I walked through the crowd.

a reply to: Revolution9

You seem to want to believe that people like me don't exist, that we should sleep on it and that will make it better. Do you not see that there are many people who are having problems of interaction because they find their way of being is at odds with the society in which they live?

Your words eloquently describe how I feel without insulting anyone!

What is sad is the "system" has it's own special branch of "emotional enforcement" called Psychiatry. Those like us who choose to bury ourselves under a rock, refusing to join the herd mentality of today's mad society and rules WILL and ARE being labeled as having "anti social behavioral problems", "severe depression" etc etc....

Just pay attention to how much "Mental Health" is being brought up in the MSM in our current atmosphere of "living in fear". Meanwhile just as in the VA system which has been known to be inadequate in caring for injured veterans for almost half a century, but the nothing is done to improve it except for recycling the outrage every 5 or 6 years, such is our mental health system and it's use of drugs to help people "comply".

Nice rant!

a reply to: Krazysh0t

Oh I see thanks.

originally posted by: Krazysh0t
a reply to: Revolution9

You may need to see a psychiatrist. I see TONS of people all the time expressing their individuality. Or, you may just be getting old. There's always that too... How do you feel about dubstep? Have you even heard of it?

Yes, I am a former dub musician. I used to make dub reggae and dubstep. I have gone back to organic acoustic music now. I could not stand the electronica sound any longer. It started to sound so dull and machine like that it made me metaphorically vomit, lol.

This age is empty for me. It has become a desert of conformity. I don't think a few kids making computer beats are going to save us, lol. Dubstep is just a little mainstream fashion trend. Not like big bad Jim doing his thing.

originally posted by: seeker1963
a reply to: Revolution9

You seem to want to believe that people like me don't exist, that we should sleep on it and that will make it better. Do you not see that there are many people who are having problems of interaction because they find their way of being is at odds with the society in which they live?

Your words eloquently describe how I feel without insulting anyone!

What is sad is the "system" has it's own special branch of "emotional enforcement" called Psychiatry. Those like us who choose to bury ourselves under a rock, refusing to join the herd mentality of today's mad society and rules WILL and ARE being labeled as having "anti social behavioral problems", "severe depression" etc etc....

Just pay attention to how much "Mental Health" is being brought up in the MSM in our current atmosphere of "living in fear". Meanwhile just as in the VA system which has been known to be inadequate in caring for injured veterans for almost half a century, but the nothing is done to improve it except for recycling the outrage every 5 or 6 years, such is our mental health system and it's use of drugs to help people "comply".

Nice rant!

No way. I was just talking about Jimbo then "Riders On The Storm" came on the youtube. Cool!

I managed to keep away from the psychiatrists for all my life. A couple of years ago I had my troubles. I have glued myself back together since. I must admit they did not try to control me. Well initially, a little, but they worked it out that I was not a fool and let me do the healing for myself.

a reply to: Revolution9

I don't like it much either for similar reasons that you said, but you can't say that there is no individuality in the EDM scene. I mean I see the push by entrenched music companies trying to waterdown dubstep for commercials and mainstream consumption too, but the younger generations are just as unique and striving to step away from the mainstream as they always have. After the dubstep fad passes, it'll be a new form of music. Heck, it may even be a brand new artform. You never know.

I'm 30 and I can already see that newer musics aren't just as appealing as they used to be to me. It's part of getting older. Sometimes you just have to accept it. It's hard to be a unique snowflake the older you get.

a reply to: Revolution9

Lol I am a former dub fan too So I know exactly where you are coming from. It's not easy.

As far as dub and reggae music goes nowdays, If it's not Bob Marley I don't want to hear it. Because bob Marley was more than just a musician he was a Saint. He embodied his music and lived the messages in his lyrics. How many other dub or reggae musicians, new and old can this be said for? Few, if any, but the music keeps coming and the industries keep growing, into monsters, saturating us with the same sounding garbage...

You're right about people wearing uniforms too, and its, because they work for the system. They're not interested in freedom.
This explain things a lot better:

a reply to: Krazysh0t

Yes, quite right Dear Krazyshot. I am firmly believing that what we need is a something real and warm, organic, natural. The commercial scene is not allowing anything contentious anywhere near mass coverage.

