What is happening?

This is mental expelling, this is nothing more than a vent - if you want a 'professional publication', this one isn't it, but you're welcome to read and tell me what you think. I'm not going to lie, I don't think it all makes sense - its just me getting some thoughts in order.
Take it as it is.
But if you don't want to waste your time, don't say I didn't warn you. The next ones might be more publishable - I've kinda decided that anything posted on the blog will be 'rough', and the best stuff that emerges will come up again in print.


My last blog post was in 2009. I think that's sad - so check this; it's not as if there hasn't been any production, it's just this blog became so neglected it's coughing up dust-balls. That has to change.
That changes tonight.
Brizban's article "Thoughts on S-10" is a great place to start a new phase in dedication. I'm glad that it was received, and that there is a wider community in our midst which supports initiatives in reaching a common voice.
Like today, in Waterloo Town Square, "Poets against G-20" met again - it was July 1st, Canada Day of all days. We met for solidarity and reflection, part of a...grieving process? A purging - or a changing - an embracing and rising - a resilience? What? What?!
They met again because they had met before. A few times. At a People's Summit Slam where more than 15 people spoke and shared their art and their rage. Today, more than 4 hours and 50 people stood and did the same, but this time more enflamed - the quiet spoke. They spoke loud. Their world had changed and they couldn't take it anymore.
The rage of some. Some people getting riled up, and rallied - and that's shocking. I've never seen it out of team sports and lame pep-talks to convince us we were the best thing since showers. The empathy - the "fed-up"ness of people who know that their world isn't perfect, and that to push it to the limit is a duty, but it's sad to know where it will end. Because you know where it will end. Because it went there. There. It went to a cell, a little place in the...the back of your mind - never really 'known' but often considered. And its not that you're there, or may even ever go there, or have been there, but its that your friends and family and allies and social support and community are there. They are there. Right now. In body and soul. Not free to make snide jokes about Canada Day, lighting up a fatty. Not free to enjoy fireworks by a lake or a forest, or out on a canoe. Not free. Not free for a long time now, and further time still.
...
Its hard to wrap your head around.
I can think of at least 10 people who's world just changed.
Like, no going back? Nothing will ever be the same?
What? What does this mean?
I am so at a loss as for what it does mean its beyond ridiculous.
Conceptually, I believe - preface this 'belief' with the understanding that the casual accumulation of thoughts on the matter, through years of not-applied study and investment of time, which have generated the summation of these thoughts so that they are recognized as the epistemically weak position of 'beliefs', and not necessarily 'knowing' but serving the same function in this case - that once you're in the criminal justice system, you're in until it is done with you. Does this mean no traveling outside of Canada? Does this mean no jobs, or losing jobs when people find out - does this mean no more working with kids? Can you teach? Can you mentor? How will people treat you?

What --- the --- fuck.

I'm somewhat...wiped by this. I'm actually, physically impacted by this - and I am so far from the centre of this gyre that it make's the hurricane's eye unimaginable.

To all comrades in this time - there are no words that accomplish what is at once a want and a need and a thing which has already passed by but needs to pass more, the sentiment of the whole-body expression, so felt, so somatic but being expressed right now in a way which has been trained, taught, conditioned to consider itself something, to consider itself alien when it so desires, and that alien has led to today, to this moment, this feeling, this neck-craning infusion of a reality check. Analysis is not enough - all thoughts and feelings are tied to actions, and when some thoughts and feelings are denied through social-architecture, like the institutions of the culture and the state, then some thoughts are prohibited. That prohibition is a cessation, culling, and killing of a life-way, a way of self-care, or a narrative-construction venture in which the radical free-agent is perpetually 'discovering' itself, becoming itself through its choices of reality - the words, ideas, beliefs as all expressed through the highly-influenced media of language and culture, but also in how it is entertained and how it is fed, how it interacts with the world and why and where those images came from and what leaving all that unconsidered means...

I am so all over the place. I think I'm just purging. Good. That's what I want. I want to be scraped clean of this. Not for not wanting to be with the moment, but for wanting to take from this what is most necessary. To be sharp, focused and action-oriented. To be ready. To be willing. To be able and articulate and there and acting in lock-step with the 'right thing at the right time' - the esoteric proper path.

Plato had it right when he chose the forms of entertainment and education in his state. Purposely, a nation with selected musical harmonies will inculcate a feeling of affection for those things it identifies as more 'good' and more 'true'. If they have an inclination to want to seek what they recognize and empathize with as 'good' and 'true', then they will act that way - ideally cultivated citizens.

