Cancel is Culture
Hey there Saucier,
Hope you’re galloping through your culture like a mustang, heading your herd up a perilous ravine even if it is just you against the headwinds with no herd or team behind you and you’re in a meadow erupted with Spring flowers That’s not us, though, as we can’t even make it to mule anymore, just a lone burro on the outskirts, nosing around borders and edges with little if anything to pack
Been festering in this American culture of late with a need to leave for a bit, to get a fresh nose, to travel this earth again as a rambler, a rogue, as I was meant both for the road and a home—to experience more, to sit in a bar with the locals in a place thousands of miles from where I am now where English isn’t the mother tongue and learn something about life through my new temporary friends’ eyes to return home to my world again anew
The reason I use temporary friend is we love our friends, but we seldom love an acquaintance; meeting someone as a friend means you love them and to love is mystical—no matter how temporal it may seem, as love transcends, even though we just met and likely will never meet again
Don’t think I’ll get on another airplane unless I absolutely must, though Need something serious to justify a jetliner’s decadence, but you should never feel guilty to get on a plane for anywhere other than where you are in regard to where you want to be—one life to live, might as well live, I’ll always say I will be here all the same, though different between when you leave and return
I won’t cancel you for your airplane escapades, but that’s what culture does: it cancels a part of us for its survival A culture is an organism made of other organisms communicating within each other, however small or vast a culture may be It seems to me in this information age, we can be a part of several cultures simultaneously, though I think this brings too much dissonance for most of us, so we tend to become subsumed by a primary culture, and then perhaps an alternate culture as well, but seldom many, as that’s saved for the sociopaths and the enlightened
About a month ago or so, I was thinkin’ about all the people I have met in my life, and how they surpass me I put them in a box and as we were talking the box exploded That’s what happens when you live on a border: people say and do extraordinary things
When I was rollin’ and smokin’ cigs, I went into the only liquor store in town to buy papers and filters, and one of the employees was a total “America First” kinda guy, and he’d say shit that would unravel me I remember him, when the BLM protests were ravaging some cities, and he’d go on and on about “they want their fuckin’ Juneteenth? Didn’t they get all their freedom in the 60s? Wasn’t that enough?” next to a mulatto-mexican-native woman, his co-worker, who didn’t feel comfortable hitting him upside his head so we could know what she really felt Instead, we locked eyes with a sigh and I walked out of there miffed This dude doesn’t drink but he smokes may more weed than most of us and glorifies how many joints he smokes to drive to Seattle (a place he hates) to visit his daughter and his grandchildren Where we align is our love of the heaviest of rock.
I know why I told one of my neighbors (neighbors up here is measured in miles, not feet, just so you know), “I’m not liberal or conservative. I’m an iconoclast.” I could see the cogs in his mind stop for a millisecond (and this is a smart dude who also believes in “America First” even if he doesn’t care what happens to our species after he dies. So yeah, a complex and beautiful fellow) and he simply ignored my statement, because he didn’t get what I was saying and didn’t care to think about it
And while Culture does seek to make this world a better place, its greatest need is to survive into the next generation of organisms it contains, and preferably grow larger with more organisms to contain Culture will kill whatever gets in its way to survive, just like all of us as individuals When I think of the atrocities of culture in conjunction with what we’re calling ‘cancel culture’ nowadays, I think of Johnny Depp bragging about how he spent $30,000 a month on wine Yeah, dude deserves whatever he got just for that crap, but he’s going to whine about it and throw money around to defend what he has and his hopes for more It’s human and it’s our culture of the individual overcoming their humanity to keep what they have and hopefully get more However, he spent a couple of millions shooting Hunter S Thompson out of a canon, and I cannot think of a better spend, even if HST was a total prick in life, he was still one of the most pure writers of my lifetime, other than Walt Curtis.
And that’s what’s at the core of this “Cancel Culture” rigamarole: it used to be that those with institutional power decided who got accolades and who got shutdown Nowadays, the kings and queens can be brought down by anyone and everyone, just need the right story to sell and enough people to buy it This phenomena scares the shit out of those with power, because they can lose everything they have; everything they worked so hard to achieve, no matter if it is making sure everyone has healthcare or they drive their cash to the bank everyday for being the shit or they are in every news outlet and talk show from here to Bethlehem; we all will keep ours at all costs, even after death if we can
When I think of all those who have been cancelled before they even began or those who cancelled themselves, I grow sad Writers and thinkers and poets are all mustangs, wild and free, until someone decides to thin the herd We get shutdown from the get-go, and even then when enough folks decide that our run should come to an end or we end ourselves because living in this world necessitates conformity to a culture and that’s not something that’s goona happen when someone is pure
I was just out of high school and going into Uncle Sam’s Army when Gus Van Sant’s Mala Roche hit the cinemas—I didn’t see it until after Walt died last year I read Walt’s book when I returned to Portland for a second run and met Walt for the first time (of course the book is better); I was already too old for him as I was in my 30s when we met, though he still had an entourage of late teens and early 20as folk at his beck and call in the early 2000s, when he was still jubilant and not living in a storage room in a basement next a bar known as The Rabbit Hole and host to an open mic call “Subterranean Beat Revival” So yeah “cancel culture” is simply censorship, just as “fake news” is a new term for propaganda Its the same old shit with the attempt to make new the same old shit and most are none the wiser
We need to recognized that even though we have the capability to think about thinking (homo sapiens sapiens), we are still animals doing our best to survive, even as we recreate this world every couple of months and culture accelerates to near light speed for some and to lethargy for others I never would have thought that it would be acceptable to be queer in mainstream culture within the culture I lived within in the early 1990s. I mean, I cannot count on both hands the times the Fag Patrol showed up when I was hanging out with friends in bars and free
In the end, we should all be free to be who we are and not push our bullshit upon other people and that goes for all you politically correct motherfuckers out there too. Be kind and understand we all have a world to live through in this whirl of life before death, and it ain’t always easy-peasy-sissy-squishy, but we can all be grateful for each other and to be alive in these times, no matter how horrific they may seem
Be love, saucier! And you sure as fuck better stay saucy and frank!
Your cataphoric collaborator in freak,
Frank Sauce
(Writer’s note: I really didn’t want to get into a nature and nurture thing; how culture is both and how we knowingly and unknowingly navigate in this world. Actually, I really didn’t want to get into more than what we got into as I would lose interest in more ways than one if this went on and o
n; not that I couldn’t do it, ‘cause I can write my meander for hours on in a day, but I’m not here doing this to bullshit you. Every word and silence has a reason to become textual here, though intention is untenable contextually or semantically, where only this form upholds intention, subverts or denies its form: a missive (go read Wittgenstein for a beginning: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/). Part of my goal is to fuse Roland Barthes idea of “writerly” vs “readerly” text. I want my language to be both readerly and writerly—accessible to a reader and dig-into-able by a writer/thinker (worth a study or two or three at least).)