Fuckin Commie Hipsters

Once in a while I actually learned something in college. Sitting in the pews of a non-denominate chapel I listened to a terrific Philadelphian poet give some of the most valuable advice I’d ever acquire in my quest to becoming a writer:

Never get more than seven hours of sleep.

He offered more, but that little statement implies so much. Starve yourself rabid. Allow dreams to brew and try to ignore the spider webs dangling from the blue prints. Let no day go by when a white page is not inked with some sparkle of truth or beauty or trash. An excellent poet, he was, and I value his work over some of the most coveted pens in the world. On a winter night in a dead mining city in Johnstown, PA, when the weather was frigid and wet and all day long I tore movie tickets and brewed heaping trash bags of theater-style pop corn, that which motivated me was a washed-up, AARP-card carrying, long-unsuccessful beat poet in a glass and pine chapel somewhere near the border of West Virginia. He was not a good public speaker, and I was ecstatic.

I went to class. My roommates, my friends, they got stoned and mastered video games. Their kung-fu got to be much better than my kung-fu. Nevertheless, I went to class on said winter night in late January. I relished the five minute breaks in our two hour classes. I smoked my cigarettes. I chatted with fat pimply girls and weird film majors that would never see their careers take off. It was all very depressing. Blue, blue, blues.

One way or the other, I knew this was as beat as it would all get. Chilling up on a mountain with a tuition paid for by my father, listening to some rednecks write poetry about being a police officer on Cops… I just knew that if there was more, it would never be that ironically beautiful.

Halladay said, never get more than seven hours of sleep. He said that in times of his greatest doubt and confusion, he’d written his best work. To that, I am largely reliant upon faith. Sometimes, however, it works out well. A day of writing can be as exhausting and liberating as a day of bricklaying. The rush never captivates the experience, but afterwards, you look over the roads you have paved or the monuments you have erected and there is the most exhilarating sense of accomplishment ever to be experienced. The poet’s spoken words are rarely evocative. That said, if the poem can evoke anything, then it is a success. They should cast doubt. It is the goal of the writer to settle scores. In writing, the words can be truthful or beautiful or utter garbage. Text can hold so much power, but it is largely reliant upon poetic wording in order to exact the appropriate emotions. The truth is valiant, whether glorious or hideous. Beauty is passionate. It titillates the senses and demonstrates great form. Garbage, as one could assume, is the flotsam of the fingertips. It means little alone, carries no weight in infinite numbers, and just barely satisfies the poet’s primal need to create.

Either way, it’s hardly enough just knowing that there was once a great writer from Philadelphia who spoke at a lonesome university in south west Pennsylvania. I’m up late now. It’s almost two and I feel that I have much longer to go.

At some point I realized that all the Beat kids were missing something important. All those communists and collectivists and anarchists and socialists and evangelicals and especially those apathetic pothead hipsters, they all carried a spine fused from a new generation of passion. They raged against machines. They smashed pumpkins. They had bad religion and they were ready to claim they hated all of those bands. Beat, they were not. They knew the Beat. They’d “read their Kerouac” and they’d snubbed their noses at Bob Dylan every once in a while. What annoyed me, what really grinded me down to a pulp and got me to realize that I did not want to be Beat, was when I realized that these people, these masses, these peers and friends, would have ostracize the Beat as soon as they’d meet it.

This sheer angst, this violent opposition to individuality, this blatant display of intelligence being wasted on, what, a college education, discontent with their promised future careers, and misery? This was their whole plan: Every rebel, punk, beat, gangsta, yuppie I ever met, it all revolved around revolution and war and a strategically illogical solution. The evil corporations had to go down. The government has to step in. The government needs to butt out. The government needs to control. The government needs to abandon. The government must expand. The government must centralize. They all had different ideas and they all dreamed big and they all lacked focus. Every time I got into a discussion with any of them, they spoke like poets. They talked of ideals and morals and the wave of the future. They evoked powerful images and gathered violent tensions into one big ball and let it turn into a bullet at the end of the page that said

END HERE.

I wouldn’t do that to you, reader. I’m not writing poetry right now. Before I stamp the save button for the night, I must summarize the important connection between that which is Beat, and that which is Capitalist.

The Beat is a label. It is a definition. It is long dead in society, masked by a new image of counter-culture. The war on Capitalism is not Beat. The war on Religion is not Beat. The war on Drugs is not Beat. The war on Terror is not Beat. A war on anything, anywhere, is not Beat. Such a concept is vulgar. A peoples’ war demonizes one side and idolizes another, ultimately disposing of all discussion and controversy and anything which may serve the public.

Another great man once wrote a list of people who should be dragged out into the street and shot. He included the obvious choices, like fascists, of course. But the last denotation was, appropriately, “people who write lists of people who should be dragged out into the street and shot.” To claim that all Capitalism is evil merely because the certain method is corrupt falls much in the same line of thinking that a person who has a cold sore in November must sleep around.

Frequently, these Punks will thrash against anything which seems to provide for a reasonable future, as if living for anything but the present is amoral. I cannot ascertain where such a prejudice comes from, but I am certain it was not their laissez-faire decision to purchase their band shirts at the local shopping mall and not, say, Wal-Mart. The fluidity of today’s logic is likable to yogurt. It flows neither quickly or clearly. The rationale behind Capitalism is that of relativity. It is not the judge’s understanding of the law that brings down the verdict, but the communication of relative emotions between the jury and the lawyers. Capitalism, unlike socialism, requires relativity in order to function at a personal, private and free level. In order to make a personal decision between two people, there must be a contract that is approved by each party as beneficial. This is a relative decision that stems from personal self-interest. I’m not saying anything new.

Long story short, I came to this decision while I was peeing:

Without relativity, one cannot have a relationship. And without relationships, people stop coexisting peacefully and begin to fear. As their fears and stereotypes and prejudices become more applied to daily life, they become hateful and ultimately violent.

We can see this, today, with the careful dynamics at work between what is peaceful and liberating, and what is peaceful and enslaves. It is a fine line that requires constant darkening. In the past, when faced with poverty and war and famine and plague the growth and height of civil rights and democracy and a free market was marked not by the bombs that were dropped, but the poems that were written.

We must revisit the blue prints, and once again, we must trace the lines.