Psychic Claustrophobia

      It seems to me that the world has gone plum crazy. It's always been crazy, but a new crazy has fallen into town. The one that you are no doubt aware of if you are reading this blog. I found myself in a Cosco with a friend recently. He's from Austria and enjoys consumerism because it helps him forget the culture that he left behind. I enjoyed it with him...mostly. It was a different experience for me because I was the one that was in a foreign country, in my own country (and not because of the multitudes of ethnicity either). When we arrived he had to drain a few beers from his bladder, so I moseyed on in to the bowls of this Chinese vessel of consumerism. “Fuck!!!” That's what I kept repeating whilst looking at the amazing consumer shit. I was simply overwhelmed by the sheer mass of shit that was for sale, and at bottom dollar empire prices. Before we even got into the store I had already said fuck several times. My first fuck was when I saw some rich bitch having some Cosco slave stuff a 70 inch idiot panel into her behemoth personal transport bad decision. But I digress.

     After about ten minutes of droolingly wandering around trying not to bump into consumer zombies, I heard my name echoing from the distant chambers of this, the largest refrigerator on the planets, brain cemetery. I know that doesn't make much sense, but bare with me, it was traumatic. My buddy from Austria had yelled my name. Having located him, I oozed my way on over to the other hemisphere of this grave mistake of a human infrastructure. We continued on to the rear of the store where they had luscious CAFO steak for sale. It was nice and marbled with the discount Walmart petroleum sugar that the cattle ranchers have busied themselves with fattening the cows up with (since actual corn is too goddamned high priced these days). Over four pounds of ribeye for 35 benjamins. On the way to the line that stretched through various quadrants of this unfortunate unfortunosity, I found myself almost bound up in an amazing six pack sock deal. I said to my buddy, “see, it's almost got me, I mean this is an amazing deal, and I can really use these socks when I push my mower over the two acres of property I live on, but I don't need them,” and I threw them back down in the bin that housed 30 others, and continued on my way.

     Today I picked up my used copy of Theodore Roszak's “Where the Wasteland Ends.” The first edition was printed in 1972 and my copy is from 1973. I originally purchased the book because John Michael Greer labels it “essential” in the first “further reading” section at the end of part one of the “Druidry Handbook” that I'm on the fourth complete reading of. I started reading it about six months ago and made it to about page 30 before I got completely disgusted and put it down. The reason I got disgusted was because Roszak pretty much details everything that is wrong with our way of life over 40 years ago. How long have we known that we were fuckin' up as a species? But then JMG points out in the “The Druidry Handbook” that the Druid revival was pretty much a response to the industrial revolution from the start. That is to say that the need for Druidry arose from the fact that we were fuckin' up as a species and the pioneers of the Druid revival knew it even then. Essentially Druidry reemerged at the very beginning of the Wasteland.

     Here is Roszak talking about what those of us who will turn our backs on the Matrix will look like in the future. That future is now. Of course he calls the Matrix “technocracy” as far as I can tell at this point (I'm just now at chapter 3 which is 68 pages into a 427 page book). Does this sound familiar:

      Ultimately, it will only be those who experience the agony of a psychic claustrophobia within the scientific worldview who will be able to take radical issue with the technocracy-and they will do so on matters that vastly transcend the issues of conventional social justice with which the radicalism of former times filled its now obsolete ideologies. They will see that the expertise we bow before derives from a diminished mode of consciousness. They will recognize that the ideal of scientific objectivity is our common disease of alienation grandly disguised as respectable epistemology. They will come to understand, in their pursuit of a reality justly proportioned to the full dimensions of our human nature, that it is the culture of science from which we must liberate ourselves if we are to be free spirits.

       I must say that I agree with him. Indeed, I myself experienced a “psychic claustrophobia,” and that is what pushed me to where I'm at now. Psychic claustrophobia is exactly what I felt in that Cosco. I understood what I was experiencing. I knew the reasons for why everybody was there and the logic that was used to create the monstrous aberration in the first place. Yet at the same time, on a very fundamental level, I could not understand. When you go to your typical sized box store, like a grocery store, it's not quit as obvious. Even Walmart isn't as obvious as a Cosco or Sam's Club. You have to pay for a membership to this fucking place. Some poor sap stands at the front entrance and his job is to make sure you have, or are with somebody who has, a membership card. I imagine if you don't have one, and refuse to buy one, their loss prevention goons will escort you to the parking lot. This is the logical conclusion of what America is all about. Cosco is where the Wasteland ends. I can't see it getting much more fucked up than a building the size of an air craft carrier full of every manner of consumer shit, shit that nobody needs (well except for the food stratosphere section) at bottom dollar prices. A 90” 3D idiot screen for $10,000!!! My wife, son, aunt in-law, and I could live on that amount of money for an entire year comfortably and we have average Americans who spend it on a fucking idiot screen!!!?

      Our species is doomed. I don't know what other conclusion my psychic claustrophobia can come to. Hell, being doomed is better than what we are now. We are fucked beyond all repair, not worth caring about, and clearly retarded as a species. I could care less any longer about what the world of man does. I'm excommunicating myself from my species. I'd rather be a monkey flingin' shit and wackin' off in a zoo cage than to be a member of Mom Gaia's obvious joke. It seems like every time I leave the fenced in area of the property I live in I'm just proven correct with my assessment of my former species. So count me out from now on. I refuse to accept responsibility for the wreckage humanity is leaving behind. I'm doing all I can by harvesting rain water, attempting to grow food, diggin' permaculture holes, shittin' in a compost bucket and trying to not contribute to the waste stream. The rest of America is either buying, or aspiring to by a fucking 90” 3D television. Phew...I sure do feel better now after spewin' all that hatred out into the blogosphere. Hopefully the comedic value will retract some of the negative karma I generated. Apparently George Carlin was correct when he said that the Earth just wanted Styrofoam and that it will shake us off like fleas when it gets enough of it. Maybe I should open a styrofoam business and act as a catalyst to get this horrible excuse for sentience reset to something that won't induce god damned “psychic claustrophobia” every time I leave the house.