In personal game news, it seems a power surge has fried my old faithful xbox black. I was in the middle of a particularly challenging boss battle in Stranger's Wrath when clouds of black smoke suddenly huffed from the poor old creature's vents. Strangely enough it was at almost this point in the game two or three months ago that the police interupted my diversion to steal a few of my things ... including Stranger's Wrath. I replaced the game through a roundabout process which took a good month and a half only to play the game up to more or less the same point and be shut down by manic electricity. Giving this a positive slant which is really not my way, I guess I have an additional reason to buy a 360 when I get to Canada. But what then to do with the stack of original games i just bought and had shipped to me here in la jungla? Whatever ... strange priorities really.

(thanks to j. chadwick for the title)

"In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined

On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind."

The Lotos-Eaters, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

As archetypal human dilemmas go, none captures the insistent insouciance of the crumbling western consumer dream quite like the lotus eaters in The Odyssey. At once aware of the world's cruelty but determined to fulfill mythological promises of paradise, Odysseus' men gathered in their war weary, fatuous circles to reaffirm their delusions, stoned to the rafters on the plant of bliss. There amongst the oblivious, they tried to assuage the cognitive dissonance grumbling from the memories of victories gained at the cost of so many dead. They whole heartedly embraced the lie by opening themselves unequivocally to whatever mental contagion would bring them peace. What harm is there, I hear myself repeating with them, to take a brief respite from work, weariness and the knowledge of inevitable death? I, too, have been raised to believe I deserve some happiness.

Hence I have run not walked from the culture of which I knew too much. The growing brown shirt movement and racial intolerance of Canada, the pro-war, anti-socialist, blame the poor, shoot the hippo, jingoism of recent memory has walked me quietly and quickly to the nearest exit. Yet, nowhere is lotus bliss more apparent than in the escapism of an ex-patriot community. On the one hand we are proud and self congratulatory for having perceived and rejected the evil doing of our homelands, only to demand a contradictory anti-intellectualism towards anything that would disrupt our pleasant dream. It isn't uncommon for people to misinterpret local law, that foreigners are not permitted political involvements, as justification for not discussing politics at all. As such, social, political, economical or ethical acumen can be read as deplorable and deportable dissention. Far beyond murder it is to point out the palm fronds crashing down amongst our idyll.

In the house across the way there is no activity. This is sufficient to confirm something is wrong. I have come to the street of big houses to tend the Voltaire-ian gardens of some fellow escapees and have become accustomed to the rhythm of this little pseudo suburban road. My neighbor moves and shakes, comes and goes, like the steady wash of waves on our seemingly happy beaches. But not this week.

The facts are non-existent. There is no newspaper and no form of communication but gossip. All that seems true is that he was taken from his restaurant by men with guns.

When the police assaulted the zocalo in Oaxaca during the last teacher's strike they apparently captured some 500 people who they then deported to the state of Nayarit in a recapitulation of Guantanamo Bay. Some of those people were just unlucky enough to have chosen that particular moment to go shopping for eggs. They were tortured of course. I only know this because one of the locals is a psychologist who was involved in post traumatic stress treatment for the detainees. Most refused the treatment because they had already seen psychologists in their Nayarit prison and had been made aware of the intricacies of "treatment" by their captors. They were encouraged, in the midst of what must have been one of the most horrific moments of their lives, to see their discontent as a skewed perspective, to see their grief as the product of their improprieties.

For the new president, Felipe Calderon, the biggest problem Mexico faces at this moment is the transportation of drugs up the coast. Of course, only drug users would also be dissenters in the beautiful dream that is green and pleasant Mexico. That the teachers of Oaxaca and the APPO are dissenters, trouble makers, surrenders them to the inquisition of Calderon's anti-drug army. That Calderon's anti-drug army may be involved in the drug trade is an irony that has certainly fried the sensibilities of the Mexican public.

