#I like how this is only contextualized for such a small handful of mutuals whom I love with my whole heart lol

[cats-obsessions]

🌧️🥞🎭 for nox :D

🌧️ What is the favorite thing for your OC to do on a rainy day?

He loves days in- curling up by a fireplace with a good book and a hot drink is ideal, or a nap day. He enjoys walks in the rain from time to time too.

🥞 Does your OC take proper care of themselves, like getting enough sleep and eating properly?

Hm, he doesn't sleep right, that's for sure. He goes between not enough sleep and rotting days when it all catches up with him, plus working nights complicates it. In other aspects, though, he does take care of himself pretty well. Food and exercise are important to him, so it doesn't feel like a chore.

🎭 What is the one thing your OC regrets most? Would they undo it, considering how their life turned out?

Ough this is such a tough question! I think of most of the things he hates that he has done are things that aren't his fault or in his control exactly. I'm going to resist lore dumping too much and say his entire life from ages 13 to 18- he was angry and violent and hurt a lot of people because he thought that's what he was supposed to do and who he was supposed to be. In adulthood, I think he has really complex feelings around violence- like, he still finds himself in fights sometimes, but he normally thinks the other person deserves it, so there's a clash of feeling a little ashamed he likes punching someone in the face but also the moral greyness of but they should be punched in the face LOL

[aruneshgoyal]

The Contextual Flashback 1: 2005 till 2014

Shaloo was four years old now and just beginning to go to kindergarten. In early 2006, Mahesh and Saraswati were blessed with a son whom they fondly named Brij, as an appreciation of the bridge of mutual love, affection, respect and trust they had been able to build amongst themselves. The same bridge they wanted now to be built between the brother and sister duo of Shaloo and Brij.

But, as Brij grew up, he spent a lot of time with Hussaini Bhai and began to love and enjoy his company. Hussaini Bhai, unmarried as such as he was, had a strong liking for children, especially boys. Very soon, Brij developed fascination for his Mamu Jaan’s cricket and often took sides on his behalf with the Pakistan team. Shaloo, on the other hand, vouchsafed for India, as did her classmates at the primary school she was studying in 2012.

A battle royal was always on the cards as Shaloo and Brij fought bitterly with each other over as trivial a matter as victory or defeat in cricket between India and Pakistan. This was much to the chagrin of their parents and their fond ambitions of building a bridge of brotherly and sisterly feelings of love and affection between them.  

Very soon, Mahesh came to realize the significance of building a bridge between different faiths and various religions. Not only this, the bridge must be built between people all around the world irrespective of varied castes, races, colors, and so on. It had to be based on the most fundamental principle of the fraternity and brotherhood of mankind and the common fatherhood of the one and only one God. Once this significant and important bridge was built, all these problems of jingoism and fanaticism of any kind, may it be in cricket or anything else, would automatically be taken care of by themselves. If there are different religions, there are different rivers too – all falling into the same mighty ocean. Religion, in its truest and fullest sense must imply that all individuals, all communities, all races, and all nations develop the spirit of mutual brotherhood and comradeship, helping each other to grow to its fullest while growing themselves to the maximum too!

Ask any individual – “does he want to love or hate?” The simple and natural reaction would be to love and love more at that. The common principle of love works and operates behind every religion. How did it matter if different religious paths were propounded by different distinguished personages? They all had the sole agenda of wanting man to be God fearing and love each other, leading man to his ultimate realization of the self.  

More often than not, religious issues are exploited by vested interests to “Divide & Rule” over people just as the British Empire did before our independence in 1947. Religion, of late, has become a major cause of vote bank politics and hatred perpetrated by the so called religious bigots to serve their own personal and selfish interests. We can easily see through their malicious designs and evil game plan when we analyze the whole situation with a calm and cool mind.  

