[scatter]

so my friends Laurel Luddite and Skunkly Monkly just wrote and self published this really interesting book called:

Fire and Ice - Disturbing the Comfortable and Comforting the Disturbed While Tracking our Wildest Dreams

"Fire and Ice is a personal exploration of what it means to live at the end of civilization, written by two people who feel its wounds on their bodies, minds, hearts, and homes. This book journeys down to the bottom of despair, and then rises to new possibilities that feel very familiar."

you can check out there whole scene at:
http://apeshitpress.org

ashley and i were reading it this morning and both just marveling at how many layers of mental armor we have to put up to be able to make our way around the city and through modern civilization. normally we just ignore it cause we have so much other shit to think about. these friends of mine just can't take it and aren't willing to medicate and pacify themselves to be able to deal with it. a lot of us have made the conscious choices to take the drugs and ignore the daily insanity because we have dreams we want to act out that entail we hold ourselves together amidst the chaos of civilization. and really, most people don't actually have any choices in the matter cause life is complicated like that. but laurel and skunk are some of my old earth first! friends that have been living in wild places for years and that actually aspire to live as hunter/gatherers and reconnect as much as possible with the wild inside themselves and out. i'm psyched to be able to turn folks at the icarus project onto this little world of folks because i'm sure most of you have no idea that it exists. who ever heard of hunter/gatherers having a fucking website?

anyway, here's some text i pulled off the apshitpress website from their book (check for the little sascha and ashley cameo's) and unfortunately you can't see that it's actually written in three seperate fonts to signify their seperate and united voices.

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The very psychological qualities so earnestly sought in today's recovery, psychological, and spiritual movements; the social equalities for which today's social justice movements struggle valiantly; and the ecological gains sought after by today's environmental movements, are all the same qualities and conditions in which our species lived for more than 99.997 percent of its existence.
—Chellis Glendinning, in Ecopsychology, edited by Rozak, Gomes, and Kammer


Standing in line, shitting in water, going to work or school, being surrounded by people that neither recognize us nor care if we die, smiling at superiors we despise, walking on past the homeless man with his hand out for help—these things are crazy, and every time we do them we become a little less human. We ignore our own instinct, common sense, and self—respect as we open old wounds and add new ones every day. Then there are the special days when we get an extra dose of trauma: rape, arrest, bombings, bloodshed.


I am not smiling; I have to bare my teeth to open my eyes this wide.


The sky is orange. Reflecting streetlights, it hides the stars. In the distance I can hear the freeway—in fact, I cannot escape this sound of a culture gone crazy, though an endless loop of self—destructive thoughts runs through my head trying to drown out the noise.


It's as if something remains in me of the human urge to belong wherever I am, even when that place is as wrong as a suburb. Instinctively, I try to blend in. My thoughts and feelings become as ugly as the neighborhood.


I am tempted to listen to them: maybe it is best to die. I can't live like this: full of rage at the madness around me, and despair at my inability to stop it. Where would I start? With the buildings ripped from ancient forests? With pavement entombing the living ground? In this house or this one, or the next, wherever abuse and pain leak out from closed curtains like the light from flickering TV sets?


Sleepless, I count the days until I can get back to the woods. I count my other options, grateful for them even as I doubt I will ever be happy having come from this place. Happiness seems so distant when you can't even sleep. And I wonder what bothers me more—these nights of total grinding awareness, or the others when I am unaware.


As a bored child strapped into a car seat, I was at the mercy of my mother and every other driver just a painted line away from mingling (and mangling) lives. I often tripped out thinking about those other people. I wondered if the split second it took us to whiz past each other could really be the extent of our interaction. My young mind searched for meaning. How could they matter when there were so many of them? I doubted they were real. They became obstacles in my way, tools to get what I want, or scenery—the background to my crowded life.


But the more I objectify others, the less I exist myself.


Just try to live in an open, interconnected way within civilization. You'll be eaten alive by the absence. You will eat yourself alive from loneliness. If not, civilization will shift its walls to exclude you, and suddenly you won't be within. You'll be against.


Welcome.

Recovery of this lost something—nature, innocence, participation—requires, psychologically, returning to a beginning. That, in turn, requires the destruction of an unsatisfactory world.
—Paul Shepherd, Nature and Madness


It's understood in most systems of medicine that you can't heal in a sick environment. Western medicine calls this "holistic". It's just common sense. The conditions that caused your disease will only feed the sickness. If you stay in them and do begin to heal, the chances are high that you will be re—infected or fall back into the same destructive patterns that caught you before.


Since civilization is our individual insanities playing themselves out on a daily basis, it is completely incompatible with sanity. An individual cannot heal without rejecting the basic twisted principles that civilization is built on.


