m sorry. Of course I wanna know. Your aunt Sharon’s just got me –this whole situation’s got me end over end. It’s been a really hard day for me.”

“When’d you see it?”

“This morning.”

“What’d you see?”

“It’s just –for me, it’s just –you see it there, and all these things about the world are tied together with that thing, all these –meanings. And it just doesn’t have any of those meanings.”
“That’s what it was like for me, too.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Even with having seen them?”

“I didn’t try to see them. I wasn’t looking for something like you and Sharon. I just knew.”

John’s heart beats so fast that it feels like it doesn’t beat at all.

“What is it?”

“It belongs here. It didn’t just get here now.”

“And…?”

“And –I don’t know either. But it’s –we just haven’t ever noticed.”

“How many are–”

“It’s not like a number. It’s just –you look and you just know that something’s there. Like you know if it’s day or if it’s night.”

“But they’re not in our house?”

“No. They’re just there.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t want anyone to know what I said, John. I don’t want anyone to think I’m weird.”

“I know you don’t. Don’t worry, no one’s gonna find out.”

“I don’t want anyone to be thinking about me.”

“I understand.”

“You won’t let Sharon say anything?”

“No.”

John hazards a touch, squeezing his shoulder, and Dan leans his head on his uncle’s shoulder and they sigh together. They linger there, the tension in their bodies creating a tickling vibration where their brows meet.

Sharon raps gently on the door.

“Guys? Why did you lock the door?”

“Have you calmed down?”

“Have you?”

“Yeah.”

“Open the door.”

“Do you trust me?”

“Yeah.”

John stands up.

“I won’t tell her anything. If I come out we have to leave Dan alone. Okay?”

“Alright.”

He opens the door halfway and slides out. Sharon tries to peek her head around him as he turns around the doorframe.

“I’m sorry Dan,”

“Just –come on. Later.”

John closes the door and leaves Dan alone. A shaft of afternoon sun coming through the white curtains lights a spot on the bed next to him. He can already feel the thing settling in with him.

He puts his head in his hands and runs his fingers over his scalp. How could he tell anyone about something that can’t be understood?  He figures it’s probably better to accept that it’s there, and to give it a place in his life, so it doesn’t need to intrude on other, vulnerable places. To let it wander would be too painful.

In the kitchen John and Sharon sit at the table, both exhausted.

“I feel terrible for fighting like that in front of him. What were we thinking?”

“We weren’t.”

“What’re we gonna do about all this?”

“Nothing. It stays here in the house.”

Sharon sort of laughs.

“If we told anyone they’d think we were crazy.”

“I guess we’ll forget about it eventually. If we ignore it.”

“I just wish I knew what it was. I wish we could understand it.”

“Well, as long as we can’t, let’s just let it be. We can’t fight about it like this for the rest of our lives.”

“Should we move?”

“And lose the farm? And what if the people who buy the place see it too, and they let it get out? Who knows what’ll happen. Who knows if it’ll defend itself.”

Sharon begins to become afraid again.

“Do you think it knows that we tried to shoot it?”

“We didn’t! Forget it.”

“John, I’ll just never feel safe again, knowing that something could be reading my mind. Couldn’t we get Dan to,”

“To talk to it? To negotiate with it? What makes you think he could?”

Tears roll from Sharon’s eyes and she sniffles.

“I just feel so helpless, John.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t. We’re gonna have to keep that boy under wraps.”

“No we won’t. How’s he supposed to know what to do about what he saw? What makes you think he’s any different from us? We’ll just let him be. That solves the problem.”

“He said they weren’t here!”

“Well, he was reacting to what he thought he saw, just like we are.”

“I suppose.”

“Mom… Dad… can I come out now?”

“Oh god. Yes, Katy, come out and finish your homework.”

Mankato, October 2010

The reason for this is that Facebook is entirely permeable, even in high-security profiles like my own. This morning I got the following wall post, and I recommend highly that you all follow its instructions:

Between today and tomorrow, the New FB Privacy setting called “Instant Personalization” goes into effect. The new setting shares your data with non-FB sites & it is automatically set to “Enabled”. Go to Account>Privacy Settings>Apps & Websites>Instant Personalization>edit settings & uncheck “Enable”. BTW If your friends don’t do this, they will be sharing info about you as well. Please copy and repost.

We don’t care about privacy, our rights, respect, dignity and so forth anymore because we think that there is some ideological war going on about the latter things, and we think that we’re on the side that’s winning. But it’s advertisers who are winning unless we keep our stuff private. Facebook is designed so that attention hogs’ friends are dragged down with them when they have their accounts open to the breeze. I’m actually doing us all a favor by miswiring the photos, because it will skew the accuracy of the advertisers’ efforts. You’re all welcome.

http://factoidz.com/cognates-of-english-french-s-lenition-revealed/

http://factoidz.com/taking-advantage-of-spirantization-in-germanic-languages/

People who use language to communicate don’t really ever understand each other, and it is a high attainment to understand each other’s language, which is as close as we can come to knowing the other’s spirit. A flexible but clear language between two or more people, founded on a few well-rehearsed moves that show not only motivation but agreement to work on certain terms, is a badge of a profound relationship.

We would like to make our argument in a simplified way, not making specific claims about prosody (tone of voice) or choice of words, such as using “why” when a simple “what” would keep the interlocutor going. The rapid exchange of dialectic results several times a minute in the following, which is responsible for language moving in the wrong direction, and therewith the topic, the speakers’ motivations, and ultimately the speakers’ emotions moving in completely unnecessary directions:

For assertion (A) there are, in an infinite set of responses, responses (B1) and (B2), in which

(B1) = Speaker is thinking out loud, organizing thoughts in response to (A), reflecting with words upon the impact of (A) upon his/her own thinking.

