I Traded My Spirit For Perspective

Photography by Elli Garlin

Sleeping angels frostbitten by memory. Gnarled roots of understanding lacing around and through and over all the nooks and holes and hideys.

Your treehouse is no longer the right size. We have evolved, moved on. Come down from the trees and look around.

Mankind is now humanity.

Colonialism is now Globalization.

We are, all of us, tucking death under the carpet. Or else deep down in the consoles of our Mercedes. We do not want to look death in the eye for fear it may recognize us, and come calling. Why have we sheltered ourselves so? We should become reacquainted over corpses in the stinking afternoon heat.

Police penguins marching along poking the vagrants, hastling the kids with
dreadlocks,
mohawks,
fauxhawks.

Taking skateboards and spray paint cans. Cracking one or two in the head with a baton to let off steam every now and then.

And then.

And then.

And then and then and then.

Sunshine and humidity and political unrest. Some are complacent, some afraid, but mostly, people are just angry. Angry with themselves for selling their spirits so cheap.

But to turn anger into violence, to turn handcuffed fist against fist, pepper-sprayed eye for eye; this must be a last resort.

We must rid the central authority of its infection. We are one, despite your invisible demarkations.

Gently wafting sound in the air. Traffic and sweat, dripping all over the city, splashing into dusty puddles, flooding the streets. We have worked too hard, we are hot. We are boiling.

Elsewhere, in the cool calm pool of information, grammar nazi authoritarian fascist patrolling the interwebz looking for noobs to pwn.

He revels in the ridicule cast in anonymity. Anonymous; because no one of us is as cruel as all of us.

A whole language and culture of the repressed, the absurd, the aberrant, the intolerant. They/we are anonymous, and they/we are not amused.

Panoptic tagging system. I am being farmed for my spirit. There is no redemption for the worker. Contribute or die/Contribute then die.

You will never be satisfied without money,

and if you get money it’s really no good without fame,

and if you’re famous and rich,

it’s really no good unless you’re gorgeous.

And if you buy yourself enough plastic surgery,

you, too, can own beautiful.

Snow slipping down the back of my hightop shoes. This is fashion. To be a derelict of the 90s. If you can look absurd, you are in. It’s every after school special. The outcast resurrected as cool kid was absolutely true – I’ve felt the wound in his side.

Except, of course, that these people are only impersonating.

We’re mining our spirits and we’re fixing our hair.