People Making Things

All around, people are making things. But you know what? I’m not so sure these things they make are any good or have any meaning or matter much at all for any other reason but that they are products. People make shit, simple as that, and that shit is nothing but a PRODUCT. They take this product around and they sell it. If people buy it, well, then I guess they have something. But WHAT, precisely, do they have? Try pressing them on that point, pressing them harder and harder to be specific, and usually they can't explain or justify anything and when they do offer some sort of explanation of why their products should matter to another person those explanations are clearly bullshit.

"Fuck you, so what?" That's what I have to say to them. I say this ugly thing because I have tried to make my OWN products for so many years without hardly any "success" that it's sickening to think about it. And every time, when I fail to get across whatever it is that I'm trying to get across I eventually get around to asking myself just why any of it would really matter. Not only why would any of my products, made or un-made, matter, but why ANY products should matter. Frankly, I just don't see it. It's just a huge, ugly mess, this world of ours, clogged to the gills with all these god damned PRODUCTS.

So, the more I think about it the more it seems a couple themes keep popping up.

#1, the fact that when I look back at my high dissatisfying and confused life, the few points of light, the few moments of clarity and vision and insight and inspiration, the few moment of meaning, have all come thanks to other people's products. That product might be a movie, a book, it might be a song... it might just be some small part of one of those products. One way or the other, any meaning I have found has largely been communicated to me through PRODUCTS. Now, another source of meaning and all that is experience, direct personal experience out in the world. We just sort of have these "experiences" in life, you know what I mean? It could be a momentary thought, a dream, a feeling, a meeting with another person, even meeting a dog, it could be some natural phenomena, it could be some sort of ineffable "spiritual" experience of some sort, or just an insight or idea. One way or another it's either experiences or PRODUCTS.

#2, that Products are the elements upon which all human culture and community seem to be built around and upon. That's not always the case - it's not always the case that we can trace everything back to a product of some kind, but it's usually true. Lots of people think religion is important (well, I think it's important, too, but not in the same way any believers in any religion might think that). Well, what IS religion based on, anyway? It's based on a PRODUCT. Take the Bible, for instance - the Bible is a PRODUCT, if it's anything at all. Now, Bibles may cost money but you CAN get them for free. Just ask anyone who wants you to become a believer like them for a free Bible and one way or another you'll get it. But the fact that they aren't something you really need to pay for, Bibles are products. Also, the Bible is comprised material written and various altered by countless people over the centuries, but it's still a somewhat single unit so it's still a product. Forget about religion, what about politics? Oh, you can bet your ASS that politics is a product. Every fucking ideology, every stance or opinion, every CANDIDATE is nothing but a PRODUCT. Almost anything you can possibly think of in the entirety of human culture is a PRODUCT. Even IDEAS are products! Even ideas that are totally malleable and indistinct are PRODUCTS!! Anything that is a discrete entity of ANY kind that can be cordoned off from everything else is a product. PEOPLE ARE PRODUCTS!

So, how can I reject this world of products? I guess I really can't do this. But still, I find myself up against everyone else's products. One attitude you can adopt is a very egalitarian one that says "This is a wonderful world in which all people are free to make their own products of any kind, though it's not necessary for anyone's products to ever be accepted or purchased by another person. The mere fact that it's a product of human endeavor it's somehow wonderful and good." I really hate that view. I hate it because it paints a picture of a world where everyone is free to produce anything they want to produce, a world where this PRODUCT MAKING COMPULSION OF HUMAN BEINGS is worshipped and adored. I hate this view because there's something about this "product making compulsion of human beings" that disgusts me a little. Maybe it disgusts me because of my own failure so far to produce any sort of product that I feel good about. What really bugs me and sickens me about this fact is how this only make the products of others that much more unbearable. I am DROWNING IN A SEA OF OTHER PEOPLE'S PRODUCTS! I figure if I'm forced to live in a universe where only those with a successful products are worth anything and everyone else must suffer the many pains and indignities of having the products of others foisted upon them then what's the point of going on. And even if I ever DID manage to make some product I could personally get behind if it wasn't financially successful then it would only rot and choke me and fade into nothing and I'd still be left in a world filled with the products of others.

And nowhere does one get this overwhelming sense of being choked and murdered and drowned by a World of Products than the god damned internet. That all the fucking internet is! It's a place where any idiot in the entire world can shove their own products into the faces of others, and that's why this got to me so much that I had to write this TRASH about it. I'll only delete it in a few minutes. I'm fed up and weary. I want it all to stop.

Mr. Enlightenment

I read in a brochure for the Shri Ram Chandra Mission school of meditation today that "Meditation means thinking about one thing continuously." I wonder: does pussy count? Because if it does then I've been meditating almost non-stop since about 1971.

Why Two-Bit Peckerwood?

At some point in several of director Sam Peckinpah's films - Deadly Companions, Ride the High Country, Major Dundee, The Wild Bunch, and others - one of the characters refers to another character or group of characters as a "Two-bit peckerwood," or "Two-bit redneck peckerwoods." It's a minor motif, I guess you could say. Since Peckinpah was known to do a lot of work on the scripts to his films, I have no doubt that this reference to the "two-bit peckerwood" comes straight from him.

I'm not exactly sure what he was trying to say with this phrase, probably just something someone he knew growing up used to say would be my guess, but the reason why he thought it was important and/or interesting enough to use so often is a mystery. The character who uses this phrase to describe someone else in these movie is always one of the protagonists - or what passes for a protagonist in one of Peckinpah's films - and they use it in reference to the sleaziest, scummiest, lowest of their enemies in the heat of battle.

Now, the fact that Peckinpah's heroes were often pretty low-down themselves means that when someone is low enough to be considered a "two-bit peckerwood" in one of his films, well, then they must be the lowest of the low, the absolute bottom of the barrel - someone so damn low that even the heartless, violent scumbags that Peckinpah considered the heroes of his movies would look down on them. Hill trash, scavengers, dry-gultchers, inbred scum i.e., Two-Bit Peckerwoods.