
THE TRUTH IS THAT...
- I'm a punk rocker. As soon as punk rock came into my life, it was obvious that everything had changed for me. It was like a lens through which the world made sense - that is, it taught me how to behave sensibly in a nonsensical world. This isn't what most people associate with punk rock, but to me, punk taught me first and foremost to drop all pretenses about making any sense whatsoever - to live for the MOMENT, for that moment when the guitar kicks in and just fucking LAUNCHES YOU INTO THE MOSHPIT.
- Punk didn't provide a soundtrack to my life, so much as it provides a soundtrack for my MEMORY of my life. I remember caroming off the roads of Poughkeepsie, screaming Black Flag at the windshield along with that quality Toyota tape deck. "I'M ABOUT TO HAVE A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN!!!!", I'd sneer, when it was probably more accurate to say that I was GIVING a nervous breakdown to my parents.
- I remember the moments of discovery of the bands that would change my life, reading about the Minutemen, hearing the Misfits in the car my hugest crush was driving, the Minor Threat records this girl near Rochester copied me. I remember working out to 7 Seconds, making out with my fundamentalist Christian first girlfriend to the eerie sounds of Sonic Youth in the middle of the night in the parking lot of a decaying shopping mall, picking out the chords to the Husker Du songs I so loved on a guitar I didn't yet understand.
- I was younger then, and everything felt new and the battles seemed worth fighting. Reagan and Bush (not the band) were in office, and ANYTHING that smacked of an ANTI-culture was down with me. Punk was a BIG word - I mean, we thought Public Enemy was the punkest thing we'd heard in YEARS - and strange hair configurations really BOTHERED people with less-than-open minds. (Years later, this BOTHERATION has REMAINED my FAVORITE cheap entertainment option.)
- Punk rock changed our lives, and if you're one of those people that share this background with me, there's no doubt I don't have to analyze this D. Boon quote any further.
- Punk sure fucked me up, as far as leading a "normal" life was concerned. Years later, after graduating from Stanford of all places (NOT the place to go if you've got any punk in you WHATSOEVER), I would remain nailed to this allegiance, so much so that no amount of education, no amount of need for money or whatever could ever make me ring true as, well, normal.
- Like most of us, I soon discovered that punk was about SO MUCH MORE than just music, that it really symbolized something MUCH DEEPER than that. An answer. There was INFORMATION in that music, the same quality of information that I find in a website or a touchdown, a way OUT of the prison that surrounds most lives in America. There was truth and beauty and energy and it was as if listening to this music, or even hanging out with other people informed by the message of punk, well, it was like BECOMING A GOD.
- It is punk rock that truly made me a religious man.
- This is a book that follows a format of my own devising. I just felt like writing, a lot, all the time in fact. I am now in the process of figuring out just what I *MEAN* by being religious. I'm certainly no Christian, or anything worth labeling. In fact, even the term "punk rock" has been compromised, as we who saw Green Day when they couldn't even tune their instruments knew it someday would be. My friend Vic said that if he could take STOCK in a band, it would be Green Day, and, well, maybe if he could've he'd be a millionaire too. In our own stupid way, we knew we were sort of sitting on a goldmine, a set of underground music SO SUPERIOR to the dreck of the evil corporate music interests that its success, and subsequent "sellout", was inevitable.
- I used to get a lot of mileage out of calling myself a Hindu, if only because it confused the fuck out of people. I think causing confusion is a religious mandate; I *enjoy* it, and therefore I believe in it. But I realized early on that I knew jack shit about hinduism, beyond my own ability to bullshit about what it meant. I also realized that this bullshit was getting more and more, well, MEANINGFUL. I *enjoyed* coming up with religious-sounding ideas outta my ass.
- Only recently did I realize that I was in the process of founding my own religion as I was going along. It was a religion based on superstition (every time I saw a license plate with a 666 in it, I would cross myself), based on stories of mythic proportions, based on things I just KNEW to be true.
- And you know what? THIS RELIGION FUCKING ROCKS. It is something that I've only heard hints of, something that has been taught to me by luminaries such as the Church of the SubGenius (run out and buy their first book after you read this one!), by my personal hero Abbie Hoffman, by every anonymous hardcore band that made it feel like you were witnessing an explosion.
