2024.11.11_SYSTOSCELA_ BEGINNINGS

I grew up in a cozy nook of Systos, and quite dumbly so, well, by Cela standards anyway. It was a small community away from most others, a weirdly religious place. Put your head down and work, but be joyful—the Lord has made you well! 

I was safely indoctrinated by the finest homeschooling my mother could offer. That's why I speak how I do, I was raised to think myself a lofty savior-in-the-making. I can’t tell you how often I tried walking on water in my youth, thinking it would hold me up if I focused hard enough. But I'm truly no saint or saviorly type—and I’ve met many of both. I’m a mess on the inside, with well-practiced religious poise as external disposition to cover the sputter of my goofy faces.

It took an entire young adulthood to be able to speak to anyone outside my religious shell. I had to deconstruct my entire life outlook that was coded in religious formalities. In university, many spent their time delving into informational depths. I did that too, but I also spent my evenings trying to kill God in my head, using studying and experiences of mind to try to convince myself I'd done it. That’s why people feel intense looking in my eye—the unraveling of my life spools behind them, waiting for you to say something of cosmic consequence—or absurdly funny. 

And it’s hard to lose such ingrained thinking. Those strange formalities that attenuated into a family of avoidants with radical religious devotion. I do hope I think differently these days. But still, I often catch myself humming an old hymn sweetly or romanticizing the cultish feeling of a community in full united chorus. It was a place of old jingoism in a very complex world. Speaking to old times and ways of living so all could be included in the historical patchwork it tossed upon modernity. However, that over-kindness and loyalty to the community had bizarre effects. Fitting dinosaurs into written history, crusading to poorest countries, and warring against the least of these, the working poor, the immigrant, the alien queer, the disabled, and the disordered. Doing it all while glorifying money and authority. Tweaking old spiritual narratives into a wayward collective’s most onerous prophetic endings. It was not exactly a place of cruelty, but smiley kindness was coldly abundant.

And in that swirl of factless feeling, I learned my way forward with my hands, contemplating this world in lonely silence. Being watchful, not strung out in other people's minds and endless needs. Some say I’m selfish because I’m always distant. I tell them it's because I'm trying to be thoughtfully kind. I can see I unnerve you when looking into your eyes, and my questions bring no comfort to your obvious fears. So I let you stay calm by keeping my distance. I like to believe I help from afar. A bizarre stabilizing force, a home base for those who’ve known me. A crag-in-a-rock personality. Always been on that hermity side. 

My cultish start gave me a simple way of seeing the world, which I've noticed is annoying to those big-brained Cela heads. But it has brought me toward basic decency and human respect—as well as anger for such obvious incompetency that destroys humble people's lives—and an entire world. Many have thought me slow before, and I usually agree with their sentiment. I have few words to speak in groups and often find conversation deeply disorienting without any substance to focus on. It’s why I tend to scribble, I keep trying to tame my intense mental swirl. Unsuccessfully as it were. Honestly, I’m more of a wandering feeling than a pure idea or well-thought-out argument—and I'd never claim to be much of a writer—at most, a scribbler with designer flair.

But I prefer it all that way. Keeps me messy. Ugly to those annoying stringed puritanicals, human to myself, relatable to others. A humble narrative to live here on Elo. So don’t expect purity here, you will find only me. Swarmy, teary-eyed, judgy, religious-tinged, and watchful Sofia; spitting out another prophetic word from a lonely typer-screen while I toil for these high-minded idiots of Cela.

I was certainly not well socialized to these comfortable, blathering neighborhoods of Cela’s ‘state-of-mind’ types. Just imagine my shock upon entering Cela’s community for the first time. I'd come from my dirty little hovel in the big city, hiding away for a decade in self-loathing despair, feebly attempting a business in a failing economy. Why, the towering perfection here was overwhelming, I was stunned for years. Blinded listening to Cela-brains blab on pretentiously as though the world was in normal operation and their retirement outlooks were rosy. But they enjoy talking here in the gleaming capital city, talking about everyone, every detail. I thought gossip was fast in the small town I grew up in. But here, gossip beams wit and powerplay from another’s eye before it squeezes from a lung. So many exist here as shining doormats welcoming unwanted mail that empowers their gossip.

And unlike Cela’s rambling ways, my enjoyment has come from the roughness of my hands after tooling and sanding wood to functional use. Or from the burn on my skin after eating tender veggies picked from a sunlit community garden. It's in the soft petting of a cat’s purring spine. Or those celebrations and dances that move a body and community together. I've been most excited when we interact and openly express our messy opinions. And from the shared labours of construction and design that allow us to develop unique futures.

I am only of measly rank and file in this great organic process of us and claim few titles. I have little to show for all my middling efforts, though hard I’ve worked. My skills as a technician and engineer are limited, I’ve slathered in the mud much of my life, building things, growing things, or sitting behind a typer-screen designing something. I have little academics to throw at you or fancy language punctuated as smooth water over rocky speech. I was trained in math, science, architecture, and engineering, those fields where I could hide away in numbers and drafting of grand designs. I hobbled around numerous jobs in service, construction, roads, farming, gardens, and tree planting. I have very little 'writing' education sadly. You’ll undoubtedly notice this—if you haven’t obviously already. I only know the power of a period, an exclamation point, and a comma.  My brain seems unable to comprehend the rest. A simpletons linguistic chemistry. That's why I’ve enjoyed my poetry. There are just too many rules and judgments in a full paragraph, you give too much for people to read into. But through poetry, oh, I am my freest symbolic self! 

