Enlightening Nonsense

I was rolling on my blades to a client when I passed a homeless guy who I have seen for years, a man who I take not as a drug addict but as a survivor. Once in the past I had tried to have a conversation with him and delve into more of who he was and how he found himself in the situation he did but because this did not involve an exchange of money, it seemed to overload his circuits as he repeated “Spare change? Spare change? Spare change?” like some sci-fi robot who was about to blow his spout.

As I approached I made my usual eye-contact of acknowledgment but this time I didn’t look away quite as quickly. His response was to ask for money, which didn’t endear me to him but instead reminded me of the “South Park” episode where the homeless were taking over the town with their rallying cry of “Spare change?”

Later that night, I was walking my dog and passed the fruit stand guy across from the Alvin Ailey Dance Center on 55th Street and 9th Avenue. I usually don’t give this guy the time of day–unless he asks me, “Excuse me, sir. Do you know what time it is?” I made eye-contact and he immediately went into his infomercial on how I should buy his fruit. “It slices, dices, leaves your car finish shiny and will provide you with a 10-hour erection!” The last fruit I bought on the street was from a pimp who was selling a Chinese midget named Ching Pou and let’s just say, although he was “juicy,” an hour later I found myself hungry for more.

The thing that hit me about these two seemingly unrelated incidents is the degradation of human interaction where the question “Who are you?” is less relevant than “What can you give me?” We seem to look at others and instead of thinking, “What can I do to support what is alive in them?” what instead comes immediately to mind is, “What’s in it for me?” Why do we do this, besides the obvious “because we’re selfish bastards”? Fear and settling to remain at the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

As a psychology major, I spent a lot of time in class sleeping and drooling and waking up with the indentation of my spiral notebook on my face. One teacher actually snuck up on me and hit me on the top of the head with a rolled up set of papers. I beat the piss out of that bastard for interrupting my dream about Farrah Fawcett–back when she was in the hot bathing suit poster days and not a leathery bag of skin surrounding a cancer-ridden body has-been–but that’s another story altogether. So, needless to say, I didn’t learn much in class other than a plastic-covered notebook was more drool-resistant than the standard paper version.

But one thing I did learn was about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I’ll attempt to discuss this in a seriously small nutshell–not even as big as a walnut; maybe like one of those filberts–in order to convey an idea without having you to face the embarrassment of explaining the indentations along the side of your face with something lame like, “I had a terrible reaction to my new moisturizer.”

Abraham Maslow made a pyramid of human needs and, according to Maslow, one has to satisfy each step before climbing higher. At the lowest rung is our basic needs for Survival, such as food and water and air. Next up is our Safety and Comfort needs, such as for shelter and employment. Next is Psychological needs, such as for friendship, family and sexual intimacy. Then there is Self-Esteem, which includes confidence, achievement and respect of and by others. Finally their is Self-Actualization, which involves creativity and morality and lack of judgement and living to your full capacity as a human being. In his pyramid, unlike on the dollar bill, there is no New World Order Scum all-seeing and controlling eye as the capstone.

When people don’t have their basic survival needs met or are hyper-focused on the lower steps of the pyramid–such as a homeless guy who has to worry about from where his next meal is coming or a person who has an eating disorder where he can eat two jars of nut butter at a sitting (this habit is costing me not only a fortune but a spare tire around my waist!)–they cannot even begin to fully express the higher steps on the pyramid, such as relating more deeply with another or having a sense of self-esteem.

There is no question that as individuals and as a species, there are some survival issues we need to deal with and to not do so would leave us, well, dead. The challenge comes in that an excessive focus on the survival of the body leads to the death of the spirit and we end up like what we see all around us today: a bunch of zombies who can manage to get dressed in the necessary costume of their daily job to staple a stack of papers together, or boss someone else to do so, but lack the true spirit inside that floods out of our eyes in love and out of our mouth in a huge smile for the blessing of life.

