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Archive for the tag “never having kids”

21 Mar 2017

40) No More Babies For Bullets

Baby Machine by Leta Gray

‘Baby Machine’ Stone Lithograph Print (2008) Courtesy of Leta Gray with permission.

I never wanted to bring a child into the world – in my time.

I’ve seen too much heartache, gross negligence and repulsive events. I live in a world of certain horrid creatures that care nothing for their own kind. Why would I labor to bring an innocent being into a world of rabid destruction?

Why would I, in my right mind bring a babe into the world where the prospects of any kind of life is destined to be grim at best, more violent, more competitive, more people? Maybe I didn’t read enough ‘learn how to be happy’ books in my youth because the reality of the world jockeyed for my attention first.

I am tormented by a belief in good things, in an ideal world where humankind takes great care of humankind, that all children never really grow up because their world is more relevant. I wrap my own placental blanket around my vessel, safe and warm from the disintegration all around.

Am I selfish for not wanting to continue my bloodline, a bloodline that feels too deeply and lives too long? Why should I bring a profound and emotional creature into the world with those who use human beings for their own selfish purpose – money and power? To plant a lovely soul into a world where women are shoved aside, women are irrelevant, just to be incubators to breed more armies of men?

NO, I will not. I have no good reason to bring a child in the world. The world does not deserve my beautiful child. The world will get my words instead.

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27 Sep 2015

29) I Am Sick To Death But I Still Fight

Angry girlEvery day, I fight for my soul. I try to feed it oxygen, but the air is stale and smells of gasoline and cheeseburgers and rotting garbage.

Every day, I fight advertising and marketing and spreadsheets.

Every day, I fight to find the good in humanity…

I fight to find courage to live.
I fight the sadness of a world falling apart.
I fight to find peace of mind.

With a shifting and restless planet, I take solace in knowing the earth is fighting through earthquakes and pyroclastic blasts, venting the pressures that hold it all together. I let the words pour out, like lava. Words burn holes through the brain, force out the impurities of conforming conventional wisdom.

I am sick to death of conforming to institutions and social norms that are corrupt.
I am sick to death of convention that lacks conviction that should be self-evident.
I am sick to death of the wisdom of tired old men talking business and trading greenbacks and depleting the last hope for democracy, something I believed in once upon a time…

The Constitution and its promise is an illusion, a false store front, high fructose syrup that sounds pretty on parchment, yet everything we do undercuts the foundation of those carefully crafted words. My vote means nothing, but I still vote.

I am sick to death of a world whose religious beliefs, politics, and monetary interests overrides social progress, education, science and the welfare of the planet and all its life forms.

I am sick to death that writers, historians, philosophers, teachers, and artists must fight for their very existence while football players, politicians, lawyers, stockbrokers, and those born into wealth are more influential, privileged, and praised in society.

I am sick to death of oil drills and greasy machines and backyards full of junk.
I am sick to death of plastic and Styrofoam and concrete.
I am sick to death of consumerism and money and GDP.
I am sick to death of buying things that have to be thrown away.
I am sick to death of driving and getting nowhere.

I am sick to death of women giving birth to children without thought or consideration to the massive responsibility involved in spawning a life form into a world lacking everything to sustain that child.

I am sick to death of suburban mansions piled in neat, manicured rows in the desert and SUVs full of burping, farting, wasting human beings that drive 30 miles to soccer practice and idle their engines in long fast food lines.

I am sick to death of college degrees and career aspirations and MBA’s that focus on making money as the ultimate goal.

I am sick to death of cardboard and packing tape and useless pretty things made in China multiplied by billions of air-polluting vehicles delivering the same useless pretty things to retail establishments that throw out large portions of what they bring in; all to sell at discount prices that are palatable for Americans that need cheap stuff to comfort themselves from the stresses of their daily lives who end up storing their cheap acquisitions in their garage.

I am sick to death of the blinding speed of daily life, police sirens more numerous than the chirping of birds, and the drone of air conditioners in a September heat wave.

