More Mediums: Youtube

http://www.youtube.com/user/vcaruso1980?feature=mhee

The Birthright of RoadGhost

This link will take you to the Other Side of me.  It's only about 6 or 7 minutes long, so you won't have the opera like you did before.

Register, Please

“Hey there sexy, you’re just what I’ve been looking for NSA :) if you know what I meen, but in order for us to chat I need you IM.  It’s the hottest new dating service in town.”

Now this may be an obvious ploy, but how many websites need you to subscribe, need your information, or your credit card and cvv numbers now?  Every single one.  There must be a server out there with my name on it.  I can’t eve LIST all the websites that take down my information, so I can create a username and password.

From your bank, to Facebook, to Twitter, to emails, iTunes, to real dating websites—it seems that everywhere I turn I either get some kind of free trial, with limited access, or must pay for the complete subscription—hell, even this free blogger website I needed to use my information.

I remember a few years ago musicians were complaining about their intellectual property and copyrights and their theft.  No longer do I feel this way.  I think everything on the Internet should be without usernames and passwords and credit card entries.  Jesus!

I mean, I know I’m bitching, but, if I want to build a website, they have to know who my great grandfather was. If I want to go to a poetry website or submit poetry, I have to name my first born son.

So why all these little *s that ask private questions like “what was the first concert you went to?”

Privacy—because there are little 14 year old hackers, who are way savvier at finding out your identity,   that want your information.  But in the process of filling out your information, I am giving license to Zoosk or whatever, every time there’s some news you don’t care about.  Half of my email is “news” I wish would go away.  And that’s even if I check the box not to get newsletters.

The worst are toolbars.  Every program tries to slide in an already checked toolbar.  If I didn’t pay attention, half your browser would be toolbars all doing virtually nothing, but selling shit.

So not only are businesses, programs, and even this Word program trying to figure out ways to take my information, but they want me to be totally consumed by them.  They want me to download them and throw every hook at me.  It’s like some kind of video game, dodging the information attacks.

And in the end, while the 14 year olds can junk up the junk mail, the businesses and programs I choose can junk up my mail as well.  Maybe I’m not smart, maybe I should unsubscribe every new program or business.  Maybe I should be a hacker and hack programs—wouldn’t that be the ultimate privacy, no username, no password, no filling in credit card information.

Or rather, why not like literary magazines, have one program you fill out—and the businesses go to it.  Think about it.  How many usernames and passwords and credit card information are out in some server just waiting for the right hacker?  Make it the Fort Knox of Internet Information.  And it has a list of every business and program I bought or subscribed to.           

http://vcaruso35.podomatic.com/

This link will take you to FOLK, a podcast, blending Brian Wilson's Smile and my poetry, with Sunny Day Real Estate as interludes.

The Power of Boobs

Easily $10,000 for breast implants.  A woman I knew once pointed to each breast and said, this is Mastercard and this is Visa.  Now why, I wonder, would a woman pay to have unnatural silicone things put into her breasts, usually to make them larger?  Perhaps, it’s the power of boobs.

I’ll admit it, I love them and ogle them like a creep.  The truth for most guys is, boobs are the Siren Call of women.  They are the Eyes of Oedipus and his complex.  Breasts have royal power, and if a man sees them naked, in person or on film, a sort of dumbing and blotting out of everything happens.

Is this right to have a breast fetish or to enlarge your breasts?  Does it concentrate too much on the physical and not enough on the mental, emotional, and spiritual?  Well, it does ignore the latter three.  However, any woman who wants attention from men will say she emotionally feels happy, because of her augmented charms.  And to stand up for her, men, wouldn’t you feel better if you got noticed for having a better body, such as if you worked out at the gym, with Sisyphus diligence?  Suddenly your arms are stronger.  You have a washboard abdomen, and gluteal muscles are nickel bounce-worthy.  Attention is everywhere, except on what your profound wisdom is saying.  Do you care?  No.