It's a dog eat dog world. We're only human. Natural resources were put here for man's use. We civilized humans are the pinnacle of creation. All evolution leads to us. We're better off now than we've ever been. Our progress is amazing. Technology can fix it. Bigger is better. More harder faster.


No headshrinker doc has ever come near enough to tag me with a diagnosis. I've just come to expect blackwater days and nights near edges. This is the most honest expression of who I am, in the place that I am, at this time. This honesty is what I owe to Life.


I'm lucky to know others forced to question the polite lies. Sascha has been labeled bipolar (manic—depressive) for his unplanned journeys to places outside "normal reality". Despite being part of a large network of community that spans continents and subcultures, he was hospitalized three times against his will. He fell through the net. Attempting now to fill in the missing spaces that let him down, he is traveling the country doing workshops wherever people can sit in a circle and begin to break the silence around madness. As people told their stories in the workshop I attended, an image emerged of our society: a collection of insane individuals bound together by preconceptions and the coercion of civilization. A field of diverse flowers cut short into someone's idea of a lawn, where a few adapt nicely to manipulation and the rest try desperately to restrain their need to bloom.


In the workshop I learned that the World Bank determines the impact of "mental illness" on economic activity by calculating "days out of role". They add up the time when people are not able to fill their determined roles as worker, soldier, mother, etc. The co—facilitator, Ashley offered another equation, a personal one, calculating the days one is not able to be the person one wants to be. Others in the workshop nodded, and spoke of their decisions to take psychiatric drugs. They said they just wanted to feel human.


I won't judge anyone who says they need the drugs—it's true, I agree, people do need medication to function within this society. The boundaries of "mental illness" are determined by our culture, but the various forms of experience that get classified as illness or virtue are real. I just have to ask why functioning in society is anyone's goal. If there might be something better; a place where no one has to medicate their experience to be accepted, to be safe, to be human. I have to ask the same questions I ask of everybody these days, medicated or not, diagnosed or not, because I constantly ask them of myself. I know my own answers and I understand they rest upon the risk I take to reach out unrestrained.


The more I stay in the woods, the more aware and sensitized I become. Generally, it's called being "bushed" and thought of as a temporary mental illness caused by being in the wild too long. Town becomes "too much to take". The speed and sensory stimulation is overwhelming, maddening. Exhaust fumes and rudeness are more potent poisons than usual. I see genocide and oppression everywhere. The examples are not subtle, yet I had stopped noticing when I witnessed (and participated in) them everyday.


Back in town, everything I see through the brown air is a nightmarish dreamscape of industrial destruction. I feel sick if I let myself feel anything. Sobbing hysterically on public transit will not get me the type of attention I need. Acting to stop the injustices around me will land me in an institution. So I dissociate. I try not to feel, and almost immediately, the cravings return. The tongue I'm biting wants some candy. My tearless eyes wander over women's bodies. My mind turns hypercritical and violent, and my heart, feeling rejected, withdraws. Lacking internal guidance or motivation, sleep, work, and T.V. gain new appeal. I'm even thankful for the ads that tell me what to eat.


In rejecting civilization's basic principles, we step away. We begin to learn—or remember—saner things: We are all connected. Everything is alive.


We can heal, but not in civilization.


And civilization cannot heal. As the effect of our madness, it will disappear when we stop being crazy.


And people call me pessimistic...


For so long, I thought I was too important to pay attention to little birds. I thought I had to fight, that my life was better spent than lived. Each being has their own niche—their own unique role and gifts to give. I was tricked into believing that my role was as a weapon. I was too busy hating the destroyers to have time to love what they destroyed.


Often it takes everything I have just to raise my gaze above my boots. It's as though a great weight lies hidden beneath my Neanderthal brow. I've read that even the birds are singing less—some are forgetting their songs. Perhaps they find less worth celebrating. Maybe they can't compete with the roaring machines. Or maybe they are missing their audience.


Not long ago, I wandered out into the forest to take a dump, normally a sacred act for me. I had spent the last few days inside reading a six—hundred—page book describing atrocities committed by our culture. Depressed and dazed, staring at the ground and grunting, I was oblivious to my surroundings. A chickadee landed on my head. She hopped to my shoulder. I mustered the strength to raise and turn my head and met her gaze. The words, "pay attention" entered my head.


I was surrounded by little birds twittering in the snow—covered branches. I looked up and saw more. I looked up further still, and the sky was brilliant.


We mustn't abandon our loved ones, broken and bleeding on the sidewalk, in order to pursue their attackers, else we do further harm. Life needs our attention now. My love and caring is the unique gift that only I can give. It's what the Earth needs. I cause the greatest hurt when I am too consumed by grief and hate to love—especially now, when Life needs it most. (When I do.) I can't be too busy, full of myself, or angry to look at the sky or listen to little birds. I won't abandon the Earth, who has always been there loving me, ever again.


