Christ – Anton Martin Smith Writer

by Anton Martin Smith antonmartinsmith@gmail.com or martinantonsmith@gmail.com

Remember back to when you were at school?

Now I am not a mean man….BUT

At least half the kids were so disruptive & stupid,

That they could barely write their name at the top of the exam, test, or pop quiz.

And of course they sent some good teachers to their ends wits – and/or alcoholism & early retirement.

All those troublesome people left school and went into the workplace.

Contrary to what your mind wants to tell you –

They did not disappear at all.

They went into big faceless companies for ‘cubicle jobs’ just like you did.

It’s not that your were ‘dumb’ to do this – it’s that you have no choice when ‘coming of age’ –

That’s the de-facto law – you can sell out as a wage slave or not and live under a bridge.

And through some weird twist of fate,

About how the world has intellectual degraded,

Or just some giant cosmic inside joke,

They (the troublesome dummies) were far more likely to end up your boss than you theirs.

Ps and to make this clear: I’m all for ‘kindly dummies’ – ’tis the ‘bastardy dummies’ in my crosshairs.

–

You see no one liked a ‘brainiac’ a high school,

And I’m sure it’s not news for you – but they don’t like one after high school either.

You see the world is so backward that they’d rather destroy the day-to-day world,

Than allow someone with brains to be in a stock-standard leadership position,

In a stock standard concrete cubicle-land position,

In some god-forsaken-randomized-grey-cubicle-obsessed-zombified-mega-metropolis –

If you will excuse the flagrant artistic-license-inbued-verbosity.

Why do think it is that nothing ever works these days?

Why do you think terrible customer service is the norm?

Why do you people lose their shit and flip out at the drop of a hat?

It’s far more of a ‘bad gag’ than a ‘mistake-by-chance’.

Somewhere along the line the dumb kids were handed the ‘keys to the city’ and nice shoes,

And you were handed some boot polish while you sat in the dirt and read Kierkegaard.

And when they said ‘Yo egghead – shine my shoes’ – you complied meekly.

And as the years rolled by you grew sick of shining the boots of the dummies,

So you slowly dropped out of society.

After all – you were human – you could only take so much.

Now you sit in rags and read Schopenhauer,

Now you shine your own shoes but they have holes in them.

And as you wearily turn the dead philosophers’ pages you tend to agree wholeheartedly.

Sometimes you deeply reflect on yourself, the pages, and the world you’ve seen so far.

Boot-polish-days over – you allow your mind ‘total creative control’ to wander endlessly.

You wonder whether the story of ‘God vs Satan’ is actually true.

After all – surely all this suffering you’ve had is for a stoically good reason?

Sometimes of course it’s all a bit too much to handle –

We all have our good and bad days.

But luckily Marcus Aurelius is always there on your shelf, desk or floor,

To help you pay your rent,

And finally climb your sad carcass out of bed. .

Sure its midday or even later – but who really cares?

At least you still haven’t done yourself in.

After all you’ve given The Devil more than enough already –

Did you not play – via coercion mind – his stupid games for decades?

You bowed down to the dummies in charge for many a moonrise –

Yet you didn’t even go full-on ‘Postal’ – well apart from that one time anyway.

That long self-denial of your human needs was a minor miracle in itself – a true act of self-sacrifice.

As you think of all these things you don’t flinch.

You merely turn the page as you sit outside in the sun, wind, and then rain.

Christ! – Perhaps in the end you got what you wanted!

‘Degradation trip’ or not , you have survived – have you not?

Sometimes you wish you were one of them dummies and you immediately blush –

Despite there being no one around you – so far as you can tell that is.

You tell yourself things are good.

You’re now ‘happily living on the outskirts of hell’.

(that is away from Metropolis-Cubical-Zone Sector 23-G).

At least that’s what you tell your solitary friend,

Who visits once a month or so – if your lucky.

You’re pretty sure he’s (or she) is real.

Or have you just become another ‘Forty-Plus Frederick Nietzsche’?

(i.e. a formerly top-tier wise but now a shackled ‘madman’?)

And a madman of course never can see that going or have become quite mad.

It all depends whether they write about you one day or not.

But to hazard a guess, statistically you’ll probably be known as a ‘book-wormed weirdo’.

So learn to be happy with that –

As I have become.

The ‘Book-wormed-Weirdo rules ok?

Well he still draws breath anyway.

by Anton Martin Smith antonmartinsmithwrites@gmail.com

So it is a summer Saturday in small town New Zealand. As usual nothing is happening. In NZ nothing much happens, especially if you are over thirty. While being under thirty their are low hanging fruit frivolities of student parties and easy drunkenness. But then after that era is over all social life is destroyed. The over thirties want to sit in their burrows with the co-dependent other and slowly mentally die. This to me just seems a fact.

Disclaimer: Of course – I know this is actually a worldwide phenomenon. New Zealand being an already long term socially and geographically isolated place, it acts merely an amplification of the general effect. A slide towards (techno) isolation. A canary in the coal mine, if you will.