- It is a set of TRUTH. It is based on a concept that is SO SIMPLE, yet so obvious, and it has the potential to truly CHANGE things and to piss your parents off to boot. (What fun!)
- I am going to steal Jesus - the REAL, RAW Jesus, the Jesus who fought so valiantly against empire and oppression - away from the shits who control him right now. While I'm at it, I'm going to steal Jimi back from the hippies, Apple back from the jeers of the marketplace, Buddha and Kerouac away from the pretentious. I am going to steal the GOOD STUFF and leave them with vapors, with control of NOTHING.
- Right now, while you read this, while you're hypnotized by my words, I am handing you THE KEY TO YOUR OWN LIBERATION - a key that, of course, you've had in your back pocket all along. The key to understanding this key, ironically, is understanding exactly where the lock is.
- Religion, to me, is simply the practice of observing what is TRUE and UNPROVABLE ANYWAY. We've got science to work on the provable, but where in science will it tell you obvious things like "oh my gawd, operation ivy is AMAZING!" or "you just WAKE UP when you're talking to the girl you like"?
- So what I'm saying, basically, is that I'm not afraid to use terms such as 'religion" to describe what I KNOW IN MY HEART. And apparently, I feel like I know a lot in my heart - much, much more than I know in my head. (Although I'm one of those freaks of nature who can recite pi to a hundred digits.) And I know that REAL religion is about creating that feeling that punk once promised us.
- *I* can create that feeling. YOU CAN TOO. It's not up to some being in the sky to provide us with the inspiration we need to smooth out the bumps in our lives and show us the direction - it is UP to ME and YOU.
- This is how I got the idea for this book - I decided to just SAY THINGS that I KNOW THAT ARE TRUE. Sometimes I'm wide of the mark, sometimes I say ridiculous and irrelevant things, although every effort has been made to remove these in the editing process. But what I'm left with, and what I'm proud to present you, is a TOTAL MESS OF A BOOK, a self-contradicting, rambling and quite potent testament to the fact that, HEY, I AM ALIVE AND SO ARE YOU.
- I didn't want to create a book; I wanted to formulate a DRUG. I want to make something that you will PICK UP and INHALE DEEPLY whenever you need something MORE in life. That's EXACTLY how the book was created. I type super super fast, without even looking, and I dragged a tiny computer around Europe with me this summer, and whenever I had an IDEA pop into my head I popped the damn thing open and started goin'.
- So sit back a spell and let me do all the work for a bit. It's a weird, rollercoaster ride, and along the way you'll find out more about me than you probably will find useful (i mean, who GIVES a fuck about my reciting pi? REALLY!) This book is not meant to be understood immediately - it is self-referential, it is egotistic, it is a waste of time unless you become sort of, uh, PSYCHOSEXUALLY INVOLVED with it. (I don't quite know what I mean by that, but maybe I just forgot to stick any sex in this introduction.)
- So hey, herewith I present my revision of the truth. I have called it "Jesus 2.0" because Jesus is an instantly recognizable brand name, and it is what I consider a MAJOR upgrade. Just remember that YOU are part of the development team.
- And I will leave you with a soundbite to sum up this book of soundbites. It's what I call my one-sentence religion, and it goes a little something like this:
- "If there's a God, YOU are an AUTHORIZED REPRESENTATIVE."
- Once upon a time, there was a kid who had a lot on his mind.
- In 1995, the world was a much bleaker place than it is now. Maybe that's due to President Clinton's policies, maybe because of Moore's Law and the Web, who knows. I wouldn't know what the job market is like today, but the media sure makes this country sound like the Land of Opportunity once again. In 1995, most of the good jobs were already taken, and this kid had no idea how to get one anyway.
- It was a low point for this kid. He had nothing - no relationship, maybe two or three good friends, a truly insane landlord/housemate who would play Pink Floyd all the fucking time. He was broke, he hated the area where he lived, all the good bands had broken up or were on major labels, and he didn't do drugs. Although never suicidal, he spent his spare time in dank coffee shops scribbling questions too existential to repeat here.