(B2) = Speaker is making a completed response (after the process described in (B1)) that contains a judgment of something contained in (A).

and in which speaker of (A) hears the response and mistakes one of the (B)s for another; the most disruptive response is to confuse (B1) for (B2). Arguably, in a sensitive and generous dialectic, the more frequent response would be (B1), which is a necessary thing for many people. This writer finds it next to impossible to think silently when engaged in a conversation. But our brains are obsessed with all responses being of the type of (B2). So we get “butt hurt” when we get a response that we consider to be an inappropriate judgment, and furthermore a premature one.

The ambiguity in the language used to make (B1) and (B2) can be cured through generous and clear use of language. A response (B1) can be uttered, qualified by including a statement such as “and that’s just my thinking, I’m not demanding anything of you by that.” In this way the speaker of (A) will understand that the speaker of (B) is not judging or pushing forward prematurely, as well as better understanding speaker of (B)’s intentions and perspective. It also takes away the ultimately destructive motivation by either speaker to tolerate something hurtful from the other. That tolerance is what we found at the core of our fellow traveler’s problem in the conversation that started our thinking about this.

Again, this doesn’t fix understanding of the other; it fixes a problem of one’s own understanding of what one is getting from the other. But the real truth in the formula is found in the fact that the fix depends on the generosity of the other speaker. The true culprit in this ambiguous situation is selfishness, and to get around the ambiguity we have to place our contributions a little bit into the interests of our interlocutor. This simple clarification is instinctual in the conversations of children, who are often occupied with seemingly lower-level tasks, like juggling the very meaning of the words in a conversation.

Let’s now think of our topic from this morning’s conversation: if the other speakers who are causing the hurt used generosity, she wouldn’t have to make the demands on their language use that she feels she can’t make, even though their language keeps her in a hurtful place.  To be aware of the confusion described above, and to use such a solution as the one we’ve proposed, should work to slow our reaction speed, check our emotions, and look for the common ground in conversation, like children and foreign language learners do.

Finally, we’d like to point out that the ambiguity we’ve examined bespeaks a real existential problem. It is mathematically possible that up to one hundred percent of our misery is caused by when we want something that isn’t there. We find this explanation to be sufficient because the thing’s non-existence can be caused by us individually or can be visited upon us by others, the latter of which most agree gives the right to be upset. When the speaker of (A) hears a response from an infinite set that includes (B1) and (B2), the fact that one mistakes (B1) for (B2) demonstrates that (B2) is not really there, within fairness assuming that the speaker of (B) is sympathetic. Anger arises out of nothing -the insult is not really there -and the conversation can begin to turn around an axis of anger/hurt for no good reason.

As a student of existentialism, which has aided our investigations of language immeasurably, this writer would like to encourage all readers to put these principles into action. The reader will find that the language we use to accomplish it is not so important; when our motivations are clear, the language will reflect that.

To go further from this article: search “prosodic phrase boundaries.” You will likely need access to an article database to view the results, sorry!

All the black tracks visible were cut by hand with a claw hammer.

A few days ago there was a light fall of freezing rain –ice pellets, essentially –that aggregated into a hard crust of eighth-inch thick ice all over everything, especially streets. I live on an egg-shaped hill, and literally the rest of the town is below it. So any time it snows there’s the danger of going out into town in the truck and not being able to get back up into the garage. I rented the garage exactly for the winter, because I’m worried about how my Californian half-ton Silverado will react to the Minnesota winter (which isn’t that bad, by the way, Minnesotans –and I say this having lived my first winter in the “first time it’s been this bad in twenty years). The city doesn’t know we exist, so usually it takes a while for the hill to get plowed.

So this morning my girlfriend went out to go to work. There are two alleys going up our egg-shaped hill, and our garage is at the bend where they meet. She turned the truck down the northern hill before noticing that the neighbor’s white van was abandoned in the middle of the alley, stuck on the traction-repellent ice. So she got it down on to the flat (and mysteriously dry) parking spot in back of the neighbor’s house that faces Hanover street. Her sister came and took her to work. It wasn’t possible to have the van towed because the towing company will only act if their house’s landlord calls, which relieved me from having to be the guy who gets people towed. I thought of calling the salt truck (which should have happened in the first place), but it’s Sunday, the second of January, and both the salt guy and the city office with the phone number have the day off. I went to work on the hill.

Having cut two inches of ice off the concrete deck of our apartment last week, I’m already rehearsed in ice combat. During the first fall of ice the other day (followed after about an hour by another), I was clever and got a plain kitchen broom and swept the pellets off the walkways of the apartment property. While I was at it I also swept tire-sized tracks clear off the western hill, which effort is still the only reason why we can get up it today.

I got the claw hammer and the snow shovel and broke tracks into the eighth-inch thick ice cover so my truck could get grip. I didn’t really judge the arc of the truck’s steering well during my first cuts, so while the truck ran I had to make additional clearings. Drive two feet, spin, clear, back up way out of original track, repeat. Sometimes the ice broke up in tidy sheets, sometimes it cracked all around a central white stump where the hammer hit, which now will never come off the rough rocky pavement. Sometimes the hammer just hit slush, and it was impossible to tell if I was making the ice harder, or if the slush concealed a lay of harder, thicker ice beneath.

My hammer technique ensured that I didn’t use too much energy, and it swung comfortably, like a properly-gripped traditional matched drumstick, despite the lack of contact with my new thick gloves. I cleared the broken ice either with my hands or with the edge of my boot.