Does any religion teach hatred? The reply would be a most vociferous and emphatic ‘No!’ In fact, each and every religion stands for love, not for hatred! For any individual, religion is a matter of personal faith and belief. For any community, religion, in general, is a symbol of solidarity. But, for any nation of diversity, religion, most of the times, divides and cuts asunder the grassroots across the various communities, acting as a barrier to national peace and harmony.  

However, does it always need to be so? No, the people of various and different religious communities can live together and co-exist in a spirit of mutual bonhomie, peace, and happiness, once they start respecting each other’s viewpoints, and rather than fighting over minor religious issues, learn to be tolerant and see different faiths akin to different colors of the same rainbow, bestowing upon it diversity amongst unity.  

The current scenario in the world is another matter, though. People are fighting just not only over religion, but each and every trivial issue or little matter they can lay their hands on, be it caste, color, race, or even a game like cricket. While they are free to do so, they are forgetting just one and a very significant and basic thing at that – “the color of each and every individual’s blood on Mother Earth is ‘Red.’ In fact, individuals on this planet are akin to a bunch of roses, each with its own fragrance, its own brilliance, and contributing its own bit, be it small or large!”  

“Alas, we have forgotten our very own self in the rather mundane race for name and fame!!” “If I were to describe all these goings-on of the mundane affairs of the world in one word, it would be simply ‘maddening’ or ‘baffling,’ if you would like it to be put that way” – thought Mahesh.  

“After all, what does one gain by fighting over trivial matters and drawing out swords at the slightest provocation?” People have just forgotten to be tolerant of each other and lack the basic values of patience, fortitude, and humility. Ego clashes at the work place, while travelling in the buses / trains, or even at home, have contributed their own share in ‘spoiling’ the ‘peace’ of the world.  

Furthermore, this sort of war-like explosive atmosphere and environs have added to the ‘tensions’ and ‘woes’ of the already ‘beleaguered’ modern era.  

[leftpress]

Jasper Bernes | July 10th 2019 | Commune

In the poems of Eisen-Martin, the violent truth of the racialized city, and an address to the forms of collective life that might survive it.

Heaven Is All Goodbyes Tongo Eisen-Martin City Lights | $15.95 | 136 pages

Tongo Eisen-Martin is the principal author, in conjunction with comrades in the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, of a curriculum — “We Charge Genocide Again!” — that sets out to contextualize and organize against the extrajudicial police killing of black people. It situates extrajudicial murder in the broader historical and political context of “the maintenance of hegemonic power in the United States,” and defines it as a feature of US class structure, which in turn comprises interlocking modes of organized violence. One central claim of the text is that the ongoing practice of violence requires that extrajudicial murder seem not only justifiable but also logical, intrinsic to social function and reproduction. Disrupting that logic is one intervention a properly political poetry might make. Eisen-Martin’s collection Heaven Is All Goodbyes can serve as an example of what such poetry might look like.

Political poetry in this sense does not tell us how to vote or how to live, but instead makes us uncomfortably aware of the discrepancy between our desires and attachments — our investments and commitments — and the institutionalized avenues available for their satisfaction and realization. Such poetry may make us question whether voting, for example, is the best avenue through which to achieve substantive freedom. The contrasting term to “political poetry” here is not “mainstream” but “middle class” poetry, referring less to a class than an affective orientation toward the existing order. Such poetry resolves the apparent contradiction between quotidian pleasures and desires, on one hand, and the alienating, calculative logic of the unliving and unlivable, on the other, through the facile solidarities of interpersonal recognition, reinforcements of the common sense, and appeals to individual morality or sympathy. For all their crafted semblance of immediacy, middle-class lyrics typically present as universal normative experiences that reflect and reinforce the genocidal cultural logic Eisen-Martin’s curriculum outlines. Clichéd sentiments implicitly provide cover for quotidian violence, or personalize and depoliticize it, all the while evacuating everything messy and singular about subjectivity.

