DECEMBER journal

12.1.00

here i have been carefully wording things, worrying when I don't have the chance to get some writing done here and…there hasn't been anything being served since first of september! The address got fouled when we moved servers.

There is a subtle yet noticable difference in 'performing' a journal and writing just for one's own back pocket.

12.2.00

I went to a warehouse with La. last night to stuff boxes for homeless kids. we walked into a huge warehouse and there were about a hundred people on four assembly lines, examining, rearranging, and putting together shoe boxes full of gifts for kids with even larger boxes filled with the shoe boxes lined up to the ceiling. …Operation Samaritan said the poster with a pix of an airplane.

It was a massive operation. We spent the whole time picking up unacceptable donations (chocolate because it would melt, war toys, candy in general, breakable items, huge boxes filled with containers of bubble soap, toiletries, etc.)

lots of kids who looked like they might have been vanned in from churches around the area.

But here's the thing: it seemed to me to be a huge ideological Marshall plan. Here were these , literally, MOUNTAINS of crap which were being sent off to some third world country (for whom christmas may or may not mean a thing to them) in order to …to.. SEDUCE them is the only way I can put it. A subtle (or not so subtle depending on who you talk to and where there head is at) colonization of the unconscious of the world's children to convert them to the cult of the commodity as filtered through the facade of christianity.

All that energy and thoughtfulness (and even caring) on the part ofthe people who made their little boxes and then…you step into the warehouse and it just becomes junk and I realize all of a sudden how ridiculous most of our lives are and how we are mainly serving some vast, unseeable machine of production that is..just…producing..CRAP for the most part. junk to rot your teeth and mind. stuff that is destined to be debris 2 minutes after it's purchased (or made) or the instance it is seen and that it's ONLY purpose is for the circulation of capital verdigrised with some thin fuzz of desire to make the circulations more possible, like painting a fish lure bright yellow so it's more visible and delectable. It was like seeing the reduction of the ethical to some sort of assembly line mentality, the perfect american ethics, drug pushers giving candy to little children. The first one is free.

i saw a huge 55 gallon plastic drum there that inexplicably said REPRODUCTION. Yes, that is exactly the case…it all of a sudden seemed like some massive operation to plant larvae in unsuspecting souls, like the last scenes of the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The more I thought about it the more ghoulish it all seemed. Which certainly made it seem more interesting.

robert cheatham