It took about two hours. Now I have some real transportation-art for my portfolio. I didn’t end up using the shovel. It’s a nice day out, too cold to snow, and I probably even got a little sun on my face, which I’ve been meaning to do. I should’ve tanned the other day when it was twenty-six degrees and sunny, but I blew it. Only my face can take eight degrees, even for sun.

Today I despise all native Minnesotans for their laziness and cowardice, their typical American unwillingness to do what has to be done in order not to be helpless (which is an illusion that belies their obedient grasp on privilege), except for those with snow blowers. Why do I have to be the example? Garrison Keillor overdoes it sometimes when he praises Minnesotan snow-dilligence. Maybe he’s referring to up north. Down here in tropical southern Mankato, everyone’s dumbfounded by the snow. It is inexcusable that no one up here has figured out how to make electricity out of snow. But I’ll get over it, since people here are still as friendly as their reputation states.

Dealing with the weather has been nevertheless a nice opportunity to meditate and be in the outdoors, since hiking and bicycling are out this time of year. I understand why the Inuit have like twenty words for snow, since every day it takes new forms, consistencies, weight. It’s beautiful to witness the cycle of energy change in so clear a form as frozen water.

http://factoidz.com/how-to-discern-german-noun-gender-the-class-of-benouns-explained/

http://factoidz.com/how-to-discern-german-noun-gender-the-class-of-ungnouns-explained/

Keep studying!

She’d worked and slept and taken on more and more responsibility, since she was the only one who had all three qualifications of speaking Spanish, being accepting of responsibility and not getting caught stealing from the till –because she didn’t –and before she knew it, she’d spent almost three years in that hellish deli, planning her whole life around work hours.

She’d started at six seventy five an hour, minus the cost of buying her own uniform. She’d started making food and clearing tables. Now she was ordering other people around, ordering food, receiving the food frozen at five in the morning, making the order two days before on the phone after counting everything in the store, printing out the paperwork from the cash register every night or afternoon, figuring out the daily loss (as there was only ever a loss) doing the deposit and change buying, slicing and storing the purportedly fresh ingredients and still making food and clearing tables and unclogging the soda machine, for nine fifty, while her boss was off doing who knows what and expecting a business to be successfully run by a bunch of high school students and people who can’t get any better work.

Still her boss would call her and say things like “I been watching the tapes and uh, if there’s time to lean there’s time to clean. And remember to stock the Snapples cause they’re the most popular. We haven’t figured out why the food cost is so high yet?”

And clearly “we” hadn’t, because there was nothing to say but that someone was obviously ripping off food, the expensive packaged kind, which she couldn’t detect because she was busy behind the counter and the packaged snacks were in front of the counter.

Often she’d wished that she’d stayed working on the farm, as her parents had demanded during high school, when one’s future is so important to everyone else. Even if she’d have to inhale methyl iodide and get sunburned and ruin her back and be ignored by all the Americans for being a presumably provincial, illiterate Mexican, at least she’d be with her forgiving family, and she’d be just as broke as at the fast food deli, and eating better.

On top of that she wouldn’t have to go through the mounting humiliation of being part of the Americans’ money grubbing by standing at the register between the overpriced, unhealthy sandwich and the broke taxi driver who spoke the same dialect as she. It was a humiliation which was by now hanging so heavy on her that she was about to slip into what she perceived to be a very deep depression, and she was losing the appreciation of at least knowing the guy’s dialect and brightening his day. But she may’ve already been depressed; it’s hard to tell for oneself.

Now, however, Irma was getting her big break. She’d tried enough times to get up the focus and tenacity to put in applications before or after work, in the slim margin of time that the job afforded, that now she’d finally landed a job as a teller at First Federal Bank of Santa Clara, or the Fed, as it was nicknamed. Either their customers had called them the Fed for so long that they’d integrated it into their advertising (which gives the illusion that they’re more interested in the community’s welfare), or they’d just made that nickname up themselves and now their customers were all obediently using it; it was impossible to tell because every last person she heard mention it called it the Fed, and because advertising tends to erase history for those who look at it.

During her interview, the bankers praised her for her understanding of Spanish, which for her was like being praised for being female or having one short leg or anything that one’s had no control over. They told her that she was the best candidate amongst the recent applicants for the teller position because of her Spanish and because she was so reliable at the fast food deli. That was the word they used, reliable, to describe her holding the shit job for so long, making it positive even though it was just the way it was, just like with her Spanish.

She was to have her training day up in Los Gatos in a week so she could give notice to her other job, as if any notice could fix their policy of letting the careless youth run the place without training them to perform any of the special management duties that only Irma knew. That’s what she was for, after all.

Irma’s boss was not happy to hear she was going. This was kind of a surprise, because he’d never been particularly happy to have her, but she realized only upon leaving how much he needed someone like her to act as the face of his business to the poor working people that keep fast food restaurants open. Without her the taxi driver couldn’t get the quality of service he was used to, and he’d probably find somewhere new to eat.

After her training day, for which Irma had to borrow her big-mouthed brother’s truck that he drove half a mile every day to manage the pizza place, for which privilege she’d had to pay him with free food from her job, Irma was summoned to the branch for her first day, on which she wouldn’t actually be doing teller work, but would be doing paperwork and watching the flow of things.

Only then did the branch manager tell Irma about her job loan. She explained to Irma that, since it didn’t make any sense to cut into bank assets to pay their tellers, she would have to sign for an unsecured loan representing the sum that she would be paid at starting wage should she work so many days in the next year, should she last that long. That way the bank had insurance against her wage: out of every paycheck would come some of the loan principal plus interest, on top of the usual SSI and so forth, so that she was kept in debt from working and in order to work at all. This way the bank would make a little back of everything they paid her.