To my mind, this collection’s mode of political engagement reveals the ultimate intellectual and political bankruptcy of perennial debates surrounding the so-called “avant-garde.” As Fredric Jameson argued regarding the more fundamental “high”/“mass” culture binary, avant-garde and middle-class poetry are inseparably twin: they mutually reinforce forms of aesthetic production that correspond to historically specific moments in the development of capitalism. The issue is not that middle-class lyrics — often mischaracterized as “workshop poetry,” which in turn stands in for the shifting class, racial, and institutional dynamics surrounding poetry’s production — do not accord with readers’ experiences, but that their prestige forms too rarely offer a vision of desirable forms of life. The strength of Eisen-Martin’s work generally, and this collection in particular, is the glimpses it offers readers not only of the ways social life and organization exist, but the ways we might desire it otherwise.

Heaven Is All Goodbyes addresses itself to readers uncomfortable with poetry understood as a celebration of the paper-thin solidarities and small gestures of a shared morality, the celebration of survival that does not ask what makes life difficult. Yet, from its dedication — “Like 50 familiar postures in the dark . . . Run here. We will save your life” — its solution is not sloganeering through seemingly transparent expression. Neither the speaker nor addressee of the imperative “run here” is given; the collective “we” is hard-won rather than assumed as the outcome of readily obvious historical predicates and antagonisms. Forms of salvation are fraught and uncertain — the collection’s title itself is a caution against certain narratives or “familiar postures” of redemption. Read as a poem, which its presentation invites, it serves as an apt preparation for the strategies of the collection: assertive and advanced (not hindered) by implicit skepticism toward the given. Its discourse is terse but not obtuse, direct but withholding. Read as a private message it works in roughly similar ways.

From the first poem, “Faceless,” the collection blends flat assertion — “Warehouse jobs are for communists” — with an indirection and will to discrepancy that abuts surrealism: “But now more corridor and hallway have walked into our lives. Now the whistling is less playful and the barbed wire is overcrowded too.” The ironic reversal that has corridor and hallway walking, rather than walked through, initially appears playful. The next sentence undercuts play through metonymy insofar as “barbed wire” figures prison. Corridor and hallway apparently refer to passageways between defined spaces, indoors or outdoors, figuratively connecting the unthought spaces of incarceration and the nominally free. The next lines read:

My dear, if it is not a city, it is a prison. If it has a prison, it is a prison. Not a city

At the level of the nation or the planet, “overcrowding” usually activates a Malthusian argument promoting eugenics (I wanted to type “genocide”) as pseudo-feminist, anti-poverty measure. Alternatively, in the instance of prisons, it promotes an argument for constructing new carceral spaces and enhancing police budgets, which can only produce more “criminals” by broadening the category. Nowhere in the collection is the familiar notion that crime results from misfit “mentality.” Instead, the social situation does not fit the people; rather, the people fit the social situation. Here and throughout the collection, the prison is a defining feature of modern social space, so “barbed wire” is at least partially figurative. What keeps us captive? What would it mean to be free?

The latter question finds no answers in poetry, but rather in the change of society. Poetry can make the present situation thinkable, in part by giving names to common forms of experience that otherwise go unremarked. Heaven Is All Goodbyes does this by drawing attention to the alienated forms of sociality presently available, while maintaining a tough commitment to the sociality of speech and, beneath that, language. Recurrent references to cigarettes, labor, police, and prisons initially appear to be emblems of working-class solidarity, but those references operate alongside similarly prevalent references to unfinished or interrupted conversation and irregular irruptions of dialogue. Eisen-Martin blends prose and verse. Individual poems typically alternate staccato, clause-based lines, interpolated dialogue (untagged), and tight enjambed stanzas positioned near page margins. Altogether, they invoke the peculiar temporality of working-class life. Represented objects such as cigarettes alongside rhetorical tendencies to subordinate the sentence to the list, the litany, and other organizing forms of thought create little pockets for breath, little pockets of life within the suffocating texture of the unliving, moments best conceived as insolated seeds of time yearning for legibility as chronological progression, if not progress. Eschewing the singular voice or focalizing consciousness, the poetry instead features collectivities of different scales — the family, the neighborhood, the guild — drawing out the rhythmic feel of the attachments and common desires, not necessarily articulate, for alternative ways of living. Put differently, these poems limn a speculative architecture of what common life could be. The cumulative effect is moving, less sympathetic toward the dispossessed than in solidarity with them, with an aesthetic agenda at least as ambitious and deep as its political commitments.

