Fiercely Alive

Every once in a while I take it upon myself to attempt a slightly more optimistic smattering of words. Due to my nature being predominately ruled by optimistic pessimism (which is really a misnomer seeing as how I'm actually more along the lines of a raging pessimist where just about all things human species are concerned), I tend to gravitate towards what could be considered a negative outlook on things. Now, it should be said in my defense, that things are pretty fucked up and therefore I'm actually just reporting on reality in a realism sort of way. In other words, it's not my fault that our species has decided to conduct ourselves like a bunch of drunk teenagers trying to find a hole to stick our pricks in on prom night whenever and wherever possible all the live long day. I think it's rather unfair to be considered a pessimist just because I make it a habit of calling a spade a spade and not some other gooey and ridiculous euphemism designed to woo the masses into believing whatever retarded garbage the American Hologram is selling for the day (that last sentence had to of broken some rules of grammer...I'm certain of it). However, all of reality generally sucking and therefore lending itself to pessimism aside, I do realize that attitude has a lot to do with how your life plays out in general. That is to say that if your attitude and overall disposition is shitty, than you shouldn't be surprised when things turn out shitty all of the time (this is where a very special herb can be appropriately used for medicinal purposes for psychological health...I find).

My wife just returned from a three day and two night getaway with two friends from college. She plans on blogging about it over at “thebutterchurn,” so I'll just be latching onto a few topics revolving around the disaster that was her weekend. She thought she was going to the mountains of NC, Boone to be precise, to stay in a cabin and commune with nature while in the company of good friends. What she was not banking on was how much people change as time marches on. What she got was a weekend of consumer hell whilst sleeping in a cabin on the edge of mountain suburbia with two friends that were afraid to go outside because they might get some nature on them...need I say more? One of her friends might as well have had an American flag stamped on her head with something like “only spews American Hologram garbage from mouth” tattooed somewhere that would be easily visible to all those not of the American Hologram persuasion. Apparently this girl thought that “American processed imitation cheese food” was cheese, and bought it (seriously, according to my wife this is what the packaging said). This same girl was afraid to drink organic whole milk (for curiously unknown reasons...I mean even she didn't know why) and couldn't understand why back yard chicken eggs are better for you than concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) eggs. To sum up her weekend it was spent mostly driving around suburbia hitting all of the shopping spots up, eating fast food, and, while at the beautiful cabin they watched “Friends” on the idiot screen. This same girl brought seasons 1 through 10 on dvd which was a good thing, for the friend, due to there being no cable in the cabin which was apparently a major source of contention for her. Needless to say my wife is now recuperating from a 200 dollar getaway to mountain suburbia hell.

I brought that short anecdote up because it helps illuminate the depth of retardedness that permeates all throughout the hologram. Dropping out of the Matrix can be very lonely, and the longer you stay out of it the harder it can be to find intelligence. Why is that? It can easily become a positive feedback loop as well. The more you can't find intelligence the more stupid shows up and the more you can't find intelligence...and on and on it goes. The hologram has been a fabulous success if consuming everything that can possibly be consumed is the goal. If you haven't seen Disney Pixar's“Wall e” yet, you should, as it takes all of this to it's logical conclusion with one caveat...we don't run out of fuel and are able to send a spaceship the size of a city into space. The basic premise of the movie is that we made too much garbage and Earth became to toxic to live on. Of course all of this garbage was generated by a multi-national corporation that apparently produced everything called “Buy n Large.” BnL sends thousands of people on a 5 year space cruise while robots are left behind on Earth to clean up the mess. That's where the little robot Walle comes in. 700 years later a reconnaissance robot named Eve is sent to earth from the ship to find proof of life. Walle falls in love with her and presents her with a seedling that kicks the journey off. The first half of the movie has no dialogue and is artistically phenomenal. I bring it up because the inhabitants of the ship, the Axiom, are all quite literally plugged in to the ship, not unlike the majority who are plugged into the hologram in reality. Quite literally my only issue with the movie is the idea that a robot can love, but allowing that, I'd say it's one of the best Pixar films I've seen.

Shit...I just realized that I'm on the fourth paragraph of a blog that is supposed to be optimistic and I've only talked about American Hologram ra-tard-edness and a dystopian movie...I think I need to sit down and talk with a professional about my level of pessimism. I would if I'm not certain that their conclusion would be a chemical lobotomy since that was what I was offered just before I exited the Matrix. So what does my wife's terrible getaway and Walle have to do with me being optimistic for once. Well, I'll tell you, it...um...to be honest it's just what's coming out of me while attempting optimism. I'm not very good at it. Let me try again. My wife learned how intellectually isolated one can become in the Wasteland and Walle is an amazing film about how the Earth became unfit for life. Shit...I need help.