Contrarily, for too many of the gringos the protests in Oaxaca are about better wages and an inexplicable, culturally endemic unrest. One can practically hear John Wayne's voice pronouncing with no hint of wavering self-doubt that the natives are restless, while completely ignoring just why that might be. The facts are non-existent. There is no newspaper and no form of communication but gossip. All that seems true is that mangos fall from the trees like manna from heaven.

We all, surely, have anxieties about how the world could be and have all had our anxieties lured into dreary congeniality by our fear. Uncertainty and the reluctance to speak about what is not sure, what disrupts, has quieted our cynicism, defensiveness and critical judgment. But such "positive" thinking, trying to pass off our muzzles for some kind of zen, doesn't change the world. It just shuts out what is inconvenient about it. And in the confusion criminals of every kind make off with whomsoever they wish as we nod our heads in passive accord.

Despite the fragmentary appearance of the community's reaction to the kidnapping, there is an unsettling theme running through our conversations. I noticed a distinct relief of tension in myself when I was told the victim was involved in questionable business practices. The event was removed from the paranoic dread of random violence and delivered into the realm of justice, cause and effect, good and evil, god. Such specific comings and goings surely have nothing to do with us general rabble. I have rejected the event's suggestion of wholesale human malevolence for the comfort provided by non-involvement.

Yet, I keep thinking of the detainees in Nayarit being told that their dis-ease, their sins against the state, had incarcerated them. I think of a boss who tried to have the only aware person in the department fired for having too much initiative, I think of a co-worker who, after the fact, spoke shockingly well of a job she had hated and with bubbly enthusiasm reminded me that life was all about enjoyment. I think of Odysseus' men rejecting stark life completely for peaceful somnambulism. And I surely agree that life cannot be unwaveringly about fear and pain. And yet it is, in as much as it is about coming to terms with perennial suffering. We have no patience for the process. We hope that there is somehow a quick resolution to our strife and we consume the answers like cigarettes. We consume. We congratulate ourselves on our enlightenment and cluck and strut with our chests puffed out at those who "resist." We go on vacation. We leave.

"What you resist persists" goes the popular Jungian quote that has been used to substantiate the bland inertia of our era. To think is to sin against our safe, shell-like personal truths. Because truth, our truth, is a selfish little, self serving, self created reality, that any real thought would pop like a blister. We dread knowing. We can not go back to the same old strife, the same old pain, the same old same old.

Jung was not offering a solution to our dilemma in his clever aphorism. It is only to our generation of sound byte addled head nodders that "don't think about it" could somehow resolve the confusion of so many years of baffling human cognizance. We want ... no ... we demand the answer now and it is narcissistically easy to embrace the lotus. But Jung also said, "There is no coming to consciousness without pain." Yes, we must be Buddhist and strive for acceptance, but no, we can not be insincere about it. We should not just embrace this or that because it serves our purposes and we just don't want to suffer anymore ... should we?

We have theories about our disappeared neighbor. We dabble in explanation, justification, discrimination to give our disregard the appearance of awareness. Meanwhile, we dream in paradise and offer money, subservience, condemnation. We allocate blame to individual negativity when people are visited by strife, anything to stay in the hidden port, to hold fast to our vacuous, guiltless peace. Yet, should those who stoke the all consuming machine have need of more fodder, they will know exactly where we can be found.

I've been passing my days of unemployment trying to get some of my old music up on the internet. Why? Yes good question ... portrait of a man with too much time on his hands. Anyway, let's move on. As it turns out myspace is the usual option for such endeavours so I have wandered into the land of absolute vanity and posted a ms music page. It's a staggeringly slow process as the pages flip over and crash and constant advisements of a 24 hour wait until the tiny edit you have made comes up. As we say in Mexico, or at least the Mexicans say in Mexico and I steal from them because I love the expression, que hueva. So, here then, without further ado, is the twelve year old disc that is still sitting in untold, unopened boxes under someone's bed in Canada.

http://www.myspace.com/morethantosurvive

Deary me I am a sentimental old sot. And now back to the gardening ...