The Beautiful Isle

Branding is no longer a logo. It’s a selfish moniker of one’s self, one’s institution and one’s monastery. I’m finding more that branding is selfish; this is not to be confused, however, with the negative connotation of selfishness. Selfishness is a good thing, something far better than selflessness. Many plan to inspire, but never conspire. 

Branding is a conspiracy. And again, this is not to say a conspiracy between moguls, cheats and manipulators. It’s a conspiracy between those searching for a common echo. A singular personality and style.

By finding more of what I’m searching for in Formosa I’m finding more that it is something I want to share with others. Something that I crave to have realized in the life/soul of another being. To flow gently through the bloodstream and seep through the pores of the brand’s skin.

I want Formosa to be beautiful and true, and I’m just finding out that I’m almost ready to share it with the world.

4.12.12

Have you heard the guy who fell off the skyscraper?

On his way down he kept on saying, to reassure himself:

“So far so good, so far so good, so far so good.”

How you fall doesn’t matter.

It’s how you land!

-La Haine (1995)

Echoes

It’s 1:11am and we’re drunk, sitting on some sticky vinyl lounge chairs in the back of the Echoplex. Re’ann says shes hungry but no one really hears her and I look down at the bottom of my drink and wish that I would have crushed the Ativan into my drink rather than snorting it behind the Brite Spot after Liam said it would be OK.

I’m a little stoned and woozy but the coffee brings me to a gentle buzz. We leave the corner of the club and she takes my hand and we cut through crowds before being stopped by some Latino with a ponytail. She fucked my best friend the other week and I didn’t really care. I was more concerned with her friend who had put her hand on my cock while we waited in line for the bathroom.

She wore the caridgan I forgot at her place a few weeks back after we saw some movie at the Landmark, and she is taking pictures of the stage, biting her lip while choosing some gaudy filter I didn’t really care for but told her I liked anyways. I tell her we should leave and she nods and we go into the back of the Echoplex and her throat tastes salty and she forces her thigh between my legs. We make love by some graffiti that reads “ONE-WAY” and I can’t stand but to think about Lynn and her naked in my bed, crying after her sister overdosed last Winter.

Bryan calls for the third time and I answer but can’t really hear him well so I hang up and tell her that my place is close and she can crash if she wants. 

The next morning I wake up and take my shoes off. The lower half of my bed is soaked with rain water and smells a little rank so I strip the sheets off and throw them into my closet and shut the door. She’s still wrapped in the cardigan and her tan back glowed in the 8am sun. I slip out to make a pot of coffee. I missed work again but don’t feel so bad after a cigarette and half a grapefruit.

The soles of my feet are bare and smooth from the beach and my marble floor sends a chill down my back while I do sit-ups. I crush a gram and tear a strip out of Chip Kidd’s book I bought at a rummage sale and take it into my lungs and almost vomit as the drip formed in the back of my throat.

I light a joint and she wakes up and tells me she has to get home and I agree.

Later I’m at a cafe making eyes with a hardbody behind the counter. I tell her that she is special and she gives me her number and says she was getting off soon if I wanted to wait and I say I can. Her boyfriend usually picked her up, she says, but he was out of town so I took her back to her bungalow in Fullerton and she told me about her beliefs in the Zodiac and why Snow White is her favorite disney character. I fall asleep on her lumpy futon, which I think makes her mad, but I take a cab back to the cafe the next morning where I parked my car, do a line, and get back to my apartment just in time to catch a really bad car crash at the intersection of Clinton and Alvarado where paramedics were loading some bloody body into the back of the ambulance. 

Let me just start by saying that the KONY video does nothing to explain any deeper-seated issues behind how war criminals such as himself come to power. How poor government structure undermines human civility. How scarcity, exploitative labor and feudalism have been eating Uganda and greater Africa as nation from the inside out.

I’m not going to lie. The dub-step bumping, Shepard Fairey’ed out video did send chills down my spine at moments, however, I couldn’t help but feel that the larger message is missing.

They threw out a ton of imagery, some cool infographics and really fluffed my hipster feathers, BUT, I still don’t really understand how stopping this one individual will suddenly eliminate the other 49 on that list of evil-doers.

What? You think that once I join some Facebook crew and plaster some posters up on the wall that I’m actually going to be like “fuck yea, got that sucker, on the next one?”

Let’s be real. There is a certain point where self-righteousness becomes infectious. We all want to be good-doers. We all want to own friendly animals, run freely in the street with sparklers gripped in both hands and have children who say ridiculously cute things. I’ve seen plenty of PEACE and LOVE bumper stickers to know that our quest for self-harmony is one of a collective nature. The video pissed me off because it’s not crediting our generation for being smart socializers. It started and ended with describing the power of Facebook however Facebook as a tool for deeper spiritual conquest is a joke. We all say we support but do we really support? What happens to a society who only shares and never creates? What happens when there is a single content provider who’s main channel is Facebook? What if the bigger power knows, studies and perfects Facebook communication so well that we are all lead to believe that the messages are trite and true.

Real ideas don’t come from Facebook. They just circulate within Facebook. We’ve all been there refreshing feeds getting that small kick of dopamine as you realize someone is friends with someone. But this is all surface level shit people. Few people read anymore, fewer people understand and retort. We all just sit there trying to digest all the pixels that are flying in our faces and we never take the 10% of our time to actually create. We’d rather go to bed. We’d rather play XBOX.

The KONY video plays into this. It demands that we take action, it demands that we collect ourselves and drive the Facebook vehicle into a small African village and pick up all the kids. But we don’t want to do this. We want to pretend we do this so we share the video. But we won’t actually do this. Because we are only so impressionable and we can only care about a subject if we truly understand it. Ask yourself, do you really understand what the KONY video was about. Do you know how warmongers dictate? Do you know their motives? Do you know how the UN plays a part in this? Are you willing to educate yourself or have others educate you? Is it worth it? The time or money?

I don’t know. But just ask yourself. 

Am I your man?

Am I your protector?

Is this house my home?

The home where I kept her?

The Island of Shitty Monkeys

Somewhere, far, far away there’s a shitty island. An island without a name. An island not worth giving a name. A shitty island with a shitty shape. On this shitty island grow palm trees that also have shitty shapes. And the palm trees produce coconuts that give off a shitty smell. Shitty monkeys live in the trees, and they love to eat these shitty-smelling coconuts, after which they shit the world’s foulest shit. The shit falls on the ground and builds up shitty mounds, making the shitty palm trees that grow on them even shittier. 

It’s an endless cycle.

Are you following me?

As I sat looking at him, I suddenly remembered the story of this shitty island. What I’m trying to say is this: A certain kind of shitiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propagating itself with its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it - even if the person wants to stop it.

Are you catching my drift?

I know exactly the sort of person he is. He thinks he can smash me to bits anytime he feels like it. But things are not that simple. To him, with his values, I may well be nothing but garbage or rocks. But I’m not as stupid as he thinks… and I know exactly what he has under that skin of his. I know his secrets. I may be a nobody, but at least I’m not a sandbag. I’m a living breathing human being. If he hits me. I’ll hit him back. Make sure you keep that in mind.

Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi has done more than anyone to study the state of “effortless talent”, and he defined it as one’s flow.

People who experience flow describe it as “a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems,” and their descriptions of the joy of that state are so compelling that Csikzentmihalyhi has called it an “optimal experience”.