I don’t have money for expensive editors, nor do I have time to pursue such exhaustive deliberation about every word I scribble here—so I apologize in advance. But I also have little interest in reconstructing everything I output, nervously ensuring no spirits are disturbed by my arrogance of a misplaced word, punctuation or idea. Cela-brained perfection. So if you need detailed technics, coddled in those long, well-tailored, and rather aristocratically maintained memory banks, those streams where they tweak each word into submission of past thinkers- well, go talk to a Cela head. They are full of chiseled marble statues with too many degrees and not enough life experience, all singing perfected words they hope will gleam into Cela’s networks. Each desiring to be a pure tone emitting their shining status in Cela’s small-minded bubble. 

And those Cela-brains certainly obsess over their tweaky technics; that reconstruction of playful organic language into code and machine-like repetition of thought. Which they then peddle on the masses as inclusive creativity or healing psychoanalysis. But I’ve certainly not lived glazed in Cela’s memory vaults, romanticizing its recurrent wordplay, nor am I one of its brilliant talking heads who they parade around in their network fields to guide your subservience. 

I think my way, often dumbly so, a hard thing for a Cela pack brain to understand. But I don’t expect them to. I just wish they’d think for themselves too, it'd be better for the lot of us. It is, after all, the only way to find new agreements to rebuild this world. How do I know what world you want unless you’re brave enough to speak it into existence over-top others' messy understanding of their dreams? But silence has no answers. Agreement is hope for what it is. Questioning is just a spool. Fear is repetition of worst effects. And history is full of many dead insistences to thrust upon an obvious future of shared suffering. 

There will be nothing easy in saying all this, and so there will be no easy way to hear it. But Cela has silenced all its philosophers, which is why they can only project false perfection, stuck echoing a past image, repeated into coddled technics. We all know we cannot continue in this way. It is time to see ourselves as more together. More than what we've imagined possible from the obsession over our many divisions and personal peculiarities.

So, with hope in mind, I am relaying my vision of a planetary framework to you, so you all can build the future from the bottom up, the ascension path for the least of these, those poorest workers in forgotten countries living on a crust of bread a day. We must construct a functional Systos-Cela here on Elo, our Common Near, so all may find mutual prosperity in our future. 

Elo must always be protected, it is what we all share, our home, our expression in this cosmos. And even if we must tame ourselves to protect it, we must balance with its needs. Elo is the base construct of care we all operate from; knowingly or unknowingly. 

It is our Common Near, 

A warm home in cold space,

May we live eternal with Elo!

And Systos is you, the people, your life, body, health, family, school, home, community, city, business, office, factory, and farm. It's how you love and engage with others. It's the spaces you inhabit and how you decorate them with flair. It's how you feel within and express it on the outside.

And Cela is them, those who oversee you from afar. Peddlers of technical wisdom output by robots and computers that offers little action or warmth in these harsh times. They are speakers of that language of technics. They roam in state-mind temples of high interconnection, authority and corporatized network privilege. They are the keepers of the eternal system that lives through us and oversees us. 

Currently, neither has relation to the other, which is why we keep choosing our worst futures. Our Systos civilization body and Cela state-mind must learn to communicate, acknowledging each other's needs. Doing so to prevent the worst emergents from reigning down destruction on us.

And if only Cela heads weren't so brilliantly smart and kind to each other, 

Then they might understand how to be useful and determined for others.

2024.11.05

Yum, delicious failure,

So much have I known.

And, after being unwired,

The scribble fell from hand,

To repetitive orchestra moan.

2024.11.03_KITTYWOOF_ SMILE'N SPIDER

Now, I know ya’ll fearful of dem spiders, 

But I gots to say, one visited me today,

Creep’n up on my walk’n time a think’n.

And it took a glance to smile by its eyes,

Dey can be cute in der own delicate way,

Like a jump’n spider’s black ball’n eyes.

Now, many in Kittywoof think spiders need an instant squash’n,

But I’m a Pumpkinhead, and fear’n spiders raised me in my patch,

Oh yes, till I rolled free, I was a grow’n head of tangled webs ya see.

And spiders, well, they tan’t so bad, and they’z usually knows a lot about a thing,

Its cause der always tangled in a fearish web, dats how they get to fast a’know’n,

And dez the ones been keeping dis Kittywoof together while de rest trashed it loud.

A spider is a spiritual be’n you see, more a feel’n of webs than mask’n depths of a soul,

Dats why they knows what’s going on in you, you're tangled, and their webs be tensing.

They are the kindest creatures, so slender and delicate, yet dey can twist you up quick,

So ya gotta watch too, dey like to send info down their webs, try’n to get you network’d.

An’ once they got ya tangled, a living feeding can begin on your soul,

Oh yes, but don’t worry, they don’t want you dead, quite the opposite,

They want you a fresh living meal, lasting a long and delicious time,

Dats why you should listen to em too, they’ll try extend your lifeline.

A spider can be a cute face,

Its creep can fill you fearishly,

Its webs can wrap you as meal,

Its knowledge refine your soul,

And der tangle can welfare a life.

But, a Creep of Spinning Spiders,

Well, dat be something else entirely,

And dat be a big problem in Kittywoof.