As I read this collection, I found myself thinking about an early debate between W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke about the possibility of a political black modernist art, a debate framed in terms of the relationship between art and propaganda. Du Bois famously declared that “all art is propaganda and ever must be”: that is, all cultural production under capitalism necessarily serves ruling interests, so black artists have an obligation to take the side of the oppressed. Locke rejoined that propaganda (or, in more contemporary terms, protest) “perpetuates the position of group inferiority even in crying out against it. For it leaves and speaks under the shadow of a dominant majority whom it harangues, cajoles, threatens or supplicates.” Both ultimately describe the conditions of art, and reveal the falseness of the binary between “political” and “middle class” poetry I described previously. However, if one is to avoid the poetry of pity, which provides an affective release for the oppressor, or of cheap solidarity, which can preclude historical and political understanding of domination, the question is how one is to take sides. The strength of Heaven Is All Goodbyes in this regard is that it manages to transcend empty sloganeering and refuse the seductions of easy pessimism, bombastic militancy, or unearned optimism. Its value is not its interpretation or representation of the world, though poetry inevitably represents, and representation is an interpretation of the world. Rather, it invites readers to examine their attachments; it helps generate new concepts and encourages aesthetic and political experimentation; and it invites readers to a world, this one, where we might live otherwise.

In its awareness of the character and texture of life shaped by the possibility and threat of spectacular black dying, Eisen-Martin seems to set himself to answering a question June Jordan posed: “What shall we do, we who did not die? What shall we do now? How shall we grieve, and cry out loud, and face down despair? Is there an honorable non-violent means towards mourning and remembering who and what we loved?” “All friendships have dead people in them,” Eisen-Martin writes, and mourning is part of what it is to live a life. It is right to focus on the ways the state and those who understand themselves to act on its behalf deploy different scales of violence. Focusing on only the most extreme and spectacular forms of violence takes attention from the forms of life and social reorganization that grow within and despite quotidian violence, tempting us to see conspiracy rather than the system’s intended functioning.

But violence is only part of the picture. The other part is collective investment in the cruel optimism of bourgeois society — that is, in the social forms and horizons of fulfillment that stand to destroy life as such. More than grieving the dead and the ideology that normalizes their killing, poetry should encourage disinvestment in the state of affairs that normalizes death and suffering. It should encourage broad reimagining of social arrangement, and address itself to the forms of collective life that may emerge. Heaven Is All Goodbyes does just that, and offers a glimpse of what poetry might follow the dissolution of the current order.

The post The Bourgeois and the Boulevard appeared first on Commune.

[Read More On LeftPress.org]

[surroundedbythesound]

file://AIM/ChrisOsborn/PublicFiles/Music/

Chris Osborn

Nothing I first loved was my own discovery. It was given to me. As a kid, I glommed onto the music of my older brother, our awkward grapplings with hip-hop and alt-rock radio in suburban Oregon mutating into a love of nü-metal, which opened up the floodgates for the Epitaph strain of skate-punk during the early Bush years. He never pushed these things onto me. It was just what was always around and through adolescent osmosis and an untempered desire to grow up more quickly, a means to become cool by association. It never felt completely mine.

When he went to college, I was left stranded without a musical compass. I struggled to adjust. I had just started high school and needed to grow up fast. I watched the punk kids at my school from afar. I found my syllabus emblazoned on their biker jackets, logos hand-painted onto the leather with care and diligence. Every band had flourished and flamed out in the Eighties: Germs, Crass, Black Flag, Subhumans. They signaled their taste, and their status, through these wearable bumper stickers.