Is this right?  In a real sense, yes.  In a rational sense, no.  In a rational way, we should be beings who care less about our bodies’ image and more about healthy bodies, in which our healthy minds inhabit.  Choosing a girlfriend or boyfriend, because they are compatible and real—these are the rational ways to go.  And usually the fatter, uglier, those who wear thick, thick, glasses, and the poor—walk the rational path.  (I know that’s mean).

In the Real World, if you are pretty and have money, it is right to pump your breasts so large that eyes, even women’s, will bulge.  And I’m not saying this because I have a fetish for them.  I am saying this because there is an eternal power struggle between men and women.  That’s the rub.

The power of boobs isn’t just the Siren Call or the Milf Fantasy.  It is a weeding out of beta males.  But breasts aren’t the only way.  There are so many ways in which women and men use sex, use the mind, use the kitchen sink, to control one another—and if you think this is my family or my relationship.  Guess again.  Power is about control.  Whoever can control the other Wins.  And in our culture, Winning is a good pursuit.

For example, with one couple, they cooperate.  However, power subverts cooperation.  We can say that this couple is functional and cooperative.  Both husband and wife earn their daily bread.  He’s a shoe salesman, managerial.  She’s a graphic designer.  Now they both have a joint account.  It all looks cooperative, until one day, he decides to add a second account, a savings account for a house, new car, whatever.  Who has made this decision?  He has.  And so they fight over the idea, whether it’s good or bad.  In the end, she opens up her own savings account too.  Who won?  He did.  He made a decision without her, thereby causing the fight and her to start her own account.  But is there such thing as winning in the household?  Not exactly.  But there always will be between men and women.

Whether it’s a peek at nipples or savings accounts, there is and always will be a power struggle between men and women.

Someone I know says, “Women use sex to get love, and men use love to get sex.”  This is the game, the game so many people talk about.  This is the American way of saying—eternal struggle between men and women for power over one another.  And this game is in our DNA as a form of competition.

Female poets rarely spend time writing about their bosom.  Many write more about their Vagina.  That’s the sacred pleasure zone of the goddess.  Its power is life.  But it does not war.  It is peace.  It is birth and the pain of birth.  And men give it pleasure.  Boobs, although for breastfeeding, are eye candies.  And hence, in the power struggle between men and women, beauty and prettiness are not only blinding to the witness, but dumbing as well. 

It is the losing man who continues to stare at cleavage till his death.                

The Job Identity

My job is to provoke thought, in the face of such a mindless Media, or maybe that’s what I profess, at the moment.  Now maybe I won’t do a good job, but I will TRY to.   And as you see, it can’t be a job, because that would entail money.

Education is a job, or is it?  See, all my life, I was under the impression that Education was work and a job.  And yet, I wasn’t being paid, or even when I was being paid to go to school, there was some other title than “student.”  The student is not a profession I later learned.  It is an apprentice to the System.  So what do you do? I’m a doctor; I’m a lawyer; I’m a student…record skips.  That’s not a profession like the others.  You’re a kid.  You have chalk marks on your hands.  You carry a book bag, not a briefcase.  You are not an Adult with a Job.

So what does this “Adult with a Job” mean?  It means paying bills, so you can afford shelter, food, more often than not, some kind of transportation (car, bus, train, etc.) and taxes.  It can also be elaborated on to include a partner and kids or pets or both.  Affording all this takes something and being a student ain’t it.  So unless you’re administering tests or asking Compare and Contrast essays, you, student, are just a peon, in the eyes of the System.  You are Potential for the System

The Job is the cog in the wheel of the System.  So fringe cultures that are in school, in communes, in monasteries, on welfare, etc., are like chipped cogs that slow the wheel.  Ideally, students should have a Job outside the school to be truly cogs.  Otherwise, the System of Commerce and Economy slows, and Dads pull their hair out as to why sons and daughters aren’t working, and welfare is taking over.

