#1

".......a subconscious drive in Civilization to bend all men until they break and in its automated image remake."

 James. would you say you are unbroken?

#2

James,

First off, if you do ever ride into NYC with your friend, we can just meet at the park. It will be easier that way, and there are numerous Whole Foods Markets around, with tables, where I can buy you any kind of food, hot or cold, that you like.

As for my question about whether you consider yourself to be unbroken or not, I simply mean overall. I, myself, have wondered lately, since I work at the museum 40 hours a week and am still too poor to rent an apartment. I've also not written any songs in a year and half, though that may be okay. I've been homeless. I may have told you. I have also lived without electricity, etc. I do not recall ever being depressed, or even questioning whether I was a slave or not, during those times. I have questioned it lately though. Anyway, simply working through it, and of course we live in time and space so things take time. Overall, I believe I am still alive inside.

Email anytime, but know you never are expected to. One further thing. Kingsnorth's book is one I enjoyed immensely, though I did not agree with every detail, both semantically and ideally. Nevertheless, a great book. Your gift is unconditional. If you decide not to read the book that is fine, of course. Do with it as you see fit.

-Barry Bliss

I pray you will write more songs, maybe some poems.

When I am at a writing crisis, it usually involves having too many novels and histories to juggle. This is a crisis in that writing is the reason I have assigned to linger in this world so counter to my weird nature. That purpose is an automatic pilot of sort, once adopted, providing this writer with a zero-point energy source. The readership remains quite small. Yet this writer is blessed with, I suspect, 10% of readers who are active or fallow writers. Of the other readers, they tend to be smarter than I, once met in person. Thanks to Charles for constructing this ether cave for our musings to meet, and to men like Barry for adding their own fuel to what has grown as a mutual fire among a variety of outsiders. Here, below, in an email, Barry helped me with a prompt that may help in the completion of a book that was unplanned, and has fallen like conjoined orphans of the past into its own gathering form.

Carnage and Bondage: A History of Social Ingression, is taking more complete form in this accidental investigation with the email accompanying my return to Portland and opening this museum window. Here awaited a gift from Barry, Against the Machine: On The Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsworth. Within was the gift slip:

“Hi James. I am still reading this book myself. I figured you might like it. Take care. From Barry Bliss.”

I intend to consider the work of Kingsworth before placing my own ragged sacrifice on this Omega Altar, this shared museum of we who reject, and/or have been rejected by, the feedlot stall. First, I must be able to address a quote that it is suspected came from these fingertips in some book or another that constitute my many attempts to find the focal hinge of our exploitation, by a power I have failed to identify. Barry knows much more about this one than the pulp writer knows of him. I am certain though, we are akin in two ways: we don’t fit the common role assigned to men of This Age and of our age grade of being beyond middle years. I do not know your age, Barry. But I will be shocked to discover you have yet to survive your 50th year on this pitiless sphere.

Do I exist as a broken or unbroken soul?

Barry, the writing of songs I wonder at from afar, cannot imagine singing and fairly drooled in Mister Lemanachus Music Class in Trinity Middle School, I think 49 years ago. I refused to sing. My Assigned Under Master, the system boss of song, sent me to the auditorium to sit in the dark for his period, the rest of the school year. I was told by an admirer that the music teacher made fun of me to the class and employed me as an example of a failed student destined for poverty. The man was not wrong! There the weird boy had time to muse, not yet knowing that muses were finding him in the dark, thinking he was alone.

On the first day in Middle School I had been tasked with running the 220 yard dash along with an athletically challenged boy returning from sickness. Our family had moved from suburban Baltimore County, MD. I was running a mile in the woods every morning in the new environs of Washington County, PA. The student teachers, a woman with nice tits for an athletic girl, and man, timed us, without coaching. I was running down the finish while the other boy was laboring around the first bend. They did not advise him, but simply cheered me on, that I was going to break the school record. So I stopped and walked in. I was then arraigned by Mister Perry, the football coach, and his assistant the gym teacher, and chewed out about not living up to my potential. They wanted me on the football team. My brother was a natural athlete, and would be the second best soccer player in his age grade across the entire state. I knew that I was not the germ they wanted, but merely some desirable chaff to help the wheat kernel shine in the winnowing. Here, as I thought I was resisting the system, I was instead finding a chink in the machine through which to slip.