- He was working at Kinko's after receiving a degree from Stanford, and he was wondering, "well, how did I get here?" He liked to think of himself as smart, affable, and supernice, but the market economy scared the shit out of him. The idea of wearing a suit and tie, the idea of lying to people in order to get a sale, the idea of trading one's imagination for a cubicle appalled him, and he just felt that he couldn't do it.
- He worked the late shift, in the computer section; because of a band he was in, he had learned how to use a Macintosh to design stuff. One night he was watching the monster photocopiers chugging away on some insipid addendum to some corporate annual report. The huge beasts created an almost techno-like rhythm as they created neat piles of dead tree, slain in the gallant march of human progress, almost certainly destined for landfill oblivion. The potential of a piece of paper, and this is what we make of it? he thought.
- He was a nice guy. (Hell, he's STILL a nice guy.) But he did have his influences. Perhaps his influences were the only things that gave him any peace at all. His influences had found him because he had a taste for the bizarre, a taste for the loud... and a taste for REVOLUTION. It had been decades since that word held any meaning, but he would read books from that very last time and his imagination would take him to the streets of Chicago with a Molotov cocktail in his hand and teargas biting into his skin. Earlier, when he was at Stanford, he found himself enrolled in the Stanford in Berlin program, and had soon found the squatter/anarchist community there. He took part in riots. He threw cobblestones at policemen - not very effectively, because he's a pacifist at heart, but the SPIRIT, the spirit was there and when he returned to the squat with his new friends, the only nonwhite at the afterparty, he would grab some liberated Beck's and stand in the front as the squatter band blazed through a set that would have been incomprehensible in ANY language, and he would think:
- THIS is revolution.
- This feeling that he had, this sense that the blood that boiled within him had some IMPORT, some consequence, posed a THREAT to the system. This was a feeling that went deeper than any drug, because it wasn't about who you were inside, but rather what you MEANT to the OUTSIDE. When you fucking MATTER for once, when people are really glad to have you aboard and you're not just another entry in someone's fucking Rolodex, you are CHANGED.
- I look at you - that's right, me the narrator, you the reader - and I see a person whose spark hasn't yet been extinguished, but trust me - the system wants your ass. You're smart, and you could make some Board of Directors a lot of money someday. You're on the auction block, your very potential is on sale, and if you're working right now the banks and the companies have you whipped, shackled in chains marked DIRECT DEPOSIT. I wonder if you've ever felt like that kid did when he was when he was pogoing to harsh German squatterpunk. I think you might have felt that way once - I think that's why you're reading this. And if that's the case, there's a good chance that what happened to the kid might happen to you someday as well.
- Because, as he was tranced out watching the photocopiers, wearing his stupid Kinko's apron and his stupid "I'm here to help" button, his mind flashed back to his little revolution. And something in his mind snapped. He had THE BIG IDEA.
- "If only I could make Americans feel like that," he said to himself, "I could make a difference."
- Time has passed. The kid is pretty much a man now, even though he often refuses to admit it. He's done his best to make that difference, and his efforts are starting to pay off - albeit in such strange and unmeasurable ways that no sensible person would call him a success by any means. And the core question is still gnawing at him -
- is he making a difference?
- When he was younger, he listened to the rhetoric of the times, passed along to him in song by bands with names like the Dead Kennedys, Filth and the Bad Brains. These voices still echo in his head from time to time, but he's found little solace in these voices from revolutions past. The world is still suffering, he thinks. Hell, I'm still suffering, all the great choruses and singalong slogans in the world haven't made him feel any more relevant, he's got a solid career and a relationship and a microbusiness that commodifies radicalism in a new way now but everything's still emptiness. Time has passed, that's all, and fuck if he doesn't crave inspiration.
- Addicted to moments and undergoing withdrawal, that's where he's at. And that core question still makes him shiver. Do I matter? Do I fucking MATTER?
- Any artist processes experience and expresses it in a way that's communicable beyond his immediate sphere of contact. A good artist can leave the consumer of her art with a sense of having MET her, of having somehow KNOWN an intimate part of her. And a great artist can leave that consumer CHANGED, in some way - as if a set of glasses has been handed to the consumer, and upon wearing the glasses, shit just gets more CLEAR, you know?