So, naturally, the motivation to have and do a Job is of the utmost importance from society’s perspective.  There must be classes for which you are motivated and trained to do your Job.  And anyone who doesn’t have a work ethic that is politically required is either shunned or secretly dismissed.  For example, they will say he’s a nice guy, but isn’t as productive as he should be.  No gold star and bonus for him.   And carrots-on-sticks are everywhere in the Job World: Christmas bonuses, monthly bonuses, bonuses for customer service.  And they really do work.  People will sell time, holiday-time, vacation-time, time with family, time with friends, pet-feeding time, for bonuses.

                                                                          

*

I may be just the rebellious sort with all this.  But I think the very most difficult thing to swallow about Jobs and Job Markets and the System are the direct relation between Identity and Job.  When the major questions come, such as: Who are you?  Some people, like Adam Sandler in “Anger Management,” fidget and raise their voice a little.  This is not a standard: “What do you do?” or “How are you?”  It asks one to strip away their job, family, shelter, food, transportation, Things and Self-Defining Things.  It asks you philosophically: Are you a being in this world without these things or are you not?  And this is its conundrum.  Anyone who says, I know who I am, either has a self-awareness of Dalai Lama status, or simply has a running narrative of their life.

However, the major problem with these answers is that they ignore nature and nurture.  I don’t know my Identity.  I think he’s somewhere among family, Socrates, Dylan Thomas, and Stanley Kubrick, with a little Jesus thrown in.  And that’s the best way I know how to describe my Identity.  By influences.  Not Writer/Poet.  Those labels are what I do for work.  And taken seriously (at least now I d not) by most.  And they aren’t really Who I Am.  My Job is not my Identity.  But for many, their business cards cost their souls.  Director of Sales—ABC, always be closing, sealing the deal.  The sales director will target people as a potential sale, and will pretend to like them only for that sale and connection: which translates to money and potential money and more money, until that target is but a cog in the system of the sales person.  Sales wasn’t always viewed this way, although Chaucer may disagree.  They cared, and knew what the person wanted, and knew when to quit.  Now all that is feigned, phony.  Just like a politician wanting your vote.  They perfect their smiles to make you feel good about yourself.  Although, if you’ve read my previous blog, election’s a show in itself.

                                                                           *

And so we have the Job, the common denominator, among people.  And if you are unemployed in any way, you better understand an obvious something: that a job is where you earn.  And this idea of earning is crucial to the value system.  If I won the lotto and had dinosaur eggs for breakfast and bald eagle coats—not only would archeologists and PETA raise arms and people want my money—, but, I guarantee, I would be looked at as someone not earning the right to have my Corvette.  So many would say luck, not that he EARNED it.  And earning implies a work ethic that the more you work your job, the more money you get, and the more you save and invest, then you are an Adult with a Job who REALLY owns that Corvette.  And if you built that Corvette from scratch, you’re a guru of earning. You are an Adult. You are pronounced able to sit at the adult table and talk about politics and religion.   What would you know about those types of Adulthood concepts, even if you spent 7 years studying them in undergrad and graduate school, you didn’t pay for your roof or the food on the table.  Your note-taking and reading didn’t feed the System at that hippie college.

And so what happens is: the more you identify with your job, the more you earn, and the more people can label you that Job ID, and you become X-the Dishwasher, while he is X-the Doctor.  Which one do I respect more, which one do I want to date, which one has a better car, which one, etc.?  However elegant you are, and however great your personality is, they are just WORDS and MEANINGLESS, if your Job ID is subpar or you’re unemployed.  But that saleswoman can say anything and be a snake, because her business and bank account are growing.  Let’s listen to her.  It’s like the Bill Hick’s old bit: we have the greatest minds of all time, making music, now, but let’s shine that camera on that little 13 year old singer and see what his lyrics mean.    

