PAIN

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Let's talk about pain.  Pain comes in many forms.  Physiological, psychological, emotional.  We've all experienced pain in our lives and we all know that pain doesn't feel so good.  I've experienced all kinds of pain in my life, like anybody else.  These past ten years, in particular, I've really had quite an intimate relationship with pain.  We know each other well.  It's a part of me. From the totally debilitating pain of migraine headaches...to the psychological torture of prison...to the loss of dear friends...to the emotional hall-of-fame level pain via consequences of drug addiction and alcoholism...hunger, homelessness, psychosis...solitude, insanity and darkness.  Pain.  We all know pain.  And it hurts.

Recently, scientists have discovered that we also inherit certain forms of pain from our parents and grandparents, etc.  Geneticists and biologists have determined that the emotional pain experienced during traumatic events actually, in a way, get imprinted into our genetic codes and gets passed down generationally.  It's an interesting new field called epigenetics, and a lot of what they are discovering makes a lot of sense.

The United States of Bullshit.......(yes, again)

I'm listening to Metallica's 'Black' album right now, quite loudly.  I find it to be a good way to get the morning started.  It also reminds me to release any repressed anger or frustration I might have floating around in the dark chasm of my mind, because if I let that stuff roam around freely, it tends to grow like a tumor and eventually the consequences of such a cancer become quite painful and deadly.

I think I'll pick on the United States today -- after all, it is one of my favorite subjects -- it's an easy object to rip apart, to chastize -- spank it like the big fat baby it has grown into.  It's like a big, fat, rich, spoiled three-year-old child with a penchant for temper-tantrums and a complete lack of ability to do anything to solve it's own problems.  Problems created by it's own imaginative private reality.

As usual, though, I have to point out that when I say bad things about the U.S.A., I'm not talking about the relatively few people I love, respect and admire who happen to live within it's borders -- prisoners unaware of the confinement in which they currently reside.  Most of my favorite people in the world are stuck living in America, so this is always an interesting subject of discourse.  Many of them are actually happy and comfortable living in the U.S. -- I used to be the same way.  My perspective has changed a bit due to my own life experience and intimate encounters with reality.

The United States of 'Twerking' vs. Reality.......and American Idiots.

From time to time I take advantage of my unique perspective on the state of affairs in the U.S., given that I no longer view and gather information from inside the U.S., but rather from my perch here in Toronto, Canada, the most culturally and ethnically diverse city in the world.

After having spent thirty years in the U.S., and having the world's news/current events bombarding me solely through the all-American lens otherwise known as the U.S. media, these past three years in Toronto have provided me with a much more realistic picture of how the U.S. is regarded around the world by more civilized nations like Canada, Britain, Scandinavia, western Europe, etc.

The picture is not a pretty one.  I quickly learned that U.S. based media outlets are largely full of shit, for want of a better term. Nothing down there comes close to the level of intellectual reporting, relative objectivity and news gathering of, say, BBC or CBC. Even Al-Jazeera is more journalistically honest than the best the U.S. has to offer in the form of CNN, Fox News and others.  There are many reasons for this, the most obvious and glaring being the fact that private enterprise controls the U.S. news machine, and the private sector corporate behemoths only care about one thing -- MONEY.  In fact, they are legally obligated to do whatever it takes to increase the share price of their stock.  The result???  News outlets that feed the masses the kind of information that keeps them glued to the screens -- the TV, the smartphone, the tablet, whatever.  It's all contrived bullshit, typically engineered to keep the public in fear of the unknown.........so that they'll keep watching to see what happens next -- glued to the little screens.

This ends up creating a populous that in aggregate enters more queries on Google and Twitter for Miley Cyrus 'twerking' on the same day the U.S. is contemplating going to war in Syria.  A mass of people who seek comfort at places like 'Fatburger' and Las Vegas. Hookers and cocaine and guns and gangbangers.  Rich white kids buying 'music' created by street-corner drug dealers who fancy themselves as 'artists.'  Cyberbullying, suicide, entrenched racism that has nothing close to a solution in any of our lifetimes, and a litany of deep-rooted problems that nobody in the U.S. has the balls to properly address.  Political correctness is prioritized above reality, security, education, healthcare. All the politicos care about is that they don't offend the sensibilities of one group or another. In other words, they care more about 'hurt feelings' than actual democratic progress and success.  A bunch of fucking babies.