As it stands there is no way we are going to see Bobs (both Bobs), Jims, Johns and all gaining mainstream access and promoting free imagination.

I am the last to go slamming the younger generation. Some old men and women have turned me on big time in their writing. It is not just a music thing, though that is these days a sign of how we are doing.

I tried to read everything under the Sun. Man, all the poems, novels etc I have read. All the modern music visionaries I studied intensively. Most of these people died young, victims of a destructive lifestyle and persona, their loss being our gain. They all had deep pain, hence the use of "pain killers". Their pain and alienation pushed them to the very hilt of their creative abilities. It is noble in a tragic sense. Perhaps now people are too aware that such a path is too much of a sacrifice.

Perhaps I ramble too much. I only really wrote this as a comfort thing. I really do feel for alienated people. They feel the full weight of mass friction and opposition. It is a difficult life journey, yet who would give it up once they are firmly on it?

Born to be wild I guess, hahahaha!!!

a reply to: nonjudgementalist

I am very thankful to Bob. He was a full on Shaman, being able to use music to expand consciousness. Yet, even Bob ended up hobbling on the stage with one foot in bandages and a bandage on his head over the gun shot wound from a few days before and all because of his vision.

Thank you, Robert Nesta Marley. I see a few from ATS are trying to introduce ATS to him. Good luck. It can only help.

a reply to: Revolution9

His aim was simply to reach out to people who he knew were out there in their millions but who the mainstream media simply ignore. That in itself is a miracle. Expanding consciousness and affirming truth and morality.

a reply to: Revolution9

This post makes me very sad. So sad I cannot even be snarky about it. So I will say, as gently as possible, that while I understand and appreciate that you are having an epiphany of sorts and looking at the world around you with new eyes from outside the proverbial box, no good can come of using it to judge and berate your fellow men and women. Nothing good can come of lumping a world of individuals into one box based on your own limited perceptions.

When I look around me, I see people doing the best they can with what they have. I see people who have been bruised, beaten and battered, desperately trying to keep on keeping on. I see people so burdened by the demands of a faceless bureaucracy that it's all they can do to keep their heads above water. And I see people who have lost the fight and just given up. I see the rich and poor alike who take, take, take, but never give... I see others (rich and poor alike) who give, give, give, but it's never enough. I see people that know that no matter what they do or don't do, they will be judged, condemned and crucified for it by someone. And I see people that just want to live their lives in peace and are sick and tired of others trying to force their will on the rest of us.

People are not colorless. We are every color of the rainbow!!! Some of us are pastels and some are jewel tones and some are florescent. Some of us are even plaid or polka dot or striped or floral. Instead of focusing on others who you cannot control and have no responsibility for, has it occurred to you that you should be focusing on yourself? Has it occurred to you that maybe it's you that is colorblind so to speak? Has it occurred to you that the lack of color you perceive is more about people shielding themselves in public from those that will somehow bully and abuse them? Has it occurred to you that maybe people's colors shine brightest in those times and arenas which light up their spirit... and shopping isn't one of those times?

I wish you the brightest blessings in your journey... but you won't find what you're looking for "out there." You will find it within yourself. Nowhere else.

a reply to: Boadicea

Of course it is sad. Unfortunately I am not the first to see it nor the last.

I see what you see in people, just the same. Yet I am watching the lives of the generations here at the moment sucked of their life. Yes, all that is happening to people.

Is this life? All that you describe is in so many cases become drudgery. I have my own drudgery to live with. I don't want life to be about drudgery.

I am just suggesting that the flame is going out in people. Is it so bad to say that? I knew I would have to deal with the misunderstanding of what I was conveying.

I see no way I can fit with this. I tried and tried.

There are many people who have felt this despair. It is the despair of witnessing the drudgery of human existence and behaviour.

I saw it, I felt it, I reported it. I did not manufacture it.

The whole thing has become too much of a grey machine for me. Drudgery and control. Sorry for my criticism, but I am being truthful.


"Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!

“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,

“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”.

That quote from a famous poem explains how I feel sometimes. I'm sorry, but they are my feelings and sometimes I have a need to express myself. You may not like what I have to say.

It is not just me either is it. Can you see what others have posted here? Please do read the replies. Others are finding this way of living to be very short of being human in all its colours. There is a real problem, but that is just my opinion. You have yours. I only wish you well.

a reply to: Boadicea

Or..

"I will tell you why; so shall my anticipation prevent your discovery, and your secrecy to the King and queene: moult no feather. I have of late, (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition; that this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. 'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seem to say so." (Shakespeare, "Hamlet")

a reply to: Revolution9

As for the hey ho life is ok, no need to change, just carry on shopping,

"At some point, boys and girls, the 'economy' has to stop growing. We're already drowning in landfill -- present and future. We're committing ecological suicide. That's nature's solution: 'get rid of the pesky humans'. But if we humans are to survive we're going to have to stop over-producing -- ourselves and everything else. If we can't face the future without an eternally expanding economy, we won't have one."

from Philip Slater - An Economy Based On Consumerism Is Not Sustainable

Perhaps I am having my own Vision of Johanna.

a reply to: Revolution9

I get everything you're saying and of course I don't like it because I don't want it to be!

But I don't exactly disagree... it's not untrue but it's not the whole truth! I do believe more and more people are putting up their own cloaking device in public and with certain people to protect themselves. And for damn good reason!!!

And if we can see that much, we can also see beyond that if you look inside and open your heart to the inherent beauty of everyone...

In your own life, do you not express different parts of yourself with different people and different situations? Do you not keep private certain things from certain others? Do you cry your heart out to cashiers... tellers... strangers on the street? Of course not. You don't show your all your color to everyone... but all your colors are always a part of you.

How do we create a world that encourages and allows people to show their colors? First, by not being part of society that makes them feel threatened, under attack, and therefore not want to show their colors. More and more every day we are attacking people for expressing themselves. Of course people are withdrawing, and expressing themselves less and less in society and more and more in private. But we all still have our colors in all their glory!!!

You acknowledged a few doing creative things... I suggest that most are doing creative, productive and proactive things for someone or something... or we all would have imploded long ago. No one can be something to/for everyone... but everyone can be something for someone. That woman in front of you at the grocery store may have appeared apathetic and disengaged with the world around her, but you don't see the love and laughter and joy she gives the kids when she's volunteering at school. That guy at the office may seem like a cold and distant jerk, but you don't see him when he's giving abused and abandoned animals the love and affection they need at the animal shelter where he volunteers.

You see no colors, so you dismiss others as having no colors, and you effectively walk away.... never looking deeper, never giving people a reason or a chance to show their colors. If this lack of colors disturbs you -- and it obviously does, or you would not have felt strongly enough about it to make a rant -- then you have to first understand that the problem is not that people have lost their colors, but that we as a society have made it too difficult and painful for people to show their colors. Then ask yourself what you can do to change that, what you need to change in yourself, and make it happen.

P.S. Thank you for the poems. I especially enjoyed the first one.

originally posted by: Boadicea
a reply to: Revolution9

I get everything you're saying and of course I don't like it because I don't want it to be!

But I don't exactly disagree... it's not untrue but it's not the whole truth! I do believe more and more people are putting up their own cloaking device in public and with certain people to protect themselves. And for damn good reason!!!

And if we can see that much, we can also see beyond that if you look inside and open your heart to the inherent beauty of everyone...

In your own life, do you not express different parts of yourself with different people and different situations? Do you not keep private certain things from certain others? Do you cry your heart out to cashiers... tellers... strangers on the street? Of course not. You don't show your all your color to everyone... but all your colors are always a part of you.

How do we create a world that encourages and allows people to show their colors? First, by not being part of society that makes them feel threatened, under attack, and therefore not want to show their colors. More and more every day we are attacking people for expressing themselves. Of course people are withdrawing, and expressing themselves less and less in society and more and more in private. But we all still have our colors in all their glory!!!