All joking aside, being unplugged can open up possibilities that you can't imagine from inside the hologram. One thing I've learned recently is that you can't be afraid to live differently. Unplugging pretty much demands a counter culture leaning on your part. Most people do not understand what my wife and I are doing with this fledgling homestead. We have to be careful what we tell people so as not to have the government bureaucrats unleashed on our home for trying to live life naturally. That's one thing my wife, Wendy, learned from her plugged in friends this weekend; if you did not know, nature is a dangerous thing that must be conquered and avoided at all times. The last thing you want to do is get some nature on you. So when we tell people things like we're pregnant with no health insurance, plan on having the child at home, and aren't going to get he/she vaccinated, all while not being employed, well it can cause heads to explode. How irresponsible can you be.

In our defense, I'm self employed, and I can say that because I am receiving no governmental benefits. Just because I don't work for “the man” and punch a clock five days a week shouldn't mean that I'm “unemployed.” Receiving a check in the mail from uncle Sam would make me unemployed in my opinion. And since I receive no check...well I'm self employed. As an ironic aside, I recently received a 10,000 dollar American Express card in the mail. I stated that I was self employed, made 60,000 a year and had 100,000 to 200,000 dollars in assets. It took about five seconds for them to approve me. I've got over 20,000 dollars worth of credit and I have no job. Back on the topic at hand...the pregnancy. This is where the rubber meets the road for me where walkin' my talk is concerned. I'd be lying to say that I'm not very concerned about what it will mean to have a child at home away from the sterile, controlled, and surgical environment of the hospital. We had our first child in the hospital, but I was employed with health insurance at the time and we paid nothing (well except the 600 a month that was taken out of my check for health insurance while working for a for profit hospital corporation as a medic making 28,000 a year).

The hologram wants us to believe that we are being borderline criminally irresponsible by doing what we are doing. Here's the reality. We are going to have at bare minimum an experienced dula and possibly a midwife. I am professionally trained, and according to the state of SC and the National Registry of EMT's, I'm qualified to lead a delivery in the field (and have done so once or twice). If shit goes from bad to worse we are 10 miles from a major hospital which is about fifteen minutes from 911 to hospital bed. What about no insurance? My answer to that is fuck it...I went to war for this country. Granted I quit and got kicked out for “wrongful use of marijuana,” but I still indirectly dropped bombs on innocent nomadic people while splitting atoms in the engine room of a carrier. So what's going to happen if we need to go to the hospital? Well they'll send us a bill for one million dollars, and I'll send them a one dollar check once a month for the rest of my life and there won't be a damn thing they can do about it. I'll even send them a photocopy of my dick and balls along with the check every month. I won't even charge them for the picture. God forbid I lose my 22,000 dollars worth of credit cards and get labeled with “bad credit.”

Here's the deal. I refuse to back down from a complete burning passion for life. That is the courage it takes to lead outside of the matrix. You have to be able to tell the system to go fuck itself and live life on your own terms. Should I be afraid to live? Should I be afraid to reproduce and have an actual family? What is more human than making babies with a mate that you love and are dedicated to? What is more human than procreation? The way I see it is that if intelligent people don't breed than we'll get the idiocracy that we've got now. Idiots that are afraid to get the “nature” on them and think that “American processed imitation cheese food” is fit for human consumption and a bargain deal at that. My son just turned two last June 19^th. He made me a father on father's day of 2010. He will sit down and watch Walle, a movie with little to no dialogue, and be enthralled by it. He jumps up and down and asks me all kinds of questions that I can't answer due to the 2 year old to English language barrier that we got goin' on right now. He'll do that after spending hours outside with me, or his mama, playing in dirt and puddles and picking up sticks to use as swords (which he calls “ting,” in fact anything relatively straight he'll use as a ting so long as he can pick it up).

Ayden Zen McCarty

Let me sum up this rather long blog O mine. My optimism is my son, and the fetus that's not even resembling a human yet (she's about one month 3 weeks along). It's knowing that I'm doing my best to add some intelligence to this fucked up gene pool we've got on Earth. I'm not going to be afraid to live just because I refuse to plug in and play along with the hologram. If I ever had to plug back in to feed my family, I would, but I don't think that will ever be necessary. Living intentionally requires competency, skill, and wisdom. If you can keep your priorities informed by wisdom, and live intentionally out here in head out of assicusville, than there is no reason to think you can't find joy and equanimity. This is where I'm at and this is what I'm doing. I'm fiercely alive and refusing to back down from my birthright...our birthright. I'm going to have children, and I'm going to be responsible for each and every one of them. My wife and I are going to provide them with love and guidance. What else do children need? I hardly think we can do any worse than “American processed imitation cheese food.” We are going to ferment our genes into a fucking culture and there ain't a damn thing the hologram is going to do about it (pending they don't make me disappear for being contrary and free).