But what about the poor scholarly boy, in the back of the library, studying mathematics: he won’t pay for the roof or food, and feed the System, until way down the road.  And when he goes around saying his major—which in higher education is like describing your status and job title—mathematics, people will ask Systemic questions of him: “What can you do with that major?” or “What’s the use of the that major?”–tone, annoyingly flagrant.  And few will understand that the history of mathematics is arguably the history of music, architecture, science, and even possibly it is a form of religion.  The knowledge that scholarly boy will gain will surpass any Job Skills and Job Markets and Cogs in the Wheel.  He will look at the System and calculate improvements and chaos.  And he will say: “I guess I’ll teach, I don’t know.” 

How refreshing is this “I don’t know.”  The Job Identity undecided, and, thus, he is a dork and on the fringe culture of the Job System.  And who needs Calculus anyway?   

Sex, Love, Marriage, and the Baby Carriage

From fairest creatures we desire increase,

That thereby beauty's rose might never die,

But as the riper should by time decease,

His tender heir might bear his memory...

                                             Sonnet 1, lines 1-4, William Shakespeare

From Literature, we find a lot of existential questions and answers.  We have such a glut of books, that one can scholar one’s way through life, and have some roaming Kerouac-ian lifestyle, with a running dialectic through one’s head.  Above I have put one answer.  I am not siding with it, but I will elaborate on it.  And I really owe the interpretation to classes I sat in on and didn’t write notes.  But through the osmosis of listening, and remembering bits and pieces, summarize for my own mind.  If I may interpret these lines incorrectly, blame it on the fact that I am a terrible note-taker and a lazy scholar.

These four lines summarize an interesting view of immortality.  My father believed something similar. I don’t know if he stole it from Shakespeare.  My father is an ardent Catholic as well—and a good man.  It essentially is the idea that one’s children, one’s heirs, remember their parents and thus their parents achieve immortality.  Now there are many striking things about this philosophy:

1.      It doesn’t rely on heaven for immortality and thus is an agnostic and/or atheistic view.  Though, it doesn’t necessarily exclude heaven and Christ, etc.

2.      It places children—and notice they are called “heir[s]”—squarely as property receivers.  And it is notable that much of the British had laws on property and wills, by this time.  I think.

a.      While there may be more poetic interpretations, such as Fortune has more poetic interpretations, I think it’s fair to say that owning property then passing it on to one’s child is one facet of this immortality.  Maybe look at it as a gift.

3.      This immortality is also striking, because the poet didn’t know of DNA and Evolution.  And so, in a lot of symbols and signs, what we have in lines 1-4 is an argument for Purpose.  The Reason and Purpose of having children, so that we can pass on our property and personhood to the witness, our children.  And in turn, we have a purpose.

I find this striking, because it is the poetics behind the reasoning for an evolutionary purpose.  Shakespeare was, like, I’ll channel the future Darwin, when I begin my sonnets.  And you, naysayers with cats and dogs for your only witness in life, had better have damn good argument to beat this one.  Because it is scientifically, agnostically, christianly, valid, if not scotch-taped wrapped tight with a Christmas present.  Inside this argument is where the Simple Life Plan meets the poetic and scientific life one.

It is so comforting to know that all I have to do is the Simple Life Plan, and it has its poetics.  What I mean by the Simple Life Plan is very much in accordance with a traditional view of the American Dream; only simpler.  I grow up, get a job, marry, buy a house, have two children, make sure they don’t die, and then retire where near water.  It’s simple, effective, legalized, evolved, and immortalized.

And yet, are things ever simple?  No.  Even the Shakespearean argument for Purpose has paradoxical implications for the dialectically-doomed.  Like me, in other words.  Do we look at our parents as immortal when they pass?  I hear in China they do.  Should we somehow take the 2^nd Law and Honor our father and mother, and make a cult from this argument.  No.  We follow the Simple Life Plan and we are living the philosophy, living our purpose.  And yet, what if the adversary comes to your door one day and makes you Job?  What if you’re queer?  What if you’re a lone hack who can’t get published or a wife?  Life presents challenges and problems.  And so that Purpose may just have to wait till it’s gone.

