what it means to be human

I possess most of the grosser aspects of being human - birth, potty training, guilt; but the keener more salubrious aspects of life seem to elude me: love, belonging, contentment. The question of how to achieve these important objectives seems to me to be a perfectly valid ambition - grand perhaps, but perfectly valid. A practical individual would methodically separate each ambition listed however esoteric and find what is necessary to satisfy that ambition and then set about accomplishing that feat; unfortunately, of the many things for which I’ve been accused, the word practical has rarely been used. So like the blind men describing the elephant in ancient Hindi folklore, each with his own certainty about that elephant - be it the rope-like tail, snake-like trunk or tree-like legs; there is a hunger inside of me seeking understanding about an incessant yearning that is as limited a description about this elephant called life as those blind men’s honest efforts to comprehend their part of the beastly elephant - elegant, holy, far more sacred than I will ever become, but still a beast, if for no other reason then she and her parts are prey to our manmade demons. 

Were that all there was to being human - our demons and the sheer magnitude of their destructive impulses, life would be simple, hideous but simple. My good fortune has been the distinct privilege to have lived on the fringes of a creative life. I say fringes, for I have been able to sustain the financial burden of buying my own time, and in so doing become the sole arbiter of my own good taste - a lonely bitter road, but with blossoms on occasion that make the whole comedy worthwhile. I say bitter not with the acrid biting pain born of hate and resentment, although I have personal experience with that flavor, but bitter in the way Aloe Vera will pucker parts of your alimentary canal but mend you in a balancing kind of way - if that makes any sense. The same as how some life lessons cannot be grasped at first blush, or a loving heart be gained without knowing its counterpart - be that companion pain, anger or even fear clutching at and catching the normal open flow of, for lack of a better expression the “good shit” - your first wheelie, first kiss - any of those feelings that astonish and gladden the spirit, the human spirit, or whatever animal parts of it left after the invidious, incessant assault of the Borg Corporation and its “resistance is futile” bullshit has gotten under your skin, into your dreams, between you and your bliss - whatever fucked up thang’ the ciphers and their minions are plotting to dethrone you from or subject you to . . or both.

You see what I mean about hate, so fucking accessible . . , but like Lao Tzu said about going into the darkness - I’d never know just how full with hate I could be were it just an aspect of existence, rather than a choice; I choose love, or as Voltaire said, “I choose happiness, it is better for my health.“ Ya’ gotta love the French, and I do. Yet as codified as happiness has become, even having its very own location in the American Declaration of Independence : 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by    their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it .  . .

there is no lock on any outcome as pertains happiness .  . rights or no rights. Some of our current confusion about this aspect of the human condition may derive, in part, from a fungible interpretation of the meaning of human - corporations having been accorded the same rights and privileges as people - a semantic leap accomplished by the powers that be, “government” no longer being a sufficient description of who or what is driving this train. And so we are now full circle back to the blind men describing some manner of elephant, only now like some shitty shell game we are being asked to question the very essence of being, or at best compare our hopes and aspirations with the financial bottom line of a McDonalds or Walmart. Can there be any doubt about why there might be so much confusion about happiness when we are so easily fooled about who or what has infiltrated our tribes, as easily as I have substituted happiness for love using a rhetorical coup d’etat - or weren’t you paying attention enough to notice I had substituted happiness for love?

We will always be a conglomeration of tribes, branches being the essence of our DNA sequencing. What is in question is who is doing the pruning and to what end? Prior to the microscope giving voice to our myopic hubris about the role of illness and death vs an eternally shifting stasis around and about the logic of harmony over chaos, our kind followed the flora and fauna in a luxuriant path filled with endless varieties hurtling through the expanding poorly comprehended universe on our moist orb of minerals and gas - not bad work if you can get it. We had it all “dicked” or as they say, “pussied” depending on your slant, and we could still - were we as human as our heroes have made us out to be. Not the sport/celebrity freaks serving as gladiators/minstrels/lapdogs to the corporate overlords and their cipher sycophants, but the heroes bursting through the walls of history unrepentant and unbowed by any fashionable ethos or conventional wisdom - the human spirit made manifest by the voices of Muhammad, Christ, Groucho Marx. Any intellect capable of discerning what love is and what love is not must be brought to bear - be that intellect digital, simian, canine or human - in throwing off the shackles of despair and depression wielded over our planet by the narrow interests of hatred, cruelty and profit - instruments of the weakest amongst us used to divide and conquer for no other reason than an irrational fantasy of building mountains - so irrational that the agents of hate cannot even be consistent about what exactly is gained by making mountains, much less digging endless holes into our hurtling orb - still moist, however sullied.

You reader, are patient - I know this because you have gotten this far in an essay which can have no ending. Even if our species were to cease its existence, a not unlikely outcome given our perverse delusions concerning eternal salvation; the points raised by this hackneyed narrative using crude symbols to represent even cruder ideas will continue, as it has been continued, somewhere in the universe, in some form - simple math; does that quest for understanding or being understood constitute humanity? That you are even reading this comes from a digital command manipulating your fingers and focusing your attention, ergo the digital domain present and accounted for; Koko has proven the Gorilla wants to be understood, enough so she would make the effort to learn our sign language; and I know from being one’s companion that a good canine will let you know when it is time - each are examples of a non-human entity extending itself beyond its tribe to communicate; so by definition the search for understanding cannot constitute the definition of being human. If you’ve ever seen a bitch surround its whelps in a snarled fortress of impenetrability, what better example of the tenacity of love for one’s own could there be? So love, and its manifold expressions cannot be the exclusive purview of Homo sapiens; and I hate to disappoint former Governor Romney, but just because some bought-and-sold-for shill of the merchant class declares that disembodied “credit default swaps” made manifest by +/-5v echoes on some HD storage media behind a foreign server’s firewall makes them the embodiment of “people too” - that my brothers and sisters is just laughable . haha . . . hold the phone . ! that’s IT - laughable, we humans are laughable, for as often as OE (operator error) has made me laugh at myself, there is nothing funny about how computers have become people kind’s latest in an endless parade of violent to non-violent shackles; nor is Koko in all her giggled ticklishness, funny in a cage; and as much as I love the grinning mutts, it is a dog’s life, ask any pooch at Yulin’s dog meat festival - but me sitting here thinking about you the kind reader, scratching your bewildered head wondering if that fuck might be right - well friend that is enough to make me laugh, even if only quietly at myself thinking I got a reader . . .