I am sick to death of the thought that I could be armed with 500 guns and never safe from a nuclear bomb.

I fight to stay engaged, to have a voice.
I fight to love and not to hate.
I fight my thoughts that words are futile.

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10 Apr 2015

27) April Fools

April 1, 1992

I was at home. The pregnancy test was positive and all I could think about was my father. He told me he’d disown me if I ever got pregnant, as if somehow he knew about my nightly excursions. The boy I was with; we played in the garden of earthly delights, forbidden fruit we consumed, each ravaging the other – exploring all that can be done between two people of the opposite sex.

Parrish-Ecstasy_2

“Ecstasy” by Maxfield Parrish

We sailed oceans of great feeling and played like children in our secret garden, where adults only dream: in closets and backrooms, at the airport in my car, in the clear waters of a swimming pool, the tennis courts at midnight and swing sets in playgrounds with blushing stars. Our torrential sex flooded into haunted lands and forbidden spaces; and only when the sun came up, did we really see the sobering reality, a thing we hated because the fantasy was over.

Was it love? My young mind couldn’t describe it; how does one know what love is with all the feelings that conflict and collide?

April fools…

Ours lives were a vast chasm, a generation of desire and hopelessness born of previous generations. We embodied the 13th generation in our reckless lovemaking. A trepid anger of the ages crept into our cells and frenzied us into heat – he, high on meth and I, high on sex. I couldn’t be apart from him. I held onto the feeling like a ghost in fall when the leaves trickle down to the damp forest floor, and the bounty of sacred, fertile things take over memory… and I in my youth, sexually erect and potent and empty. I cried out and raked my nails into his skin like a rabid animal.

The world around us was terrifying, rotten and void: void of beauty, void of life… and in this existence, we held on to one another in rapture, a kind of appalling sustained ecstasy. Nothing else mattered…

He snuck me into his house at midnight and no one was around. They were asleep. His sisters, four of them under 14 and he laid me down on the floor in the family room, my head by the couch. Caribbean Blue was playing in the tape deck. We dripped hot wax on our bodies to burn the pain away, our naked forms created heat on the carpet. He took me into his room and we stayed inside for hours until I had no water in me.

We slept until his sisters went to school and his parents left for work and then, he handcuffed me to his closet and penetrated me from behind and I moaned and we persisted until our bodies relented.

We let hot water pour over us in his parent’s shower. His body, wet and soapy and mine, the same, we washed each other and time disappeared down the drain. And then I drove him to work and I was alone.

Those days are a blur of highways and signals and strange thoughts that soar like floating clouds that disappear into the sun. Speeding cars, sex at midnight, blurs of life and endless dreams of escape.

April 1 – April Fools – God, I wish… I was pregnant and Mom had cancer and Los Angeles was about to burn. Mom told me to forget, to forget her, that I didn’t have a mother anymore, that she was dead.

I was late. I was supposed to start a week ago. I bought a pregnancy test. The test was positive. I knew what I had to do. There was no way I could have a child in my time. There is no future.

April Fools…

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08 Sep 2014

14) H. R. Giger – Honoring An Important Artist

I recently learned that one of my favorite contemporary artists and an important figure for Generation X died at age 74 on May 12, 2014.

H. R. Giger

HR Giger in the 1980s. Photograph: Louie Psihoyos/Corbis Courtesy of: http://www.sagactoronline.com/

H. R. Giger, a Swiss artist celebrated for his creation of the darkly beautiful aliens from Alien and its sequel Aliens. Giger was an important window into human anatomical psychology. Highly controversial and seemingly perverse by many critics, he laid open the biological functioning of sexuality in combination with surreal landscapes that reflect the darkness of the modern world. Giger won an Oscar for his work on Alien.

Alien Xenomorph Creature

Alien xenomorph developed for the film Alien by HR Giger. Courtesy of: Boingboing.net

I’ve always been deeply affected by Giger. His work depicts a shadowy garden of human sexual functions, exploring all that we are and the disturbing possibilities of a human biomechanical future. He colors the haunting quality of my own childhood growing up with my father’s guns and industrial wastelands that lurked below my pristine mountain home; a world changing at terrific speed and the sense that there was nowhere else to go but rot in place.

