I Hate It Here in This Brave New World

© Johnathan Chong

There was a boy
A very strange enchanted boy
They say he wandered very far
Very far, over land and sea

A little shy and sad of eye
But very wise was he

And then one day, a magic day
He passed my way, and while we spoke
Of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return"

The deep melody of Nat King Cole’s voice singing in my earpiece guiding my wandering imagination to a cliché black and white jazz setting for a story of this persona, whom carelessly  listening to the lyrics as it echoes in his mind bringing memories of a forgotten stranger. But nothing can be said of my true predicament, this isn’t a story of a lonesome detective or some 1920s classic novels, no in fact I don’t even know what this article is all about yet. Maybe that is why I find myself walking underneath the twin towers at the witching hours of the night. Wandering underneath the great symbol of our capital city at the time of night when the hookers are taking their last few customers behind the streets, when the drunken rapist is comforting his eight years old victim, when the homeless are disturbed in their sleeps by ridicule from both the rascal youths and the authorities of our established society. Now don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of both good and evil deeds are being done at this moment of time in this concrete jungle but it has always been in mankind’s habit to easily forget the good deeds and focused on the negative actions of an individual. But that is not what my article is going to be about. No themed or idea can be summoned in this mind for a simple layout of a storyline for these words, I continue to ponder on the topic of this article.

I walked passed a dark alley where a homeless junkie was wiping the cum from his beard after giving his dealer the second blowjob of the night for another shot of heroine that is when I realized what I am seeing  is the perfect metaphor of what  Hunter S. Thompson once said :

“Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits -- a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.”

Now I am no Gonzo, no one is as Bad Ass as this motherfucker. I haven’t reached the stage of having a trunk filled of a wide variety of mind altering substance nor have I ever gotten a whole culture of motor biker gangs trying to kill me.  The only similarities between me and Gonzo are our great curiosity in psychedelics substances and our usage of literature as a tool to express our thoughts. Plus we both don’t give a rat ass on anyone’s judgements.

After the eventful night with little spoken words and more of emotional absorption of psychic vibrations in the frames of the scenes of my night’s adventure, I’ve finally found a theme for my articles. A Gonzo Journalism-styled piece in where I would talk about anything and everything, from events I’ve attended to a discussion on the latest cultural/social trends and developments in the scientific communities to conspiracy claims that the lizard king from another dimension and has gotten hold on the global financial bankers and is now marching on the self-fulfilling prophecy of a Terminator-like Judgement Day. And perhaps later on we will be finding out that Humanity is currently living in a computer simulator world of The Matrix Reality because the artificial intelligence has already won the war.  So yeah, we have a lot to talk about. Not all of the things written by me are true but yet it would be false to say it is all fictional writings and has no aspect of journalism for what I write is nothing more than the reality perceived through a different pair of eyes.

© Johnathan Chong.

My name is Mr. Nobody.  It’s not my real name of course. It’s a fucking pseudonym that I’ve used so many times so why not use it for this bloody articles.  If I use my real name I have to pretend to be that personality in which people assumed of me but using Mr. Nobody, I can line up cocaine on my big fat cock and shove it into your corporatocratic society’s moral philosophy and you’ll fucking snort it and call it revolutionary.  Mr Nobody is just a journalistic persona in which I’ll portray the current truth of our society’s biggest predicaments from cultural inequality such as our racial tensions and seek a fantasy-like insight into the historical events that might have contributed to these topics. I have used other pseudonyms before such as Psychedelic Monk, Nuke Abe, Ix, and even John Smith but Mr Nobody is the best character to be telling the tales of our modern tragedy. Maybe this choice of a mask would be clearer in later articles, or maybe it’s just some random choice, I am too interested in finding out.

But for now in this article I am still searching for a topic to talk about for this damn article, it’s not easy to focus on a single movement in this whole globe when the information are just overloading in the palm of our hands. It is no longer easy to catch the attention of mediocre minds to read an article anymore, books are slowly dying and literature will soon be obsolete. Don’t believe me? Currently there are scientist that are perfecting machinery of advance computing power that would be capable of reading and even visualizing your thoughts, memories and dreams. Give it another 50 years or so there will be gadgets that allow our thoughts and feeling to be connected through an electrical psychic communications. We would have implants in the back of our cranium to enhance our brain capabilities and even connect our consciousness into the cyber world. We would be a civilization that has access to the Matrix at anytime we chooses, it would be perhaps the quietest times of our human history but definitely a lot of headaches.  Don’t think it’s possible? About 30 years ago, most adults do not believe that our society will be having Smartphone, heck they were still doubtful about mobile phones, their society would never really belief that we would be filling our daily experiences and personal information are shown publicly on the internet.  Imagine what the next 30 years alone will change, touch screens are the past,  holographic and flexible technologies are coming in next, our internet connections are getting faster and the wireless (wifi) range is expanding evermore, soon internet would be accessible anywhere worldwide in any area of the jungle. Information is gathering and spreading ever faster in our human history and creatively has becoming an epidemic in the mental philosophy of our society, and of course useless facts and bullshits are too increasing. Our society is reaching its crescendo of cultural interactions; the world is becoming a mixing pot of ideas.

© Johnathan Chong.

It would be a scary brave new world but the same can be said about our present.