I couldn’t dress the part, but I could learn the lines. I consumed every fucked-up story of Darby Crash and GG Allin that Google had to offer. I spent my allowance on back issues of Maximum Rock ‘n Roll and Cometbus. I became quietly radicalized by grainy JPEG scans of Penny Rimbaud and Eve Libertine’s Christ’s Reality Asylum. I strained to understand Jello Biafra’s spoken word albums. I used my family’s desktop to scour dozens of blogs for Rapidshare links containing entire discographies. Even the rare 7-inches. I burned them onto data CDs that, due to the short length of these tracks, encompassed an entire decade of music to study.

Because that’s what this was: an education. It was work. And I had plenty of time and motivation. After all, the friends I made in middle school had been bullying me within an inch of my life. I’d been cast out to the periphery of the cafeteria to eat alone. I had no one. If I could infiltrate these older punks, with the right contextual cues to speak their specific shared language, I might just survive freshmen year.

I had help, of course. My closest friends existed online, met through blogs culled from our daily scribblings of mutual angst. Marcus, a punk from an adjacent suburb to mine whom I’d never met in person, shared folders of music to anyone willing to make a direct connection on AOL Instant Messenger.

These shared folders became a similar marker of taste between me and my online friends. The publicness of this illegal trade allowed us teens to tout our invisible shelves of records, and prove our fealty to some ideal of music geekery, without the expense. Gone from this digital collection were the more embarrassing albums over which we initially bonded: the Pinkertons, the Punk In Drublics, every Warped Tour comp and Dashboard Confessional album, CDs that would otherwise be visible in our bedrooms (and returned to in private). Here, we could prune and tailor the image of ourselves, and only allow a little light in. I’d have fulfilling conversations with strangers about Aus-Rotten without anyone needing to know I was into Finch just last year.

Soon, I had discovered the screennames of my prospective punk friends from school. I added them to my Friends list, despite never speaking to them. I waited in anticipation. I had hoped to see if they had a shared folder of their own, and maybe more than anything, hoped that they would see my shared folder, if I ever took that fateful leap to initiate. Unlike me, they were rarely online. In my head, they were still smoking outside 7-Eleven, like they always did at lunch, or practicing in their band, delightfully called Amber Alert. Never had I thought they were feeling lonely like me, or scared about grades, or sex, or the state of the world, like I was. They seemed untouchable, wise beyond their years, just like the other punk heroes I admired from afar. Perhaps that’s how I wanted to see them at the time. And perhaps that’s exactly how they wanted to be seen.

Punk, like other fringe interests like metal or professional wrestling, lives and dies by exclusivity. It’s never “just about the music.” There are volumes upon volumes of history to unearth, entire mythologies and family trees to memorize, all born from that elemental catharsis the music provides. For all its bald confrontation, punk is surprisingly nerdy and ascetic in practice. It’s a lot like faith. You can’t be in halfway. And you can’t cram for the test.

By adorning myself with the right bands, the right stories, the right information, by mastering the performance of a good punk, I had missed the point entirely. A mohawk and some patches on my backpack probably would have gotten me closer to friendships than all this absurd intellectual preparation. I spun my wheels, and fanned my peacock feathers for the few people peering in on my AIM profile, or reading my blog.

One Friday, from an away message, I saw that Amber Alert was putting on a show at the Java Mama, a comically small coffee shop in a nearby suburban strip mall. I got dropped off by my dad in his Toyota. Those punks I had watched for months put on a hell of a show. I moshed with their friends from other schools. I think they played an Operation Ivy song. Someone smashed a lamp, and they were never invited back. They were ferocious and unruly and powerful. I mustered up the courage to meet them after the show. “That was fucking great!” I said.

“Hey, thanks man! You go to our school, right?” they said, recognizing my face.