Another Perfect Hangover. I think that’s a Motorhead song. It also applies to me this morning.

“Perfect” here is not used in the positive, “I like headaches and feeling ill” sense. It’s perfect in the sense that this is what a hangover is supposed to be like after last night, a beautiful circumstance.

After a long day I headed home and grabbed a giant bowl of yesterday’s nourishment (see previous post) and set to work on a bit of article cleanup for another journal piece I finished with my project partner. Afterwards, I tried to get more familiar with acrylic paints and experienced an incredible disaster. The outcome was a good learning moment: I recognize that using anything besides Electric Orange™ is completely beyond my abilities. Anyway, in the middle of that work (now known as “The Disaster” because my countertop is newly and accidentally multicolored), I received a phone call from a friend I hadn’t spoken to in a couple of years.

There was no particular reason for the gap in correspondence with him, I have many good friendships like that, and my very best friends (save for one) are people I speak with very infrequently. So his call was a surprise, and despite my hands being covered in paint, I answered it quickly.

He writes for the LA Times full-time these days, though he works out of an office in Virginia. When we communicated more frequently a few years ago, he was writing for what seemed like a dozen places at once, perhaps especially Wired Magazine which I used to check out just to see his column.

Over the phone we caught up and described our life events and changes and observations and had the usual nice reconnection that occurs between close but independent friends. The conversation turned to contemporary life, and it was clear, to me at least, that it was going to be a long, great night.

After arriving at consensus, we both ran out and grabbed bottles of Johnny Walker Black, came back, and switched to video Skype. I was surprised at his suit, but I shouldn’t have been. I remember my days of suits without any fondness at all, and as I let him know that, he reminded me of the pleasure of not having to figure out what to wear in the morning. I agreed, though we decided Devo suits would be a step up.

We spoke and drank continuously until about 4am.  I recorded most of it, though it won’t be shared anywhere. By 2am we were laughing so loudly my was voice getting hoarse. But our laughs weren’t reactions to jokes or funny stories, rather they were reactions to the occasional clarity of the absurdity of the world’s circumstance. Though the conversation began with American politics, it went everywhere else fast.

Consumer “culture” was probably the mainstay argument we worked on. We rediscovered the root of “culture” as “cultivate,” as in, to “cultivate the land” (agriculture, remember?) allowing for best possible harvest. So what’s the best harvest for people, the best fruits of the cultivation of human powers?

Now, reapply “consumer” to the phrase: “consumer culture”. We live in a world where people try to cultivate themselves by getting attention and approval from the least cultivated, least conscious, least developed and especially the least wise of our civilization. In our world, people build a sense of “self” through appealing–or not–to the fucked new psychology of an entire civilization that has grown downwards, devolving to live from the reptilian part of their brain– the shallow, impulsive, conforming, ignorant and reactive part of the brain that has caused every problem mankind has ever caused for itself.

And now that’s basically the rule.

Tyrannical capitalism and money worship is classic “hoarder mentality” in the anthropological and psychotherapy sense, and results from human feelings of insecurity or inadequacy and manifests in irrational accumulation of unneeded things. The behavior is born of the fear-induced attempt to compare one’s survival success chances to others in order to feel better, to feel OK, and is carried out by so many despite the lack of correlation to actual survival success or even success as defined by those now famous indexes of “fulfillment” or “happiness”.  It has retarded our entire civilization, taking us back a thousand years in the last 50 years, and leading where unexamined, unthinking lives will always lead: to war and collective murder.

The ancient Greeks called the unreflective person “Halfman”– people who exist as beings with half of their potential consciousness not only undeveloped, but missing. These people are unfree in the truest sense: they are controlled by their impulses, rather than being in control of them, and being free of them. They walk around slaves to conformity, ignorance and impulsivity, slaves of a “self” that doesn’t grow, and is uncreated. My only problem with them is when they interfere with the freedom of other people, and especially when they work to create a circumstance that encourages the very unfreedom of people, an attempt to make them more like themselves and into a state in which they can be better controlled.

How does one know when another person is missing half of their consciousness? Talk to them and see what comes out most frequently, see how they describe their world, how they spend most of their living time. If working, what are they doing and why? If playing, is it leading to a higher developed and more fulfilling state? Or merely the most distracted. We come down hard on drug abusers because they waste their lives in semi-conscious hazes and dazes and become human wastes. But what about the people who do the same without the use of drugs? People who live in order to be distracted from living, valuing “playtime” above every other human endeavor, unable to conceive of anything more fulfilling than permanent recess in which to spend their limited time alive, and who throw their most productive years into whatever provides the greater and most powerful distractions–toys?–along the way and to be played with for a couple decades of infirmity before death.

So, what’s wrong with that? I guess my answer is another question: what’s the point of that?

In addition to the fact that our world is completely full of suffering people, people dying of unfair diseases and of unfair circumstances being created by the unwise, by the unreflective, by the distracted and undeveloped “halfmen”, it now also conditions people to desire distraction and strive for incompleteness of consciousness. It conditions people to hold the “Halfman” state as the ideal. At our current rate, we’ll get there soon enough, and it will bring with it the end of the human era– an era full of fearful monkeys in suits trying to protect themselves by surrounding  their lives with objects and people of artificial value– desperate attempts to feel OK. Make no mistake about it: consumerism and consumer culture is drug culture. They achieve the same things within individuals.

We were so drunk by the time we reached “the problem of distracted life as a way of living” that I think I nodded off at the computer.

No amount of describing would do justice to the feeling of relief from reconnecting with someone I share a solidarity with. We’re so surrounded by intelligent people who are also completely unthinking— not just unwise, but people who don’t actually value or seek wisdom in life. It’s creating so many problems everywhere now that ignoring it or considering it a normalized aspect of modern life is unethical and also dangerous. Power is so concentrated now that the world can change for the worse, or even be destroyed, overnight, and there will be nothing anyone can do about it. The circumstance is like a child accidentally holding a gun, undeveloped and unaware, yet more powerful in the moment than even the strongest adult. This circumstance is a byproduct-absurdity of the way things have gone because of the way things have gone because of the kind of person our system has inadvertently and recursively created.

I crashed at 4am in my clothes and barely made it to my first meeting of the day. As I write this, I can’t help but notice the evidence of how taken I was by the call– I smell of whiskey and unwashed clothes… my hands…