It didn’t sound like a good deal, and Irma had never heard of something like this before, but the branch manager explained that it was the new way that banks had to do things in the face of impending new regulations from the government. Irma tried really hard to hide her trepidation –yea, her sinking feeling –and expressed gratitude for the opportunity. It was still exciting that she was out of the fast food restaurant and would never have to go back for any reason. She signed the loan, signed for her ring of keys, got her magnetic nametag and drove back to return her brother’s truck to him.

She had no banker-like clothes, and borrowed money from her mother to buy a couple of expensive things and a bunch of tasteful layers and combinable suits from the thrift store. She took up the habit from high school of painting on her eyebrows again. She took pencil and paper and figured out how much she would actually take home with this employment loan. In the rush of the day she hadn’t been able to ask if another loan would be necessary in order to work another year, should she last that long.

It used to be at the deli that she’d take home about two hundred seventy three dollars a week at her wage minus taxes, and every year she got taxes back once the taxman figured out that he’d been sucking twenty percent out of a worker beneath the poverty line, the guilt from which could be assuaged through a variety of tax credits. Now she’d be making about three hundred fifty two, if there wasn’t the loan to pay.

That added up to seventeen thousand nine hundred and change in a year if she didn’t get a raise, and the loan was about eleven hundred, which worked out to six percent of the annual take. The interest was six percent of the loan as well, which worked out to her losing twenty two dollars a week out of her check in interest alone, plus principal, making it forty three a week.

Which made her actual take-home out to three hundred nine a week, just thirty six more than at the deli, which would make it very hard to repay the loan earlier than the end of the year. She would probably save no interest, and now she had to pay for her new work clothes. She resolved to work very hard at being a good teller and refer as many customers as possible to purchase bank services so her quarterly PIP would be as big as possible and maybe just offset the cost of her job.

She didn’t tell her parents about the loan, because she knew that they would see right away that it made no sense, and it made her ashamed. Her mother lent her the money to buy clothes with a reserved pride, regretful of losing her daughter forever from the farm, but proud that she was making something of herself from her own work. Her brother assured her that the bank job would be the same as the deli pero con blusa, which she couldn’t deny.

Irma’s coworkers were very friendly and helpful in the first few weeks at the bank. They taught her how to recover from a mistake before it made its impact on the ledger, how to time currency buying so that she didn’t run out of a certain denomination during rush hours, and who wouldn’t consider buying a CD or an IRA or a home equity loan. She was very patient and stuck to the rules when angry clients would demand that she bend the rules on account of their overdrafts.

She would ask the wealthy construction company’s wife what her checkbook said about it, and the wife would answer that she didn’t keep a checkbook. The woman would then demand to see the manager, since the account was used to pay for business expenses as well as their family expenses (which is actually illegal and defeats the purpose of tax rewards for business owners) and was very important. Then she’d leave the bank smiling nervously and still talking across the room to the manager about her money problems until the door swung to behind her, get into her raised sport utility truck (which was dedicated for trips to the bank and the grocery store on the company’s books) and peel out.

Amy was Irma’s favorite coworker because she didn’t purr and hiss with the rest of the tellers, all young women, but would simply let them have it whether good or bad. This made her a great teacher for Irma, and earned her a lot of resentment from the others. Amy invited Irma to the bar after work for a cocktail, which would be her first, and stood up for her when she made a mistake.

One day Irma asked her coworkers candidly if they had to take out the job loan as well, and they all were perplexed and said no, and said that it must be some new regulation. In corroboration with the manager’s story, one teller suggested that it might be because of impending regulation from the government since bankers had almost derailed the world economy. This was the first time Irma had a job in which one was supposed to resent and fear any forces trying to make changes in the industry, which somehow posed a direct threat to everyone’s job, even if the changes were sensible and designed to protect people from financial ruin.

Nevertheless the new rule from upstairs was making it a lot harder for Irma, and she argued to her unsympathetic colleagues that such a rule makes it almost impossible to get ahead in a job. They argued back that it wasn’t that strange, since fast food restaurants make their workers buy their own uniforms, and many trades demand that craftspeople bring their own tools. They seemed to think that it all went around the idea of whether the employer provided something assumed necessary to the work.

Everyone chatted like this except Amy, who abstained from entering the discussion, presumably watching out for if the manager was approaching. Later on in the break room Amy told Irma that she felt sorry that Irma, who came from such a harder life than the others, should have to work even harder still to make it. Irma knew, though, that Amy was only a helping spirit and couldn’t actually do anything about it.

Though Irma didn’t speak about her loan and money problems to anyone else, she got the feeling as the weeks went by that the clients somehow knew. They would give her money advice. One client who came in often told her about working for a company that didn’t make any extra money. She had a tall disposable coffee cup with cardboard heatproof cuff in one hand and an organic candy bar in the other.

“You need to get a degree and work for a nonprofit like I do. My nonprofit’s CFO makes ninety kay a year!”

The chief financial officer, or bookkeeper, was also seen often in the bank, as she made the nonprofit’s deposits. She often would tell Irma and the others to work for a self-righteous nonprofit in order to make lots of money the way corporate America does without having to go into corporate America. Irma wanted to go to school, but she was still young and would have to pay for it all herself, which would mean waiting at least another year, should she make it that long.

After her first ninety days was over, in which she had managed to pay her mother back for the money to buy work clothes, and in which she had eaten very little, since she no longer got food included with her job like before, Irma was given a performance review. The manager said that she was very proud of Irma’s work, particularly how she remained punctual and professional at all times, never seeming to be lazy or distracted. The manager did, however, caution Irma about learning too many habits from Amy, who, despite her perfect balancing record, was considered to think a little much for herself and seemed not take bank business too seriously.