Us boys were arraigned to compete in a school track and field meet on the final week, to train for it, three events each out of ten, I think. They had made a mistake. I signed up for the last three: shoot put, javelin, and discus, which I found interesting and had never done. I already knew how to run better than the rest. Most of the boys in my grade, 7th I think, maybe 8th, did the same, following my gambit to leave as if it were a lead. I was aghast, found out by the rest and singled out for discipline. I was removed by the three gym teachers and made to sit the rest of the year in the dark auditorium. One of the assistants also worked at a steel mill. He was the one who chewed me out quietly, alone, in the dark place with a hundred empty seats, who let me know that I was being cutout like a cancer from the Body Adolescent. I sensed he had been assigned to turn me back into the herd. He had no idea that the weird boy relished the dark alone. The next year, I think, he was crushed by a steel beam at work. I felt, in a small sense, that my intense dislike for him, had added to his bad luck. I never bothered to recall his name, but still see his slick black hair, his strong wide frame, under his red sweater, knowing he could beat me in a fight, deciding that I was out and he was in. A sad chill still sinks in my chest when I think about him, who was supposed to be my last chance conductor back into the temporary age grade tribe, who was so easily crushed working for what was the major area employer.

A dozen years later, working in grocery stores in Maryland, I heard news that Washington Steel had failed, like the glass factory back there. I had already been hired to staff stores that replaced the failed Pantry Pride, and the failing Acmes and other chains. I would see a chain go out of business every second year. We debt slaves kept turning the wheels, us the raw materials for the corporate fictions that mastered us for a dozen years, then died like overworked beasts, their riders hopping off onto another growing beast.

As I remained in my own dark place, working at night and in one-man departments like Frozen Foods, or in the hardest grocery aisle, as a way of being too valuable a gear to be sucked up into the hierarchy and “belong,” I remained a debt slave like the rest. Reading was my portal to other worlds from where the weird young man viewed our own. I began to understand that companies and governments are grave fictions imposed upon us, to shepherd our indebted state as we are gradually marinated and seasoned into a consumable good.

The debt I did not escape until my fifties. It took from 1998 thru 2018 for me to fail to buy cars and a house, all repossessed, and to fail to build back credit. That wretched fiscal state finally untied me form the wheel designed to break us all. My body is broken in many ways, my will shattered along certain grooves, unable to even decide what to eat at a restaurant. Lost even is the ability to grow angry over threats, to dislike those assigned to maintain a boot upon my ideological neck—even a failure to align with, accept or cultivate an ideology. Barry, like you, poverty has helped me wiggle free from the system of our consumption.

Last month, my editor applied for me to get an Amtrak credit card. In 2018, I had been rejected for bad credit. When I returned to Baltimore, to my Address of Record, where I sleep on a couch 7 nights a year. There was a credit agency letter. The auditing body regretted to inform me that I do not exist as a debtor, past or present, that there is no record of me in the existing data-bank, and therefore, I am unsuitable for future debt!

“Free, free, free at last!”

Like the dark auditorium of a long dead youth, what is left of the man he became, seems but an echo. This does not feel good, brings no sense of accomplishment. Like a savage that tripped and fell down a mountainside and thence avoided being killed or enslaved by the agents of the machine, the empty feeling is somewhere north of bondage and south of freedom. It does not feel good, yet somehow seems appropriate for a person fabricated with enough defects to be spat out by the thing that feasts so greedily upon better-made men.

Sir, it feels also, that the words you wrote above and the book now resting upon this dresser, might help frame this curious exploration of what ate us in the wrong ago.

Thank you.