I flick the roach of my last joint for my breakfast and walk into the sea of sleepy citizens, a perfect crowd for a stoned face to be hiding in. Every single one of these poor fuckers looks like a fucking zombie even with their fresh faces and clown thick make ups, all subconsciously crawling towards that yummy brain for they are losing theirs.  They are all losing their minds, all chasing that illusionary success but worst of all they are all willingly trading their consciousness in their brain-numbing entertainments for some cheap kicks to kill boredom.  I stand here in this congested train station with only a few eyes staring at the beauty of the rising sun while others are busy staring at their gadgets. All the eyes are glued to the screens of their smart phones with their ears plugged with miniature speakers drowning any thoughts of unimportance. It is sad to know that smarter the phones, the more ignorant the society has become.  Not stupid but ignorant, stupid is when one doesn’t know and does a mistake but ignorant is when an individual is fully aware of the situation but does nothing to change it, instead they just ignore the problem. In our society that has a near instant communications where all of human greatest sorrow and troubles are evermore present and annoyingly disturbs your daily dosage of entertainments, we often just ignore such post or share it for selfish satisfactions of redemptions for our lack of real actions.

This present reality of mine is like a nightmare scene from a Phillip K. Dick’s cyberpunk novel. Once we feared the televisions for zombifying our children’s mind but now there is a six year old boy that hold in his hand a gadget that can tap into the vast amount of information which dwarf the great library of Alexandria, is being used to entertain this innocent child because his parents are just lazy to take care of him. The greatest tool mankind ever made is being used to babysit a little boy. It scares me to know that the new generations of kids born in this era is no longer interested in playing in the dirt, catching frogs and picking flowers or even bother to look up to the stars. Give them an iPad or a tablet and they will be satisfied. Of course these parents who work tirelessly chasing these made up currency of money that holds no value outside the human society will chose the easier option. But we cannot forget the importance of an early child’s mind to explore his curiosity of his natural surroundings. Nowadays parents are too afraid of letting their children roam around by themselves and I can’t blame them, the city is filled with paedophiles rapist and kidnappers. But then again why are there such individuals? We can’t just blame the immigrants because around 80% of the criminal statistics are local citizens. Maybe it is the lack of education but ask yourself what is the point of education?  To get good results so you can go to a good college or university so that you will graduate and get a good job? It looks like there is only one culprit that we can really blame for our corrupted system, Money.

What is Money? It is just a piece of paper that symbolizes the amount of energy in your short precious limited time of existence that you have traded in for paper in order for you to continue living in this system. If you like your job then perhaps it is worth it but 90% of the working human population on earth hates their job. So you trade in hours, days, weeks and months of your life in which you will never get back doing things you hate for imaginary currency to continue doing things you hate. No wonder the world is in such a negative vibe.  And to comfort yourself from wasting your non-refundable time, you buy materials of an illusionary status with your illusionary values of currency to satisfy the needs to be happy because you were told that success in life in when you are rich enough to buy anything you want. And even the choicest of materials that you chose to purchase is pre-programmed by countless Medias, social influence and the pressure of conformity. The human desire to be accepted by the fellow peers is overwhelming that many fail to take the time to think twice on these actions.

Somehow somewhere in our human history we have created and accepted the illusion of status. The rich are successful and powerful and thus they magically earn the respect of everyone else. You were told from the so called ‘Education System’, that you are nobody until you reach some sort of a respectable status in the society. That is why you must study hard so that you can reach that Dream of success. This is not an education, it is a brainwashing method which teaches you only the skills that you need to become a working gear in the grand money making machine. The schools are nothing more than factories that crush your will to question your reality and makes you think that the only escape from a bad life is by being filthy rich.  Many young adults after just a few years of graduating high school can’t remember much of the stuff they learnt.

It is sad to see the wonderful history of mankind written in such a boring format that makes you careless of the past, the beauty of science and mathematics taught in such a dull bombardment of facts in which no growing child or teenager can relate to or ever bother to understand. The school is just a place where social skills are being formed to understand the structure of society and make the kids ignorant to the beautiful vast of knowledge that took human’s centuries of trial and errors to just get it right. All that these students see is plain facts to memorize in order to pass a biasly structure examinations in order for you to get an A, which is just another imaginary value of achievements.  

True education is meant to fulfil the curiosity of a youth minds and equip them with the necessary knowledge to further explore the fields of their interest without any regards to whether it could make a lot of money or not. A child should not worry about social structures.

Yet the human population are endlessly put on this conveyer belt of a socialistic idea where we would chase the imaginary certificate of achievements from a well established institution in order to gain a better status in life. But what about those who fail this system, those drop outs and outcast without any other skills that is useful to the economic systems? How will they survive? Only in the fields of illegal occupations will they find acceptance. The system creates criminals in order to justify their actions of policing the society.

This is nothing new, we had been talking about these flaws of the systems for a very long time but yet nothing much has changed. Go to school, get a Job, Climb the hierarchy of social class, Buy expensive things to show your status, Get Married, Build a Family and Repeat the process. Now say after me, we are free. Maybe we are all too comfortable being in this fucked up established system but I hate it here. I live in this city and I can’t find my way out. Maybe that the reason why I’m writing this article which has no topic but rather an endless ramblings, it perhaps the best I can do for now with my deadline long overdue. It is a mere introduction to a bunch of writings in which meant to justify my existence and my refusal to exist in your society.

Carl Sagan once invited us to ask the question, ‘If we were visited by another superior species from a different part of the galaxy and we were forced to explain to them the stewardship of our planet and not to mention the state of human affairs today. Would we be proud of what we describe?’ How do we explain this system of governance that is widely accepted as broken and corrupted but yet little is done to change the predicament? Maybe our human culture is really in decline as noted by Peter Joseph, or maybe we just need to let someone with an idealistic utopia such as Jacques Fresco take charge of things.  It is in my interest to pursue these topic in greater details with creditable sources and imaginative solutions in my future article. This is Mr. Nobody, an agent and a victim of a culture in decline.