Irma didn’t get a raise, but did soon get her first PIP payout for referring customers to buy more accounts. She took this money and bought things for her apartment, and went out drinking with Amy. They went to one of Amy’s spots, which again was a little uncomfortable because Irma was not just brown, but looked like she still had both feet in Mexico and felt the upper-class diners’ eyes on her. The evening special was margaritas.

One day Irma found out that Amy had been fired after a scuff between her and another teller, which Irma had seen. The other teller had given out an extra twenty to a client, but they didn’t know that until Amy broke her perfect balancing record by being twenty dollars off at the end of the day. She had traded the other teller a strap of tens for a strap of twenties, which in all likelihood was handed over one twenty short, and that was the only link between their accounts for the whole day. They had kept everyone in the branch until six thirty, meticulously counting up the day’s business and eventually gave up when the guy arrived who took the bag of work to regional headquarters for its actual processing into the accounts it comprised.

Eventually it would be found out that the other teller had deliberately entered twenty dollars more into her balance program than she had, but before the research came back, she and Amy had had words in front of clients. So Amy, who originally had the shortage and put up a fight, was fired to calm the situation. When it was discovered that the other teller was at fault, she wasn’t fired, because that would’ve made the staff short and the idea was that such would hurt employee morale even worse.

On the strength of her positive reviews and good reputation at work, Irma was offered a job with a little less pay by a dentist client, where she would be a receptionist. The dentist had a lot of “hispanic” patients, as they said, so Irma would be instrumental in making the office more comfortable for those patients. On her last day she had to print out and mail a form to the customer whose deposit slip bore twenty dollars less in the less-cash box than the sum on the teller’s cash-out ticket for that transaction. The form was attached to photocopies of the tickets and checks and was asking for the twenty dollars back.

Because she was quitting after only eight months, Irma hadn’t paid off her job loan, and she was legally obligated to keep paying interest and principal on a loan against pay that she was no longer receiving. There was an early-termination fee of two percent of the original loan, which came out of a full year’s wages and not the eight months fulfilled. But eventually she paid it off, and she never had to work in fast food again or buy anything in order to get a job again. She had good credit, so she cosigned on the loan that her brother took out in order to start his own pizza parlor.

With the evidence presented in the piece above in mind, let’s now observe its currently popular workings, namely the so-called Green Revolution marketing campaign. The title of this piece is not a work of irony, but a conclusion based on the evidence of the introductory piece above and on the evidence to be presented below. Right now the entire US, on one level or another, is embroiled in the latest consumer fad of going “green.” It seems every major industry is encouraging us to go green by using their products -even SUVs have little perverse green leaf badges on their rear ends, right above the exhaust pipe.

This means, by a definition compiled from all the products and services that I’ve seen marked “green,” that the product or service is less harmful to the environment with regard to its ingredients, construction, business practices, und so weiter. We shall take the scare quotes away from “green” for the rest of the paper to avoid being annoying, and take pains to avoid describing anything below that is in fact colored green, except when describing packaging on materials that are supposed to be “green.” You get the idea.

For instance, my credit card is green because I can get a statement online rather than a paper envelope containing a paper account that must be delivered to me by airplane or truck. My household cleanser is green because it’s made of plant-derived chemicals found naturally in the earth, so it theoretically shouldn’t harm the ground that I empty the mop bucket on, nor contribute harmful chemicals to the sewer system. One of my Spanish 1 students retorted to my hemming and hawing about consumerism by showing me that the plastic cap on her plastic water bottle is green because it’s smaller than it used to be (indeed its label, which is usually red and white, was now green). I noticed right away when she showed me, because one’s hands memorize a bottle cap.

As we discussed in the introductory piece above, our symbols are undergoing modification to protect us from the concept of starvation or harm; they are symbols protecting symbols from other symbols. We now have this green symbol that protects us from the symbol of environmental disaster, which threatens our symbol of selfish satisfaction and prosperity. That’s not a blame on anyone; that’s a report on reality. However, as we suggested toward the end of the piece above, these products are still produced in the exact same way as the more harmful products, yea, even side by side with some. Similarly, the credit card is still a piece of plastic made in a factory and loaded with information enlivened and managed by coal, gas or nuclear powered computer systems, and the people who manage it still commute to work through the usual methods, und so weiter. The most dramatically stupid example of this scam may be cars, which are extremely destructive to produce, but recycled packaging for convenience food items is just as culpable.

We want to talk here about the productivity of our symbols. The fact is that the green revolution is a desperate shift in marketing and production that protects our most valuable anti-hunger symbol, that of the unshakable presence of consumption. Consumption protects us from hunger, and now environmental crisis threatens consumption. Green means that we can keep driving individualistic cars (to be discussed in our next psychosis essay, if we ever finish researching it), keep buying packaged food and goods, keep doing things exactly as we do, as long as it’s green. Greenness is ordering us to keep consuming, and most of us are eating it up like hungry dogs. But what about our behavior modification proposed above, that of reconnecting to all things through growing our own food, and so forth? If we grow our own food, as discussed above, we get the understanding of our seasonal lifecycle, and so forth. If we buy green, we’re still buying.

We’re experiencing a huge resistance to the green revolution by many consumers, even though this shift is barely different at the point of purchase -that is to say, they sit on the same shelf and we pick one -and certainly not an effective solution to our environmental crisis. This is because greenness is not effective enough a symbol for our above-demonstrated symbolic economy. Toxic waste is an excellent symbol, as even the lousiest of our high school history books tell us (see Loewen, “Lies my Teacher told Me, usw). No one likes toxic waste, no one wants to swim in a polluted body of water, no one wants to live next to a dump. Therefore, to ditch the green scam and go back to paying attention to toxic waste would be a much more effective symbol for driving behavior modification. But of course greenness is far more profitable for those selling the products; toxic waste is only ever a liability. As long as we’re in a consumerist mindset, any consumer-oriented brainwashing will be effective on us.