The most important news item for most Americans - this is a fact people.

This is one of those moments when I actually feel glad that I was deported from the U.S. to Canada (the country of my birth) in 2010 for my 'horrendous' crime of trying to pass a phony prescription for Vicodin (Percocet) in the U.S. while I was struggling with a life-threatening addiction to pain pills.  This,  after having lived in the U.S. for thirty years. I'm just one of many -- and you will soon be hearing from more of us -- who had his life turned completely upside down and destroyed for minor technical bullshit.

Life in Prison

Today I think I'll talk about life in prison.  As most of you know, I have significant firsthand experience and knowledge regarding this particular topic.  But I'm not going to talk about that kind of prison -- the jails, 'correctional' institutions, detention centers, or any other of the multitude of human warehouses which occupy a rather large allocation of government property throughout America from sea to shining sea.  Today, I'm talking about the kind of prison that almost anyone can relate to...

About an hour ago, as I was walking down King Street toward Bay Street in the heart of Toronto's financial district, I noticed a crowd of people snapping pictures with their smartphones of a man whom I can only assume was in the midst of some sort of performance art display.  The man was dressed in a business suit, kneeling prostrate on the sidewalk at the southeast corner of King and Bay, with his head fully inserted into a pile of soil located inside an open suitcase also laying on the ground.  There was a small rope tied into a noose knot on the concrete ground next to him, along with a carafe of clear water.

I too wanted to take a picture of this somewhat shocking sight at the busiest intersection during rush hour in Toronto's equivalent of Wall Street and Broad in New York City, but there were a lot of people surrounding him and taking pics and pointing and remarking, etc.  The crowd of people surrounding him were also mostly dressed in business attire, given the location, but their heads were definitely not buried in dirt.  So I just kept walking along, somewhat curious and impressed with the man's brave display of something, although I wasn't quite sure what that something might be.  Only the man/artist truly knows, but now, upon further reflection, I now know what it represents to me.

When I think of what I saw while I was staring at this man along with everyone else, I kept having flashbacks of my experience in prison (actual prison) in Texas a few years ago.  Alone, locked up in a small area, surrounded by concrete and steel and insanity.  It's a hard feeling to forget, and it pops up from time to time when I feel stuck or powerless, scared and alone, regardless of the actual location or circumstances.  It's a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness and solitude.  In other words, it feels like shit.

To me, the display I witnessed by this man at the busiest time of day at the busiest intersection in the heart of Toronto's financial district, represents an all too common human experience in our 'free' society.  Now, before I go any further, I need to say something, which is this:  relatively speaking, in terms of numbers, there are a few people in our society who are fortunate enough to be able to work in a profession they actually enjoy -- a 'calling' -- people who love what they do and make a lot of money doing it.  That's great and I'm happy for those people.  Given that we live in a 'monetary' society, it would only be fair that everyone should be in such a position.  But that's not the way it is, except for those fortunate ones. So I'm not talking about those fortunate ones.

I'm speaking to the human being who is presumably sick and tired of living in a society in which he is effectively forced to spend most waking hours of his days, working at some job he doesn't particularly like, being sent around to places he doesn't particularly want to be, all just to simply make the money he needs in order to 'live' a 'normal' life.  Further, it made me think that it doesn't matter what kind of job a person has or how much money a person makes.  What matters is that there are a lot of people in our society -- maybe even most people -- who do things they don't enjoy doing in an attempt to enjoy a bit of time while they're not busy doing those things they don't enjoy doing.  You may need to read the previous sentence again, because it sounds weird, I know.  But it makes sense.

Some people call this 'sacrifice,' or 'paying dues,' or 'gotta work hard to play hard,' or whatever else people say to convince themselves that they're happy in life.  That they are content.  'Normal.'

I call it bullshit.