What is “excessive”? My parents might feel that I should seek out more clients than the two I currently give handjobs to on the West Side Highway, one of which is my Dad. But if I worked with more Johns than my comfort level, not only would I probably develop a blister on my hand but how could I think of higher ideals, such as writing perversion or “enlightenment,” when all I’m doing is jerking guys off all day?

Our society has been designed on a model that fuels the fear of survival, creates a myopic desire for a bunch of crap that nobody really needs and helps to keep most but the exception-al at the bottom of the pyramid. The government continues to put fear crystals into the pipes of the addicts in the form of reports through the controlled media about crime and terrorism and pig flu and invisible weapons of mass destruction.

Religion’s opium high contains nothing but “holy” books and sermons that seek to convince you that without the so-called prophets and leaders of this affront for pedophilia and perverts that you will not be able to relate to your Self or your family or the All and that only by spending each and every moment afraid that, God forbid, you step on a crack, will you avoid burning for eternity in a made-up Hell.

Corporations sell you rock in the form of imparting on you how unhappy you are and convincing you that only through their garbage and poison will you be able to end your misery. Just look at the drug commercials today.

I remember seeing one for “the purple pill” with smiling idiots running through the fields. The commercial never mentioned what the drug even did and I couldn’t figure out if it was for hay fever or depression or erection. At the end of the commercial they told you to “Ask your doctor about…” Think about this: people are going to their doctors and saying, “I saw some smiling people in a field because they were taking the purple pill and I want to take it too!” To call doctors anything but drug dealers at this point I would consider slanderous. Any coincidence that the pill is purple–as opposed to the red pill or the blue pill of “The Matrix”? Purple is a mix of red and blue and says, “Why make a choice? I’ll give you the best of both,” and without making choices in life, you stay where you are–stale and stagnant.

In defense of the mindless dummy who runs to his doctor for a pill to answer all his woes, he is at least aware of one thing–he is unhappy living on the bottom rung of Maslow’s Pyramid. How to climb up off of it is another question and, unfortunately, while a pill may temporarily make you fly high, it will not sprout you wings so that you can take your body with you. And as Icarus discovered, you cannot approach the light with false wings without them melting away and sending you crashing back to the reality below that you never changed.

It saddens me a bit to lock eyes with someone, allowing them to look into the windows of my soul, and all they search for with their X-ray vision is my wallet and the money it contains. Was there a crossover point where the spirit’s value dropped so much that it fell below the worth of a green piece of paper? “And the latest in the stock market: Spirit has done a reverse 20:1 split leaving it a penny stock not worth the price of its pink slip.”

What can one do? For starters, stop believing all the negative hype that the papers and the fake news spit out like a polluting smokestack. Unplug your television and only plug it back in for episodes of “South Park” and “Family Guy.” Stop hanging around Negative Nelly’s who are always complaining or talking about “What a struggle” life is or how the world is going to be destroyed by Armageddon or the New World Order (we’re going to defeat those scumbags!) Sell all the junk that has been cluttering your life and don’t seek to replace them with the “latest, greatest, updated” version of the same crap. When you write an email, start by writing the person’s name–just like you used to when you had to use a pen and paper to write a letter. If writing one of those stupid text messages and pretending it’s communication, add two characters at the start: “Hi.” Okay, the period makes it three. Look into people’s eyes. Smile. Say, “Hello. How are you doing today?” and actually care to listen to the answer before you focus on how they may serve you.

Until we start placing a higher value on the human soul than on even the survival of the body we will be constant prey for the predators who have for millennia been telling us that we are nothing more than a battery whose sole worth is to be drained of our energy so that we can keep this life-destroying machinery running.

So you shovel more of your coal into the ovens and watch your fellow man be burned to death solely so you can wake up tomorrow to shovel more coal. Until as individuals we start to take our shovels and smack the boss man across the skull with it and says, “Fuck you and your ovens!” we are destined to be nothing more than slaves to a system of death. Even if you manage to avoid gagging at the smell of burning bodies, how much longer can you smell your own odor of unfulfillment before you start to crack some heads?

joined Abby, I joined the Navy to see the world.  I’ve seen it.  Now how do I get out?