Or, what if you’re a relatively normal couple who looks at the world in a cynical view and say, Why would I want to bring someone here, into this world?  You know, we’ve been there, wishing we had never been born, not wanting to be buried in a Pet Cemetery, so we have to live this life again.  Beauty’s rose may have so many thorns that you don’t mind if it is cut before its time.  In short, if we’ve thought we would have a simple life, we were dead wrong, and just looking at a news article and witnessing it all, may have us saying: his tender, yet brown fern might bear his being forgotten.  That’s at an extreme.  It’s so paradoxical how life is, that bringing in a child to this world, you had better think it through.

 I mean who wouldn’t want a baby for an accessory?  They’re cute, cuddly, and bonding.  But once it knows how to say, fuck you, and asks you, why you brought me to this slave factory, you may question this whole simple immortal plan.  And when the child has gone from 1- 10, in age and personality, and she’s growing at the rate you are growing gray hairs.  And you wait till 2am, when curfew was midnight, and he or she has about as much appreciation for the house you bought as he does his own hygiene, then you see the speed and relativity of how fast life is moving and how worry and concern are becoming psychosomatic.

Is Shakespeare for real?  By now, I just want to hear waves again, and not concern myself with the grandiose immortality.  And when I actually have to do the mathematics on doling out the estate, you know King Lear’s rain storm was no pathetic fallacy.

And so you see I’m trying to portray very real parenthood.  Shakespeare’s Immortality is a bit outdated.

                                                                           *

There may be a compromise, though.  And it is for the mindful individuals who don’t go around rutting and popping out hellions.  But this takes a discipline.  I call it the Long View (somewhat the opposite of the Green Day song).  I propose that society should be traditional in one area.  And this is greatly supported by data and history.  It’s a rather old fashion word you hear every once and a while: courtship.  Courtship says the interested parties will be PATIENT, will get to know one another, postpone sexual intimacy, until the time is right.  Who’d a thunk it?  But it is the wisest course of action, despite what Elvis believes and most of society.

It is the wisest love, in my opinion, because it gives respect where sex demands none.  A couple can be intimate on all levels, just not the most blissful one.  Why this boundary?  Because scientifically speaking, when two people have sex, there is a bond, in that arena.  Sure, third date sex rule or one night stands or anonymous sex is gratifying, but when developing a relationship, there is, in my lay observation, almost a direct correlation between the speed at which things come together, and the speed in which things fall apart.

Of course, both people have to understand it is a courtship.  And here’s another benefit, let’s say I am friends with five girls but have sex with all of them.  Can I rightly call them friends?  No.  I may date one or two, but, if we dove into bed, and then dove into a relationship, when the flame goes out, the romantic inclination, WE ARE LEFT WITH EACH OTHER.

Take the same scenario, only I don’t have sex with any of them.  I court one or two.  I find out one is an alcoholic, the other is incompatible for minor reasons.  I know these things.  I don’t lose the friends.  And then three years goes by, I see the alcoholic and she no longer drinks and has taken up a multitude of interesting hobbies.  In other words, I may like her more, but she needed to quit drinking.  These are only a few lame examples that show that the Long View patiently waits till there is a solidified foundation for the relationship, with things like fidelity and communication are as if married already.

Does society follow the Long View?  Not everyone, especially in the media, i.e. celebrities we worship.  I mean there are reality shows that are ridiculous about dating.  Fail.  False.

Following the Long View model, one is not only free to select, but free to, get this, enjoy the company and friend for who they are.  And there’s no pressure, except that overwhelming one society condones.   But these third date relationships, I guarantee, 9 out of 10 make the false assumption that they have a foundation or will along the way.

This is all very traditional I know, and may be boring.  But next time you’re in the sheets with the latest Subject, the next day you may wonder where things really are going.  And her idea of trust is letting the condom break, and his idea of trust is secretly waiting to ask for a third girl to the party.  And so you don’t know each other. 

Just relax.  I’m not judging.  I’m calling for a foundation, so that once firm, things truly can be simpler.  Which if you’re like me, you want the Simple Plan to Immortality, but will settle for a simpler existence.