You acknowledged a few doing creative things... I suggest that most are doing creative, productive and proactive things for someone or something... or we all would have imploded long ago. No one can be something to/for everyone... but everyone can be something for someone. That woman in front of you at the grocery store may have appeared apathetic and disengaged with the world around her, but you don't see the love and laughter and joy she gives the kids when she's volunteering at school. That guy at the office may seem like a cold and distant jerk, but you don't see him when he's giving abused and abandoned animals the love and affection they need at the animal shelter where he volunteers.

You see no colors, so you dismiss others as having no colors, and you effectively walk away.... never looking deeper, never giving people a reason or a chance to show their colors. If this lack of colors disturbs you -- and it obviously does, or you would not have felt strongly enough about it to make a rant -- then you have to first understand that the problem is not that people have lost their colors, but that we as a society have made it too difficult and painful for people to show their colors. Then ask yourself what you can do to change that, what you need to change in yourself, and make it happen.

P.S. Thank you for the poems. I especially enjoyed the first one.

I wish it could be that simple, alluding to your last paragraph. Believe me I tried so hard. I think your attitude is wonderful by the way. Makes me feel bad about laying on the blues. I didn't want to include this bit, but there is another poem that really fits our little encounter here and I am itching to post it as a response to you. I hope you don't mind me posting it. It is from the same poet as the quote you liked. Yes that first quote is from a very beautiful poem called "The Wasteland" by Eliot. It is a wonderful and wise cultured poem. I hope one day you get a chance to read it. It is written for bright people.

I'm a full on humanist. I just get very worried these days. I have no power to change anything. Hence these little rants from time to time. Thank you for going to all this trouble to reply.

Any way I will leave you with my response, provided here in full humour. I hope you will find it amusing.

"And I then: “Some one frames upon the keys
That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain
The night and moonshine; music which we seize
To body forth our own vacuity.”
She then: “Does this refer to me?”
“Oh no, it is I who am inane.”

“You, madam, are the eternal humorist,
The eternal enemy of the absolute,
Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist!
With your aid indifferent and imperious
At a stroke our mad poetics to confute—”
And—“Are we then so serious?” "

a reply to: Boadicea
I have never read a more succinct, truthful answer. Though you talk in philosophical terms, I see it in black and white.
Through the continuous drip, drip of alienating people (by devious and underhanded psychology) to keep people divided to control them easier they have been alienating the individual soul.
No matter what other people say humans ARE herd animal. WE NEED other human contact and I see it as counter-inteligent to say " don't be part of the herd" "be individual", therefore alienating yourself from human contact.
You can still be yourself and be part of the herd.
The very worst places you can find yourself in is any city. They are the loneliest places in the world. There are a lot of reasons for this ,but the primary reason is if you try to inter-act ie. talk to someone they automatically think 1. your deranged or 2. your after something. This is the mistrust the people in power like because you are doing their job for them.
What can I say to the poster but search and find some group (could be a church group, though I'm not advocating religion) just a interactive, friendly group to give them a moral boost that not all mankind is------I cannot think of a word to describe all the lonely people that want to speak but are scared.

originally posted by: crayzeed
a reply to: Boadicea
I have never read a more succinct, truthful answer. Though you talk in philosophical terms, I see it in black and white.
Through the continuous drip, drip of alienating people (by devious and underhanded psychology) to keep people divided to control them easier they have been alienating the individual soul.
No matter what other people say humans ARE herd animal. WE NEED other human contact and I see it as counter-inteligent to say " don't be part of the herd" "be individual", therefore alienating yourself from human contact.
You can still be yourself and be part of the herd.
The very worst places you can find yourself in is any city. They are the loneliest places in the world. There are a lot of reasons for this ,but the primary reason is if you try to inter-act ie. talk to someone they automatically think 1. your deranged or 2. your after something. This is the mistrust the people in power like because you are doing their job for them.
What can I say to the poster but search and find some group (could be a church group, though I'm not advocating religion) just a interactive, friendly group to give them a moral boost that not all mankind is------I cannot think of a word to describe all the lonely people that want to speak but are scared.

