Leaving onna bus for Berlin in a few hours, not really sure where I’m staying, just ate tiny strawberries, started writing poems* again, floating floating floating, let a stranger paint my nails, popped dollar champagne and hit someone’s window, and the rain keeps pourin’.
*this is not a poem
“Today, humanity is up to its neck in denial about what it has built, what it has become — and what it is in for. Ecological and economic collapse unfold before us and, if we acknowledge them at all, we act as if this were a temporary problem, a technical glitch. Centuries of hubris block our ears like wax plugs; we cannot hear the message which reality is screaming at us. For all our doubts and discontents, we are still wired to an idea of his- tory in which the future will be an upgraded version of the present. The assumption remains that things must continue in their current direction: the sense of crisis only smudges the meaning of that ‘must’. No longer a natural inevitability, it becomes an urgent necessity: we must find a way to go on having supermarkets and superhighways. We cannot contemplate the alternative.”
Dark Mountain Manifesto: http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/
A German activist group called the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK) addresses the internalized desire to work by casting the relationship between patients and doctors in a Marxist framework. For the SPK, everyone is sick under capitalism. For some, their bodies make them more aware of this. The SPK was formed in 1970 and existed for about a year. Before their dissolution, they managed to put out some fiery propaganda. Their slogan was, “Turn your illness into a weapon.” They also wrote, “Sickness is the condition and result of capitalism.” As a perpetual patient, this rhetoric is refreshing. The chronically ill are often cast as victims of fate or genetics. Rarely are we politicized or allowed to relate our personal experiences to larger social or cultural phenomena. As far as doctors are concerned, our diseases are empirical facts and not much else.
How to Be A Person in the Age of Autoimmunity
Written by a badass girl with Crohn´s disease. Really inspiring.