There is of course a graduation of actual effectiveness of these green products. As mentioned above, my household cleanser actually can be dumped in a cold compost pile without hurting the stuff living in the compost. The dust and crap I clean off my surfaces is probably more harmful. When the cleanser runs out every three years or so, I wash the plastic container out and either get it refilled with a new natural cleanser (I’m spoiled by living in northern California) or I throw it in the curbside recycling.

Furthermore, it could be argued validly that we need some things, like toilet paper and soap. Those of you who make your own natural toilet paper and soap are welcome and encouraged to knock this section down a peg. These products are nevertheless prime candidates for one hundred-percent recycledness. Of course we can make natural soap -we’ve been doing it for centuries. Of course we can make waste paper into toilet paper. It’s all paper, unless it’s one of the heavily treated kinds.

However there is an opposite and ridiculous side to this. In my district they’ve outlawed polystyrene packaging, and vegetable starch-based fast food packaging has become the mandatory rage. So I got breakfast a few sundays ago and took it to the beach, which I almost never do. When the food was gone, we were stuck with a biodegradable plasticine bag, a potato-starch paper carton, and potato-plastic forks -which could not be thrown in the recycling because they’re biodegradable. The alternative: throw them in the regular beach garbage can, which is lined with an old-fashioned plastic bag. So the biodegradable mass still won’t ever biodegrade, because it’s now stuck in a plastic bag in the garbage museum. In this way, the green revolution will cause more garbage and threaten the funding for recycling, which encourages us not to recycle, but rather to stay lazy and wasteful unless we have a compost bin at home for the packaging.

More important than arguing the validity of green products is recognizing how fast the introduction of greenness has set up a tyrannical rule over our perception of environmentally harmonious living. Ten years ago “organic” was still a relatively new idea for most people, and now there’s a “certified organic by whomever” sticker on almost everything in the store to help us use our new green symbol. Has anyone asked a Navajo in the desert or a Bavarian high in the mountains how they’ve managed for so long? Of course not. They don’t have the “organic” sticker, and we mean that literally. A piece of cave-aged cheese from France from a provincial farmer can’t be organic, because it’s natural, and hence doesn’t need to be graded by the organic police. I was talking to a Mexican man I know who works up here and then spends what time he can at his family’s ranch in the central Mexican mountains. At home he does everything “naturalmente,” a description I eagerly encouraged him to use. He at first said “organico,” but I assured him that I understood that he meant natural, and the conversation went on with a wonderful easiness of understanding.

In colonizing our consciousness, Green has made us as scared of naturalness as the processed food titans of the twentieth century did. A solution: begin to connect to all things by raising even the smallest bit of food for oneself. We must realize that we’re scared of tradition because we’re supposed to be doing this increasingly ridiculous “progress” thing. Organic and green are not a solution to the side effects of progress. Dwelling on toxic waste will just make us scared, but what action we take when confronting fear will have a much greater longterm effect than action taken from delusion. I’m not qualified to argue that point; one may look up the civil rights movement for a good dramatization.

We can conclude by reflecting on how easy it’s been, for those of us who have gone green, to go green. Anyone who thinks that they’re going to save the environment (“save” being the egotistical active word) through consumption is gullible. Hitler used simple semantics and rhetoric to convince drunk laborers in the beer halls that, given we=poor and jews=in germany, then of course jews/(#jobs – #us) is a function f(x) when x=the regression into poverty of us. This was one of his simplest ones, but you get the idea. Similarly, Jackson argued that, since there was so much gold in Georgia Territory and so many Indians in that territory blocking the white man from getting at that gold because it was under their homes, then the Indians were guilty of keeping the white man in poverty. The above examples are identical to the present argument that toxicness and wastefulness are keeping us from feeling good about our rampant consumption. So, like Hitler and his mentor Jackson, we march toxicness and wastefulness off on the trail of tears with our mighty weapon greenness. Like the Indians and the Jews, toxicness and wastefulness are nevertheless still here, and we’re not addressing the issues around them realistically.

As we’ll state many times, in discussions of this nature, the communities of the rich world are moving toward an existence more and more dependent on symbols, which is precipitating a massive individual, isolated decoding effort that’s replacing actual communication between people.

It could be argued that language and money are currently the most important symbolic systems in the world: neither actually produce or describe anything, but rather reflect our desires about things. The cultivation of language, for instance, is beautiful to the one who can do it. Nevertheless it is ultimately an economy of diminishing returns, as with the cultivation of money, because a person’s fluency in a language is far more a result of his or her ability to understand his or herself than the product of plying the tools of language to a certain craft.

As a brief example, a man may tell his significant other that he loves her more today than he did yesterday. When we get to the reality of things, this declaration isn’t the complement that we all surely assumed it was upon first mention, for the individual is, in all likelihood, professing the miraculous ability to allow himself to feel more love for her than he allowed himself to yesterday. Many of us will never get to this point, and our symbols for love must labor under our anemia. Of itself, the expression is beautiful to us, for we all would have it reflect our desire for love, and we all want it to be a complement. But it is actually a reflection and not a complement to be conferred on another as a result of exposure to the other’s desirable traits.

