Shine on, Wasteland

The desert was illuminated by alien lights foreign to the dust and dirt. The whole landscape was transported into a Roswell model, neon pacifiers taking the place of glowworms, bobbing in and out of focus, clenched between lips framed by perspiring skin.

A spotlight on the ground taunted a lost moth. It danced the dance of the seven veils above, its delicate turns and sways relentless for the blazing audience. Over time it began to drop lower and lower: grey fur swallowed up by the overpowering beam.

A girl was hunched nearby over the ground, heaving a shiny liquid. Glitter filament dotted her arms, her legs, the glimpse of skin showing underneath her slowly creeping miniskirt. The gold arcing out of her mouth covered the ground, noiselessly, cascading as softly as the amber locks that evaded her boyfriend's attention. He stood behind her, popping gum, looking over her collapsed body for a future girl to bend to his will. But his current lady was now on the move. Having finished expelling a days worth of designated hedonism, she straightened herself, all the while turning her head from side to side to lock eyes with anyone who might have been captivated by her stirring performance. She transmitted a message with glazed over eyes: My aim is better when I'm alone.

iWhy ithe iLong iFace (version 21.0)?

((From the latest issue of THE WORKS...sometimes I shove the jagged fruitiness aside and write like some sort of Person.))

William F. Ogburn, perhaps the most famous sociologist and statistician of the 20th century, was the first to introduce the idea that culture inherently lags behind technology. A sort of economic Freudian, Ogburn asserted that humans base their decisions off a series of economic motives, which ultimately, and immutably, set apart the private and public sphere. But Ogburn's writing, although at first-glance so dry and matter-of-fact that it seems to just be one more credo incited by America's economic woes, soon begins to blanch under searching eyes, and melt into one, large, white flag of surrender.

The problem lies in the fact that Ogburn did not see, or want, to find out a solution to the lag. He was scared of eccentrics, of lavish living and not-so admissible pursuits. To him, happiness was recognizing the delayed action of human beings and being able get-by, make a living, have a family, play golf. Be Normal. Nowadays, normality just won't cut it in the long-run, but still the current social climate points toward a worldwide acceptance of defeatist tendencies. People are letting their aspirations and talents slip by the wayside because they are scared to fail, and yet they still complain of not having a reason behind their unhappiness, or an identity as a whole.

If only we could let go of the stigma of living in a "post-postmodern" world and accept that we are in the midst of what can possibly be deemed the true “Era of Inspiration,” without it actually seeming uninspired. Sure, technology has alleviated some of our hardships, and stirred up the tempo of day-to-day living, but it has not yet matched the greatest machine of all: the human brain. There is still so much to discover, and now is the time when humans should reap the benefits of having access to knowledge on a grand scale, and simply create.

So, Generation Y-ers, take the earbuds out for a while and look around. The motive is not to trump the technological powers that be, or to try to take them down, but to take a minute to place everything- yourself, a computer, a hero- underneath a critical eye, revealing inconsistencies and neglect. Should you still bemoan it all? No. Take action, and the gears of change can begin to function, straightening priorities and fulfilling the wonders that surround us. Teach old Ogburn a lesson: that happiness is not found in resignation.

I'm trying to set it all out ordinally, phantasmagorically..

When I was 14 I discovered agoraphobia in Spain, seeking sanctuary in a mansion governed by a 5-foot-tall man. But reality was seeking me, and I uncomfortably realized that his livelihood was powered by the elevator that ran up all 4 floors, so that his small army of workers wouldn't waste their strength lifting luggage and packages, instead devoting their time to dinners filled with serrano ham and soft-boiled eggs.

When I was 15 I tried my hand at Delphic esteem, feeling like the baby renegade amongst my slightly older peers. They were the idols of art school babylon: pale flesh squeezed into denim and lace, talking about Leonard Cohen and running away to Argentina. Screw adolescence, they wanted to gut it all, drag the entrails across a sky-high canvas. Say it was "inspired."

When I was 16 I lined the tops of my eyelids with gold glitter and decked myself out like some 1980's call girl. But I spat on irony...My flesh and ego were too unruffled for any of that. Then I traveled through the Inferno, and wasn't able to discern the actual human beings from the fiery demigods, the friend from the foe. So I gave up that stint and pledged allegiance to Alva and distortion, hoping that my reverence would end up being fulfilled with some sort of urbanite glory.

When I was 17 I was part of an epic battle- My brain is a perennial abode...NAW man! It's perched on top of some godforsaken cactus in the backyard of some poet/mystic in Arizona, tinted a turquoise shade, serving as a vulture's foothold - but I stuck it out. Read a lot. Wrote some more...Words stuck to me like Lilliputians, insistent little bastards piercing my skin and squeezing out swollen drops of my essence - melted PVC - claiming their function was to cleanse my soul. I wasn't always so sure.

When I was 18.....