In Giger’s work, nature is confined, twisted, wrenched apart, trapped, manipulated and in it the soul is barely visible through filmy eyes of nymph-like femininity surrounded by creeping things hugging, grasping and penetrating every hole. Giger lays open the body to show us the pipes and fittings, juxtaposing sexual organs with mechanical chambers of guns, metal and organic mutating cells. These opposing elements become biomechanical creatures, a new species, a gallery of deformations and experiments. Giger is certainly not the first to explore this organic world. His ideas were greatly influenced by Hieronymus Bosch, a Dutch artist from the 13th century dark age.

No. 341, Witches' Dance, 1977 acrylic on paper/wood, 200 x 140 cm Courtesy of: http://homepage.eircom.net/~donpjkelly/hrgiger_gallery.htm

No. 341, Witches’ Dance, 1977 acrylic on paper/wood, 200 x 140 cm
Courtesy of: http://homepage.eircom.net/~donpjkelly/hrgiger_gallery.htm

Perhaps Giger sensed that we are standing at the gates of manipulating our own DNA, that our technology will thrust us into an unimaginable new existence. There is the feeling of inevitability, that we have no control over the transformation – the most frightening thing about his work. Freedom and choice potentially replaced by servitude and Orwellian control. Have we damaged the planet to such an extent that the only way we can survive is to change our fundamental biology? Giger explored these ideas and the filmmakers used his imagery, pushing the limits of these nightmares not to be grotesque for its own sake, but because we must think about them.

Artists like Giger, force us to the think about the uncomfortable, the icky things about ourselves, the things we must explore in a time we have the freedom to explore them. Without understanding this realm of the human condition, the horrors we could face might make artists’ work such as Giger seem as cheery as Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers in comparison.

I designate H. R. Giger as an Honorary Solo Gen X Warrior and may he rest in peace in a cemetery with a prominent tombstone.

Some people would say my paintings show a future world and maybe they do, but I paint from reality. I put several things and ideas together, and perhaps, when I have finished, it could show the future.  — H. R. Giger

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31 May 2014

04) August 10, 1996 – Lights Out

I was 22, working as a cashier at a gas station in the Inland Empire. The sun blazed down at an angle. The heat made wavy lines like dancing snakes across the parking lot. Shielding their eyes, customers walked into the Mini Mart to buy something cold to drink. It was cool inside the air-conditioned cashier stand.

Courtesy of Newspapers.com

The Index-Journal (Greenwood, South Carolina) Sunday, August 11, 1996 • Courtesy of Newspapers.com

At 4pm, the power went out and busted out the satellite that powered our card readers at the gas pumps. Customers had to pay inside. The register could only do cash transactions. Within 10 minutes, we had a line of customers out the door for 50 feet. I pulled out the old-fashioned carbon copy machine, the one you have to slide the arm over the top of a credit card. Of course, everyone was using credit cards and it took longer for each transaction. The owner of the gas station came out of his office and tried to take over the register, glancing nervously at the growing line. He kept making mistakes.

“Don’t worry. I got this. The food will rot if we don’t take it out,” I said.

He started packing ice in coolers and transporting the perishables to his office. The phone was ringing off the hook. On my break, I answered the phone while the mechanic assisted the other cashier at the register. A frantic woman on the phone wanted to know if ATM machines run off of electricity.

The moment hovered like a hummingbird in my mind. I watched the people pulling out their credit cards, fear in their eyes, creases in their faces. This must have been what the 1974 gas shortage looked like. It was getting hot in the cashier stand. Nothing was working. I was told that the back-up generators for the grocery stores weren’t working either. The entire west coast up to Canada was out of power.

The sun lowered in the sky, casting long shadows of the people standing in line. It was only going to get worse. I’m never having kids.

 

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