Money, as a symbol, works in much the same way, and with equally as disastrous consequences. Money is the symbol of our ability to achieve the objects of our desires, or, to put it in its full perversity, a symbol for catching symbols. Of course the ability to get what we want is far more important to us from day to day than actually getting what we want (just ask doctor Faust), so money becomes more important than the actual product it buys. Again, we gain a symbolic victory by using symbols to catch symbols, and this burns up enough of our energy to render us useless when it comes time to go outside and let our bodies have some fun.

This economy of symbols has now reached our food. It did decades ago, more or less after the second world war, when the military learned how to turn weapons into fertilizer, literally feeding us the stuff of war. Yet only now do some, like Schlosser, Pollan, et al., begin to discuss the implications of our divorce from the material economy of our most basic needs in favor of a symbolic replacement for it. The irony here is, though we are (for now) adopting a very materialist analysis of this condition, the problem is that the material is being largely ignored by individuals, and that technology has prevented the divorce within us to starve us to death.

Now we come to our argument. As Pollan so lucidly points out, the wealthy country’s grocery store has no seasons. Somewhere in our longitude there’s a warmer latitude this time of year, or a greenhouse, whence someone will provide us with out-of-season food through the shortest possible distance between us. If the food threatens to go its natural way before it arrives at our arm’s length, we can preserve it any number of ways. We then grow so accustomed to the safety of preservation (though bacterial outbreaks continue to remind us of its fallibility) that we regard anything that hasn’t undergone the rite of preservation and been served to us clinically dead with extreme suspicion. Has anyone ever tried to offer homemade sauerkraut or kombucha (this writer is from California –ignore the latter if you don’t know what it is) to the grocery store-brain and had the guest, learning that it’s five weeks old and raw, decline to try out the masterpiece?

The net effect here is that the model of the wealthy country’s grocery store, with its rows of processed and colored sameness and its practically immortal produce, becomes the only acceptable model for getting food. The method of acquiring food through this ritual conveniently requires the use of our money, symbol of our ability to master the objects of our desire. We’ll keep the even weirder fast food model out of the scope of this discussion for at least two reasons: it’s more weirdness, and we want to impress upon the reader that the grocery store is just as weird, quality differences be damned, and creates just as unhealthy a relationship with the material world and with what we’d like to think of as all things.

The fact that we have grocery stores, like so many other things we now have, somehow generates a symbol in our minds that convinces us that we need grocery stores. We actually don’t, strictly speaking; grocery stores are a technological extravagance  that we’d like to consider beautiful, just like language and money, and all are now governed by the out-of-control symbolic systems we’re using.

That delusional need for a certain model of existence, that psychosis of the grocery store, is what we would like in this discussion to begin healing from, that we may heal our connections to all things.

We mustn’t let our egos run off, however, and blame people for being like this. For a start, that would not be the reflection of our inner relations that we are so proud of exhibiting. On a more practical level, how is a person brought up from childhood going only to the grocery store to be blamed for keeping such as his or her only model for getting fed? To confront this we must confront the false safety engendered in us by the store.

The grocery store’s existence motivates us to regard it as the symbolic satiation of our hunger (ever since the time we invented it to do just that). No matter what happens, no matter how low our chances get of taking advantage of it, the grocery store is always there. If an earthquake or a hurricane knock it down, it can be reproduced exactly as it was. Knowing that it’s there eases our hunger. We should like at this point to verify that this is not strictly a materialist analysis. For one, the physical reality of hunger is greatly amplified by the spiritual events inside us, and, for another, should we confine ourselves to materialism, the ghost of Weber will rap our knuckles.

The fear of losing the food security promised by the grocery store is one of the strongest contributors to the psychosis of the grocery store. To measure how decadent, delusional and de-natured a community is, one must simply count the number of things that its members feel they stand to lose. The sum is proportionate to the delusion; how many things do unwesternized, indigenous people, prisoners and slaves feel that they have to lose compared to the commuting suburban couch potato? Not a hell of a lot.

As with many things, we must confront the fear of loss in order to come clear with the grocery store. Ironically, the strength of fear in this situation is swiftly destabilized when one begins to heal one’s connection to the growing world by learning to grow our own food. In fact, this writer conceived this essay a few years ago, just a few weeks after first spending no money on lunch by eating potatoes and collard greens grown in a square meter of rehabilitated apartment dirt using only water, sunlight and eager attention.

Furthermore, it’s not that we completely lack a connection to all things, but that we know that we can grow our own food with a tiny amount of soil for at least a few seasons of any climates year as we have for millennia, yet we don’t. We lose belief that it’s possible. The lack of balance between the frequency of luxurious trips to the grocery store and the real physical and spiritual toil of trying not to screw up the carrots has the following result: our clever brains simply make a hard turn away from the less-frequently visited vibration. If we add this to many people’s current lack of knowledge of cultivation and the lack of belief that it’s possible, we get a terror of instability. That instability is in turn a symbol for the terror of starvation, no matter how unconscious, or of not achieving the objects of our desire, if that’s better, and the vessel of that terror will prostitute itself to any force that promises to protect it. Hence we’ve got a deluding set of tools developing: a symbol that catches symbols, and a symbol that protects symbols.

We’d now like to raise the problems in our discussion to the level at which they encounter the out-of-control symbolic systems suggested above. We shall review our argument once more, but this time we’ll look at it in terms of symbols and of the psychosis, the unhealthy delusion, that they cultivate inside us.

We have a fear of hunger. The grocery store has the potential to cure our hunger, but its important role as a symbol is to reflect our desire never to be hungry. This is precisely because of the reality of growing our own food. However, just as we can spend money and make what we want magically appear in front of us without having to actually produce the thing, we can go to the grocery store and feel the relief that we’ll soon not be hungry, as we mentioned above. When naturally cultivating food, that guarantee is not constantly present.