It is not a question of loneliness, but more a state of alienation. My Family even don't understand me. They all lead similar lives. They don't read and think like I do. I could go to the Church, but it is only a group of older Ladies there now. Frankly, I would frighten them. Could you imagine Jim Morrison going to coffee morning, lol. Hahahahaha! I have a thing for Christ. Even He had to admit,

"Leave the dead to bury their own dead", echoed by Bob Dylan,

"Forget the dead you've left they will not follow you". I see nothing wrong with gay people enjoying their lives together and I use a certain herb. I don't think the older Ladies in the congregation will approve. Even artists find me strange, lol.

And now for a video break;



Can you see what I mean about the prevalence in artistic expression of this state of alienation?

Even these strange artists who have lots of fame and money feel alienated. The singer Amy Winehouse was alone at the end of her life. People could not cope with her. I have a similar problem. It is not possible to change one's character. It would be a lie to become something that fits in and an act that I do not have any will to perform.

These artists are not any different to the people from which they came. They personify certain states of being.

I'll never forget when I was a child. My friend and I were walking in a field and he turned round to me and said, "Are you an alien"? Hahaha! It has been that ever since to one degree or another.

a reply to: Revolution9

And the poems, the pointless poems. See how real this is for me:

Disssociation.
"Et je voguais, lorsqu'à travers mes liens frêles
Des noyés descendaient dormir, à reculons !" Arthur Rimbaud, "Le Bateau Ivre."


One shade to dull and mask all colours
For the sake of uniform relationship
Is a kind of death in life
Sterile dictatorship.

It is pain to drift between emotions
To the whim of a chaotic ocean
No flow or tide, infinite shifts
Of free will wandering nerves adrift.

Notes must move in time and space
Stillness stifles movement
Pitch pattern code subliminal language
Like emotion bound to moment.

Are we guilty as adepts
Of exaggerative perception
Inciting both heights and depths
Extremities of emotion?

Angel of awareness
Poem of the sea.
Lease of consciousness
Between pillars of infinity.


Carl Jung theorized that dissociation is a natural necessity for consciousness to operate in one faculty unhampered by the demands of its opposite. As a literary tool of consciousness I would argue that it is very necessary.

a reply to: Revolution9

Stripped of Honours.



Wars and depressions
Scorch the flora and fauna
Retards imagination
With bleak battalion order.

Aesthetic explorer
Interprets ugliness and beauty
Refines through furnace fire
Utilitarian idolatry.

Hard times demand soft rhymes
To rid shell shocked troops
Of the deafening bellows, blasts
And blows from brutes in marching boots.

May the honeysuckle creep
Like a beautiful assassin
Come to depose the tyrant
Eye-sore blitz bombed ruin.

I'd tear the uniform from your shoulders
Throw your medals into the mud
Gutters of this slaughter abatoire
Slurry sewer of cattle's blood.

a reply to: Revolution9

Consumers.

The machine crowd crawled like a single entity
As of one mind, bee hive behaving collectively
Wandering a spell as dust molded golems
Like an ordered army, obedient and solemn
Soldiers, male and female gender blurred troop
Of drooping deportment, deaf and mute
Before the stranger shouting in foreign words
To them a mad man, shoulder shrug swerved.

Do you comprehend your vague cruelty
Hordes and scores of human entropy?
As in death so in life smoldering tired flame
Like a knackered beast exploited and lame
Seduced by sorcery, perpetual slavery
Abused by the priests of consumer usury
Debts drag the delirious beggars to miseries
Over lorded by master kings of drudgery.

It is a mockery of power to play puppeteer
To these dreary blinkered beasts cowering in fear
What of it to be king of this mendicant misery
Of propaganda paranoid victims in a factory
Abattoir of victims, carcasses hanging
Meaningless in a culture famine
Concentration camp fodder, price tagged prisoners
At the whim of tyrants who trade in this business.




What do ya do when your brain keeps doing this?

Arghhhhh! Why did I ever ask where the driver is taking us???

I better sign off now! Catch y'all later.