The Resistance

by Tommy on January 10, 2012

Get up.

The Resistance is forcing you under. It’s making you double over and drop down.

The Resistance is a dirty motherfucker. It’s telling you what to do and making you its bitch. Right now. It wants you to suck — just like everybody sucks. It’s easier just to suck at everything than to choke on the acid and emerge human.

The Resistance wants you to say “it’s okay.” It’s not okay. It wants you to be comfortable, go on vacation, spend too much, eat too much, think too much, worry too much, fluff another pillow. But — the Resistance NEVER wants you to act up, wake up, stand up, or fuck up. The Resistance hates reality even more than you do.

The Resistance will never go away. The best you can do is dig in. Fight when you’re tired. Mend when you’re angry.

Get up.

Do this now.

{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }

M. John Fayhee January 10, 2012 at 07:49

Does this mean I’m lame if I still go on vacation?

Tommy January 10, 2012 at 13:09

Yep.

M. John Fayhee January 10, 2012 at 14:47: What about if I call is a sociological survival-based fact-finding self-awareness-expending spiritual journey?

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M. John Fayhee January 10, 2012 at 14:48: What about if I call is a sociological survival-based fact-finding self-awareness-expanding spiritual journey?

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Will January 30, 2012 at 04:55: Rest, relaxation and travel are not lame. Nor is making a trip to connect with someone you really care about.

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Dion January 10, 2012 at 07:51

Were we supposed to think of a substitute word/phrase for ‘Resistance’? If so, I’m going with ‘Status-quo’.

Tommy January 10, 2012 at 13:13: Agreed.

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Auntiegrav January 10, 2012 at 19:17

Thanks for the vid. Great stuff, man.
I think the “somebody that I used to know” is one of my past selves.
I think the resistance is the machinery of comfortable logic: also what we might call “homogeneous consumer society”, and all too many call “humanity”.
..but it’s NOT humanity, is it? It’s a 70 years-young anomaly in the short history of the human being as problem solver and struggler. Cheap energy and cheap food has created cheap, comfortable humans who know no other lifestyle than to consume.
…but they want to know another life.
They want to know what “useful” means. They feel it in their soft, aching bones.
They want to be connected through that usefulness to a future self and a generous, reliable existence.
They are afraid because the Resistance wants to be their Provider for Profit, and it keeps telling them about the easier paths: the indentured paths, where they don’t have to make hard choices or muscle aches or even teach their own children to do so: the Provider resists your randomness while it keeps nature’s randomness away from you.
Humans evolved with their shoulder right up tight to Randomness, and when it zigged, we zigged. When it sent locusts, we used frying pans. When it sent tigers, we picked up spears.
The Provider doesn’t want us to be able to be aware; to move too fast, or to engage our abilities too well for our own ends. It wants us weak and helpless while it sucks our life into an abyss of simulacra.
The Provider wants us to be kept a long dark tunnel away from our own future, with only a light that He holds for us to see.
Security. Comfort. Stories.
http://www.ted.com/talks/tyler_cowen_be_suspicious_of_stories.html

Auntiegrav January 12, 2012 at 08:57

Ahh…here’s the James Kunstler I’ve grown to love:
“What voices will resolve out of the phenomenal noise of gadget America, with its deafening tweets, incessant advertising, instant messaging, idiotic robo-calling, and ever-present flat-screen assault on the senses?
I discern the distant sound of rebellion, a spirit that won’t be appeased by bytes of Disney-babble from the pandering snouts of Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, Paul or Obama. They are interested only in keeping a set of suicidal rackets going. All the yammer about “freedom” and “liberty” is hollow when the rule of law is AWOL. This ripe time is the natural moment for a true opposition to rise. A few months from now neither major party will have a credible candidate or a plausible platform of ideas. This will be painfully obvious. What angels and demons will rush into that awful vacuum? ”
http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/01/this-ripe-moment.html

Jojo Bojo January 14, 2012 at 03:44