Without discussing it, we in the store’s vicinity agree that the store will be a symbol of our security. As a proving action, we all go to it for food, and this normalizes its presence, gives it a symbolic identity that shields any other possible identities from our perception. Should one of us claim not to go, our brains become so overcome with terror at the thought of insecurity that we first assume that he or she must go to a different one. Maybe a cheaper one or a more expensive one, or one that takes checks.

The symbol of the grocery store, in any case, is as portable as the design of the store, and as language and money even, so it spreads, and the process begins again in another neighborhood. In our rush to make our symbols agree, that is, to make them like real communication (which they’re not), we rush to all accept that the grocery store is the model for security against hunger. We use a symbol (language) to rapidly reproduce symbols that protect us from other symbols. Then we wonder why no one understands each other, even when we’re being honest, even though we harp on the same strings for centuries. A more ambitious scholar will take Victor Borge’s and this writer’s cue from here and demonstrate to us the “obesity of language.”

If we add to the above the wicked, delusional and stupid symbology of the advertising necessary to support industrial food production, before we know it we can only prepare food at home that comes from our symbol store lest the specter of insecurity bleed through our thatch of symbols. For the most obvious example of this, see what happens to people who visit the frozen aisle often. Without digressing too much, we should also like to suggest the health implications of what happens when one acquires the habit of budgeting food money exclusively according to the store’s prices. In any case, we cannot blame people for not knowing what to do with a kitchen full of garden-fresh produce, unfrozen, unbalanced, unsoaked, unsalted.

We need to begin using the simple solution of growing our own food, of making ourselves vulnerable to the seasons and the whole uncertain astrology of natural reality. Action is great for reducing fear, if only because it makes us too busy to be afraid. We don’t have to be land owners or independently wealthy or unemployed to do it; one needs only to start, to meet someone who’s done it and let him or her banish doubt with stories and instructions.

We need a body and spirit that know store-food from home-food, and that can see its own fingerprint in its food, if that’s what’s necessary. Of course this applies mainly to vegetables, but that still has a quantitative value, and with ingenuity one can also cultivate eggs. With a healthy, realistic relationship to both foods we can make decisions about them. One cannot change who doesn’t think they have the choice (another useful measurement of decadence), and one cannot liberate a thing from its symbol until one can make good decisions enough to trust oneself with building new meanings for the symbols through communication with other people. We can’t yet resolve the issue of our talking mostly to ourselves, so we must overcome our psychoses and use our symbols freely as the simple, governable tools they are supposed to be. We can use them toward growth and healing, until perhaps the symbols aren’t as important to us as communication about a thing. Then a grocery store can be a grocery store, an opinion can be an opinion, people can be healthier and more respectful of the earth, and a wall of delusion can fall to reveal our connection to all things.

If we don’t do this, a destructive consumption cycle will continue to grow. To pick up from the digression above, we must consider that, since we agree to rely on the food in the store to fill our very model of what food is, and support our symbols of survival, there has been constructed a very powerful capitalist machine to provide that to us. We speak namely of companies like Monsanto, Cargill and ConAgra (these are the heads of many, many smaller and friendlier companies), who own so much of the means of producing our food that no one wants to think about it lest they have an Orwellian panic attack.

These companies are pursuing the money symbol, and their psychosis works in perfect harmony with that of us consumers, as we have demonstrated above with the interdependence of spending money and visiting the grocery store. They know that we use symbols to protect our symbols from harm, and they’ve mastered how to become one of our symbols while hoarding plenty of their own favorite symbol. They will drain, starve, and destroy as much land as they can to have more capital, and are suing, robbing and shutting down as many farmers as they can in order continue. This obviously isn’t something an entity does when it lives by a connection to all things. If we train our bodies to make decisions about whether to eat store-food or home-food, we take away a large share of Agribusiness’ power.

We shall conclude by reminding the reader of the goal of these essays, which is to demonstrate that these “psychoses,” and we as their vessels, are currently stuck in a negative feedback loop with the conditions that gave rise to them, and with our efforts to maintain them, though they’re no longer valid or useful. The psychosis of the grocery store is in large part caused by unsustainable economic novelties invented to keep an expanding America fed, of which the model of the grocery store is comprised, and by our repeatedly renewed response to it, detailed above.

These discussions all point toward the problem of self-preservation, and our symbolic structure should now make it clear that the decadent industrial world has gone so far beyond a meaningful, natural sense of self-preservation (to whose formulation we invite the reader), that we now feel the need to preserve our symbols for survival as much as the means of survival themselves. Unless we let go, all of these precious white liberal progressive ideas and movements for change will amount to nothing but running in circles. We cannot, for example, ever hope to cure global warming by driving hybrid cars and consuming at the level that we believe to be necessary. We’re to save the world with a car that is constructed, advertised and delivered to us using the same polluting methods as to for a “utility” truck? Whoever’s fooled by that deserves to have his or her house eaten by rising seas.

It is true that our quantity and habit of consumption is unsustainable, “organic” or otherwise, and is very close to wrecking our communities. However, rather than proposing a hysterical, millenarian apocalypse, as is the fashion, we suggest that the end of our communities as we know them is but a point in time, on either sides of which life shall go on. We have proposed furthermore that we look at our place in the circle of history and simply use new habits to shift our direction. The platitude that habits are some of the most difficult to change is itself born of habit, and we must work on many levels of our consciousness in order to render habits more pliable. This is proven to be possible through traumatic experiences, such as surviving cancer, seeing a gruesome film, hearing a tear-jerking story, and so forth. The simple plans for healing from the psychosis of the grocery store are indeed also plans to heal from our consumption habits, and there we have a tool that we can use for good: an action that disciplines and constrains symbols.