- He wants to be a great artist. He wants it so desperately. He wants to be memorable - indeed, he wants to be immortal. He scans the pages of history books, and realizes that he is reading The Book of Life Itself. Those who contribute to history are forever immortal, in a very, very tangible way, and HE WILL NOT MISS THE BOAT. He knows his very soul depends on it. Other people will live and die and fuck and love and be content. Occasionally he envies these people - more often, he tries to emulate these people, desperate for an identity that society understands. It's no fun being the reject, the square peg, the one who can't keep a job to save his life because his ideas torment him away from everything secure.
- Something in him is bitchslapping him to the ground. For his own good. He's thinking about his daily walk to the BART station, and imagining a mean motherfucker blocking his way, making his every step towards work resonate with DOOM DOOM DOOM. Mean motherfucker is going to make every... step... a... new... nightmare. Because that mean motherfucker is his own bloody potential, it's the path he's forsaking every second he sits inside those cubicle walls, it's every dream he's ever had, and it's mean because it is fighting for its very life and WILL NOT DIE.
- One of these days, the way to work will be blocked. He will break down. The doom will take him, envelop him, force him back home, sit him in front of a computer, and get him to call in sick. The mean motherfucker of DESTINY is undeniable, and it will own your ass regardless of your desires.
- Someday, this will happen to you.
- When you opened this book, you fucked up. I'm dead serious. You will never be free from the curse that plagues me. I have passed this curse onto you. You WILL drop out of square society. Squares are going to affect you like the very sight of the whip affects the slave.
- Anything can happen.
- From the statement "Anything can happen", man began its pursuit of spirituality. In a way, understanding that anything can happen is a precondition to desiring some way of, you know, PREDICTING, or feeling out, that which might happen next.
- When you take a situation and analyze it to see if you can determine what will come next, that's VISION you're using there. Vision is a combination of logic and instinct, a complex interaction between determinism and free will.
- This book is about inspiring you to respect and develop your capacity for VISION, in all its forms. If I get you thinking about your own capacity to visualize the future and your own instinct to PLACE YOURSELF within that picture of the future, well, my karmic debt will be satisfied.
- I propose that Vision is good in and of itself. This is due to the fact that whenever I speak with a sense of Vision, I'm on top of mount fucking Everest. I walk on water, I forget my limitations, I embody "God" for a bit. It feels good, I get attractive, and the luck just seems to flow forth from my fingers.
- It's ironic, because Vision makes me forget about my need to plan for the Future at all. In fact, I simply have Faith that my future will turn out okay, simply by token of the fact that the Vision is flowing through me.
- Divinity is a drug. Being intoxicated by "God" is the purest, cleanest high. It makes conventional drugs superfluous, irrelevant - it is you in tune with Your True Secret Self, and it FUCKING ROCKS.
- This book is meant to exhaust you, because, if you ever meet me, I'm a pretty damn exhausting person. If we meet and we click, man, I am so full of action I ought to be a verb, and I encourage this kind of behavior in the people I'm with. I am creating this book in my own image, and, perhaps, just like in real life, you might only be able to take a limited amount of me at any one time.
- I'm also creating this book as more of a FORMAT than a BOOK because I love the idea of a book that ISN'T OVER once you close the covers on its last page. Also, I love the idea of a book that gets YOU to write the sequel.
- Just because this book is printed on paper and bound at the spine, doesn't mean it's just a book. I had my LIFE changed by my favorite books, most notably the Book of the SubGenius and RE-Search Publications' Pranks!. The Book of the SubGenius was visionary enough to write that as much as you "read" their book, THEIR BOOK IS READING YOU. Both of these books defined a WAY OF LIFE that inspired me to aspire to live a life worthy of being documented as well.
- If you don't like this book, or any of the proverbs in it, WRITE YOUR OWN DAMN BOOK. That's what punk rock is all about.
- I'm not going to be able to edit this book myself. I can't even visualize editing this, because I want to present myself as I am - as a spontaneous explosion of ideas, as a gateway to the Truth itself. Double-click on ME, baby, and let your mind link through to the Truth.
- Some people have PORTALS behind their eyes. Imagine being able to move a spiritual mouse around the world, and double click on people who interest you, and find out what their take on the truth really is... imagine that.... well, it's REAL, you CAN make this happen.
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