A clear summer day with storms inside. I was up half the night with questions too big for anything but partial answers. What is the "right" response to all that is wrong? What response can I live with, really live, and have some measure of possibility for a future? I opened a book and read, "What are the dying salmon telling you?". The whales, the forests, the children of Iraq. Fuck answers. Fuck trying to rationally figure out my place in an insane situation. I curled up into an even tighter ball and cried. I moaned and wept. I hurt—what the salmon are telling me is pain. The consequences of this situation. They are dying and I will starve, physically and emotionally, deprived of both food and community. Pain. Anything beyond that is rationalization.


The time is past for figuring out what level of pain I can live with. The pain is so deep in me already that I just have to follow it to its ultimate conclusion.


What that means looks differently than I thought. From my place of pain and the acceptance of pain I find a need to reach towards Life, to hold on to living, to do other than slip away like the salmon, to do everything possible and some things that might not be. I carry the pain and the life, the acceptance and the reaching, and go on.


When we give up our false hopes, when we stop trying to "save" everything—money, the Earth, damsels in distress, our lives—when we stop running in frantic circles, stop pretending like we have all the answers, stop telling everyone else they should be like us—when we settle down, take our fingers out of our ears, their lenses from our eyes, and start accepting the truth—only then might the little bird of hope come near us.

[laurel]

Hello all. Thanks for the plug, Sascha! I just wanted to let folks know that you can get copies of Fire and Ice from Wildroots for ten bucks.Here's their info:

Send checks made out to Wildroots, or WELL CONCEALED cash, or a BLANK
postal money order ONLY to:

Wildroots distribution
pob 1485
Asheville, NC 28802
wildrootsnc@ziplip.com
www.wildroots.org
866-460-2945 (toll free)

If you're honestly too broke for that leave your address on my voicemail -- 1(866) 758-9634 -- or email fireandice@apeshitpress.org and I'll send you one.

Also, we're doing a series of workshops and readings starting now on the west coast, then going through the desert in February, and continuing on the east coast in the summer. Email or call for more info.

[missing_my_flights]

...loved what i saw here. would you(r collective) ever think of coming to canada? i'm in southern ontario, about 1.5 hrs from US border at buffalo (other state borders slightly longer but possible) but it would be great to have your crew. we have had quite a few zine folks/punk bands from the US sleep on our floor. vegan everything abounds. (wow, am i lonely...look at me sell myself...shall i now give out coupons for TVP..) anyway, we could set up a good venue. it's a good community for such a forum, especially when the university is in session here from jan-april. let us know if you would ever be interested in swinging north... there is another very cool icarus girl in town... lots others would surely be interested...at certain times of year, it's a great town that way. anyway. peace to you all.
p.s. today, canada's supreme court officially legalized same-sex marriages with the same stipulations of different-sex marriage... all judges agreed! there has been some opposition amongst right-wing groups...and whilst a piece of paper saying your relationship is meaningful or not sucks beyond belief... it is still a huge breakthrough to have people who feel the desire to have their marriages so legitimized see it so! pieces of paper for all! but it is something to celebrate, still, i think, in terms of public perception...
always good to see something positive actually happen in this world... all the best to you all

[missing_my_flights]

...loved what i saw here. would you(r collective) ever think of coming to canada? i'm in southern ontario, about 1.5 hrs from US border at buffalo (other state borders slightly longer but possible) but it would be great to have your crew. we have had quite a few zine folks/punk bands from the US sleep on our floor. vegan everything abounds. (wow, am i lonely...look at me sell myself...shall i now give out coupons for TVP..) anyway, we could set up a good venue. it's a good community for such a forum, especially when the university is in session here from jan-april. let us know if you would ever be interested in swinging north... there is another very cool icarus girl in town... lots others would surely be interested...at certain times of year, it's a great town that way. anyway. peace to you all.
p.s. today, canada's supreme court officially legalized same-sex marriages with the same stipulations of different-sex marriage... all judges agreed! there has been some opposition amongst right-wing groups...and whilst a piece of paper saying your relationship is meaningful or not sucks beyond belief... it is still a huge breakthrough to have people who feel the desire to have their marriages so legitimized see it so! pieces of paper for all! but it is something to celebrate, still, i think, in terms of public perception...
always good to see something positive actually happen in this world... all the best to you all

[Pois_In_Us]

That was absolutely beautiful. I will be ordering a copy soon.

[scatter]

hey laurel - i know it's a little last minute but would you be into sending us a couple copies of the book so we could sell them/have them for peope to see at the art show? even if you don't get them to nyc in time for the opening there's going to be a literature table with our books and stuff at generally be a little confused by your anti-civ stance but it's always good to shake things up...
sorry i've been so silent by the way - that email you sent me in november got buried under a pile of viagra ads and activist spam in my inbox, i just discovered it two days ago!
good luck on your tour and stay in touch
sascha