Music is subversive. Plato said it first (To my knowledge?), and this is an example of meta-individualistic choices that affect how one thinks about the world. By choosing to frame ones social interactions purposefully, one is constructing what I (and I'm hoping I heard this somewhere else too) want to call 'social-epistemic architecture'. 'Social-epistemic architecture' appears to me to be a framework, or system of thought, which acts as a vehicle for behavior in relation to those factors. Plato's music inculcates a presumed desire for 'the good', 'the true', 'the beautiful', and 'the harmonious', and this world is one where everyone has a particular 'nature' that guarantees them an embodied place. 'Social-epistemic architecture' is what seems 'natural' when considering how to think, feel, and behave about an issue. It is a meta-individualistic choice because it is something that functions individually, but gets its origins from the environment, the phenomenological experience beyond 'the self'. It is still a 'choice' because accident and agency are responsible for its prominence, and are responsible for its maintenance.

Why am I saying this? Why am I blabbing about this?

To the best of my knowledge, you can go to jail for acting a certain way - breaking the law. I have been argued and taught and educated for a long time about what is 'the right way' to live. (Or as one of Peter Braid's '10%'ers has said what 'good Canadians' who "live by the rules" do.) We assume that the basic rule of people is to live together and be kind, honor your word in deed or kind, to not steal or kill, and to help those within 'your community', however you choose to narrow that. This seems so common! Its a presumption, a...an expectation - if you do not have this basic level of commonality, we can not live together, and you are exiled one way or another. In today's case, contra Socrates', a jail is more likely to house dissidence than exile would. An isolation like jail is an alienation from the rest of the public, because they, never likely to really experience it, will only go on the assumptions that they have, learned from their environment. But I digress - fuck, I digress, apologies.

The 'rules'. The 'golden mean'. How do you step off this path?
What is it to not superimpose this ideal upon your life and into your worldview - when does that happen? It happened in Toronto for those who had contrary political views - it happened to Marc Emery for contrary political views in a country hell-bent on squashing illegal trafficking in narcotics. It wasn't even the country he was in, but he was arrested and extradited for it. They wouldn't even charge him in this country, they never felt it was a problem. Why would they? He operated a functional business that supported many with the promise of a timely deliver of quality product - he paid his taxes, supported a world in which he felt things would be better. That was wrong. He is not allowed to make the world better - it is contrary to the superimposed cultural architecture of the state. It is a deviance from the accepted norm, the 'rules', and in that it must be culled. Deviant thought is dangerous, and those people with them are punished with the threat of social-cultural-economic isolation-marginalization. They are imprisoned, shunned, stigmatized, beat-down, auto-suspected, economically-burdened in order to make the vital transfer of knowledge that comes from being able to reproduce, to live as 'fully' as possible. That way that embodied-knowledge, or 'lifestyle' is more likely to die off.

So political ideas are endangered because they represent a divergence from the mainstream, and they are dangerous when they challenge the prominence of other lifestyle norms. The power struggle between newcomer and habit is articulated in the ways permitted by the social architecture. If something is 'dangerous', i.e. if it challenges the 'security' of ones 'lifestyle', then it needs to 'treated' with 'dominance, precision, or force' - a zero-sum, win-lose understanding, if that is what the social-epistemological architecture permits.

Dangerous ideas collude with like. It is a community of thinkers, a 'community of thought', that is affected by this. What that means, to me, is that the time, resources, mental-labor necessary to deal with these super-impositions is costly, and therefore debilitating not only to those whom are the direct targets, but to the wider community 'network' as well. Because it is a 'network'. Solidarity. Voltaire - I may not agree with you, but will still stand for your right to say it. When your right to think, believe, act, and feel how you wish to feel is threatened, even if only indirectly, it is an imposition on ones self-care, on ones life! So, when you have ideas in common, other ideas that you possess are also affected by their criminalization. Finding a correlation, i.e. a mechanical 'proof' of this would require sociological analysis, but it can be done. I'm just presuming the truth of this. So, ideas on the margin, found undesirable, confederate to other ideas on the margins but not necessarily identifying with them, are endangered by association. And this is how the embodiment of the thinker affects what you are to think about.

Shit.

I am...all over the place. Purging. Purging. I met with JC tonight and he taught me a meditation technique. Pop the thought. Sit for half an hour, and every thought that comes up, acknowledge its 'thought-ness' and send it on its way - if you're on a train of thought, don't punish yourself, but keeping 'popping' them by sending it out of your mind. Pop. Thought. Pop. Thought. Pop.

Pop.

Meditate - clear head - be fresh. Focus. Work harder.

This purging process has been good - I needed, wanted, to just write and feel and express and not worry about making sense - I just needed to uncloud, recloud, wade through the mist. There is still so much to talk about, but right now. I don't know if I want to talk. No, that's a closing.

I want to talk more. There is so much that needs to be purged, to cleanse, to feel, to express, to share, to expel.

Where to next?