Conceptualize how non-social media, ad-free citizen journalism is modern sin-eating. All metaphors come pre-mixed. I respect both the time and space of others, just not much else and not for lack of trying or bloodshed. We can opt to give it or share it, but making demands for it always rightfully comes across as self-centered childishness to all ears with no skin in the race, all the casual passersby be they human shields or human capital for those with ample pounds of flesh for sale. Nonetheless not nevermore,
“There are sacred obligations of conscience from which no one has the power to release us and which we must fulfil even if it costs us our lives.“
— August von Galen, Bishop of Münster, 1941 Sermon
More mom and pop, less uncle Tom, it’s what every industry ultimately requires, and what every failure in flavor of marketing lacked; it’s what every governmental management program needs to function and it’s what every school board and city council need, or they implode by the burden of dislocated self-importance. Unironically, I ultimately sank that first comic book news site I contributed to, learning that lesson for myself the hard way. More mom and pop, less uncle Tom was the first big tagline I came up with that honestly grew a life of its own. Devised for the old comicnewsdotinfo comic-zine site wherefore a couple of years I played Managing Editor over a staff of 11 contributors, columnist and lead interviewer and active reviewer of non-Big Two works, along with the odd journalism, I did the scheduling and trafficking and proofreading and I had a ball, we were growing so fast and learning as we were doing. Until I took my ego and half the site’s production away, that line was on our masthead. This was when the largest virtual gathering of comic book people was on myspace, and very fastly did the line creep up here and there, others hurling it about with many fresh farmer’s market of choice pretexts, subtexts and context. And never were we bothered by that, like by all means steal it if you want just get the notion out there upon the noosphere again, and again. Over a million words in essays later I think and I feel very much the same. Like walking the evening streets of a small town, or obscured neighborhood to a larger allotment of condominimalized living both depressed and compressed yet rarely decompressed; you spent nights in one or two decades of more memorable days past, and still finding your way when you manage to recognize more than signposts. The could have beens and should have beens announcing themselves first and loudest because every place has its own memory. It doesn’t really need us at all.
I’ve shoveled more than my fair share of diverse compost physically and metaphorically. Horse and cow but the miniature donkey poo I mentally classify separately, as it steadily went to elderly pot farmers who weren’t hurting nobody. Although the gift-shop for the Louisville zoo never took me up on my persistent suggestion along my months with food services there, of selling special packages of their own polar bear dung and lion shit explicitly to stoners, as fertilizer for homegrown. I’ve also worked a couple of political campaigns, successfully as canvasser for an independent state rep in the US house, and later unsuccessfully as a co-organizer for a green party local business owner pursuing the city mayor title, in what I want to say was then the 16th largest city in the USA. Hand in hand with volunteer marketing for indie press, it’s all the same daisy-chain dancing their respective rings around the rosies, the proverbial sins of our forebears with trampled graves and misquoted memes. All fancy and fantasy to the contrary, there is nobody to hide behind, and the more mess you struggle to avoid the more others cannot.
That’s where the veterans of good intentions get retired and memorialized for their service, inside the public domain subletting not bloodletting its rightfully subsidized place within wildlife reserves of the third, fourth and fifth circles of Hell. But those downward spirals of damning inferno one can only find by swimming toward, graveling voice to mind forever singing of its churning burn, those rings of fire are the internal hemorrhoids of the goddess, for in her embrace where nothing is more worthless than esteem her diet is rich! Testify my brother but be nimble and be quick, for jumping over the candlestick is to land in her loving arms where no wayward light escapes every life getting well-spent, all the skeletal remains grinning with eternal gratitude and grace as the last word on all matters even unsigned, unsealed and undelivered.
If fling we must, fling more words not more boogers as though the most respectful death has an ear to bend, ass to grab or heart to win. For fire meeting fire purports to be the unnatural stuff of foolish living, yet of all elemental forces death understands how one-sided are all relationships, thusly bending ears, grabbing ass and winning hearts are for death to reap what’s owed.