Of course the ‘moneyed’ will always have their ‘dinner parties’ etc – so I’m not so much talking about them. I guess in a way this is a reason for me to hate them less – they know socializing is important. That is why they ‘force it’ like a job they have to attend, when they would rather sit on the couch. [Edit: I have, like all those who grew up poor been guilty of hating that nebulous blob ‘the rich’ I realize now that that is an affliction in itself For the ‘nebulous blob’ is at least half fictitious. It is perhaps poetically more of a haze that clings tightly to a wooded gorge, avoiding the city flats at all cost.

I shouldn’t hate the ‘moneyed’ as if that ‘nebulous blob’ is scientifically real – it’s probably a bad habit I can’t break. I know most of them – pretty much all the ones that are not mega mega rich – actually do work hard. They are not lying when they say that glibly. It’s just I can’t stand how they all sound like the exact same tape recording. That’s usually how they got their money – copying each other. I can see why they do it. I mean they don’t need to worry about being under a bridge catching fat moths to eat. And besides, their genus on the whole are the types that hate to read. Another reason why I don’t like them. That one is a good proper reason.

But I think they (the moneyed) minimize the down side to being so very much a copy-cat all the time. There’s a big price to pay with that psychologically. There’s a dissociative thing that happens. I believe deep down in every human there is a creative soul wanting to be heard. The moneyed don’t realise that this need cannot be willed away by hard work, fine things, weekends away or general copycat-ism. This is where the dissociative aspect enters. It is as if the moneyed middle-class-copy-cat types, all residing cloistered within their tight-knit social groups are all acting as the same character in the same play. They know something’s deeply wrong, but they dare not listen to their muffled souls voice crying out from the bowels of their hearts to them – for they fear if the listen the risk losing all their wealth, or half it or perhaps three quarters of it, and they feel to mention the lie would risk being ostracized, ridiculed, exiled. And of course they are right to fear this – that is what would happen. It takes courage to listen to that what speaks to you from the core of your ancient humanity – your caveman self? More so if you are at the lover levels of the ‘moneyed’ cults. And so the dissociation, the split occurs – the moneyed treat this via alcohol and or class A drugs, or sometimes a sport like golf or running etc.

More than a decade ago I used to work in the ‘Corporate world’ (it’s all in the name – they admit it’s not actually the ‘real world’ its a constructed one, a virtual one, with its own customs and laws). I was around these ‘middle class copy cat culture’ types – perhaps a third were the dissociative ‘moneyed’ types mentioned prior. I was about thirty when I realized I was facing a fork in the road: destroy my life as I know it or become like them (the moneyed), or at least a half-pie version of them. I chose to destroy my life as I knew it. Though it wasn’t really the executive functioning side of my brain making a considered logical choice. The decision came leak-wise and via stealth from my soul. I think it used its ‘veto power’. It issued a clandestine order:

You will self sabotage this life, you will torpedo it from afar.

That is what happened. It was a slow exit over perhaps two years. In the middle of my separation from my ‘rehashed middle class copy-cat life’ was a six month long international trip to three south Asian countries (Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam but it could have been anywhere really). At the time I thought that trip was happening to ‘revitalize’ me, whereby I would return to some kind of ‘copy-cat utopia’ back in the big rat race city I lived in (Melbourne, Australia). Of course my soul new that it was just stretching out the divorce from my former self. Not so much a closing of a chapter but a throwing away of the whole book. The mind trick self delusion of a ‘ nice reset via a international getaway’ was just my soul just making it sure the ‘book throwing’ could be made palatable.

That was more than a decade ago. After that trip my souls sneaky plan worked a treat. I couldn’t rehash that old life, even though I did try for a year afterwards. The attempt to re-copycat myself failed at every turn back in the copy-cat-haven-rat-race city. It all folded so beautifully (but yes, I thought it was a disaster at the time). No employer of copy-cats wanted a bar of me. They could smell I wanted out. So I never had a chance to get my old life back – I now know how lucky that was. Most copy cats die as copy cats, with ingrained downward trend faces and anti smiles, having not had a flicker of light in their eyes for decades.

My life is no longer a copy-cat thing at all. It’s quite original & creative, even if I do say so myself. But anyone with access to a computer can just read my stuff to see that I copy no one in my work. My life – It’s not perfect by any stretch. But I get by, & I no longer am strapped to a cubicle climbing the corporate ladder, dealing with passive aggressiveness, putting up with office politics, getting wildly underpaid. No longer saying copycat-culture empty platitudes about mortgages, marriages, 2.1 kids & career progression plans. That shit is all gone. After the fork in the road opened up to the new highway, I taught myself to ‘fish for my food’. I now source my own jobs out there that people need done in the physical world. When I need more money I work harder. When I have enough I ramp up my creativity. Am I living as the ancients did in a place of bounty? Probably not as that sounds far far to romanticized. Perhaps I am merely talking up some kind of ‘temporary gentile poverty in the New Zealand countryside’ moment-of-life I reside in. As always the truth is probably a mix of the two philosophical bookends.

End of Part 1….Part 2 is below

“Soulful Self Expression Or The Existential Ramblings Of A Lonely Kiwi Man? – Part 2” (A Blog Post).

Tag: Christ

“The ‘Book-wormed Weirdo?’ ” (Prose)