Compostable Nacho Cheese

Nacho cheese is compostable. I’m not talking about the nice shredded queso fresco blend at your local taqueria that they put on chips to nuke to feed you when you’re drunk. I’m talking about the neon goo they give you at the ballpark that’s made of a couple hundred-odd chemicals, none of which resemble anything found in a dairy product. The kind that I, a hyper-lactose-intolerant, can drink gallons of without any of the gastrointestinal recourse. (But it brings other kinds.) And it can be composted! Companies and municipal services that compost food waste will accept nacho cheese. They will theoretically convert it into nutrient-rich organic matter that can be used for nourishing and sustaining plant life, possibly plants that provide us with food. Perhaps the gasses emitted can also be used as some sort of biofuel. Will the end-product also glow with the radiance of a thousand neon suns, as did its molecular antecedent? Will the bioluminescent ooze permeate into the roots of our crops, making its way into our bright orange what fields, our bright orange granny smith apples, our bright orange kale? Perhaps it will be used as livestock feed, and we will have bright orange turkeys on Thanksgiving. Or perhaps it will find its way into the feed for our dairy cows, and at last, we will have a cow that makes nacho cheese instead of milk.

The Shape of Punk to Come

I

We're exposed to art the wrong way, as a series of coded messages, there to disguise simple things as complicated. It's why the cognitive activity most associated with English classes is "bullshitting." Especially when it comes to poetry. Poetry was what faggots with too many feelings wrote who were too big of pussies to state their feelings directly. And they did it just to ruin your adolescent life. They did it to make some kid a sesquicentury later squirm in his desk trying to figure out what the hell a Grecian Urn was anyway. Until you want to smash that Grecian Urn and all of Western Civilization with it.

But that frustrated high school freshman doesn't need to do anything. The work has already been destroyed. It has been destroyed by the treatment of art as a puzzle to be unlocked, a way to conceal truth from those who aren't worthy of it. So we have turned our backs on art, simply because we weren't properly introduced.

Any expression we make, everything scrawled on a cocktail napkin or carved in stone, every thought, every idea, has an expiration date. Ideas are mortal. The lives of mortals were as short to the Greek gods as the entire artistic tradition surrounding those gods is to the age of the earth. Great art endures, but only with people, and people break down, and people die.
II

Might be time I start believing in angels. Bodhisattvas too, even if that doesn't entirely fit in with my theological framework. It makes sense in light of recent revelations. No, revelations sounds too much like some Truth (note the capital T) received from on high. Realizations then. Angels, Bodhisattvas, and other spiritual beings descended into a material world (perhaps Gnostic emanations and nature spritis) would imply a general sense of order to the world. They would in effect be cosmic repairmen. But of course the world is still very much a disorderly place.

The people who benefit us the most on the spiritual and metaphysical levels tend to be dysfunctional. They're brilliant but dysfunctional. They don't belong here and they're ill equipped to go back to where they came from. The funny ones are clearly depressed, the brilliant ones have some kind of brain damage, the ones who makes us think clearly can't think themselves and the prophets of new thought love in disastrous ways.

So there are angels out there. There are spirits of extreme compassion and wisdom and they just get distracted with money and alcohol and movies. They came here with a purpose and they end up fading on a mattress on the floor of a loft. They suffer brain damage from the magnetic flux upon entering the physical world and live their lives as the degenerates and fuck-ups among us. In other words, they're the fun ones.

III

I know people who have had their last adventure. And I want to tell them. Of course I can't, because it's improper - although I'm never rarely bound by propriety and more by a desire to never step on any toes, basically staying the fuck out of the way - and because they are already far too entrenched in their situation; the kind of people about whom I care enough to rescue from a sepia existence are also the kind of people I would never want to put through the turmoil caused by breaking out of it. So they'll spend their lives in a well decorated room (things won't be bad enough where the room necessarily has to be described as tasteful) never once even stepping out on the fire escape to enjoy the view or the breeze while they smoke a cigarette or a joint. Their idea of a fun group meal will be a bland stir fry and get upset when that one intrepid soul present tries to throw in red pepper flakes or another tablespoon of hoisin sauce. They will be phlegmatic, and their rallying cry will be a dispassionate "hmff."

What can I tell these people? You were avatars of mischief and horizon chasers. Now what? Now your life decisions that seem to make you entirely happy are killing that spirit you were born with? Of course I can't. Who am I to weigh in, he who only seeks entertainment, disguising it as a search for [choose one: meaning, truth, beauty, transcendence]?

IV

You won't find me on the traditional edge. The traditional edge has become the center of attention, an overpopulated shantytown of thrill-seekers, those mindlessly trying to push an imaginary edge. The old edge has become the new middle. The people who think they're edgy are just beating against the shadows of old barriers. The new pioneers are the ones who are going back, picking up the dead and the wounded. For the dead they make shrines and monuments - rock cairns and small mortuary temples with the ideals of the departed depicted in subtle hieroglyphs. For the wounded they focus every orifice of spiritual energy on their patient, nourishing with both substance and thoughts. But in their care all ideology is discarded, carried out in carts by orderlies, dumped in a pile and lit on fire. What remains is the human at the core, reborn in 2014.

A revived Steinbeck sees the tech folks crowding the Mission and the chimeric bartenders on Judah and decides this is no longer a frontier. This is the dust bowl so many fled, these are the monarchies that drove the footloose and the adaptive away from 19th century Europe. A revived Hunter S. Thompson sees his beloved Haight-Ashbury as an iterative circlejerk and heads for some mid-sized city in Indiana to shake things up.

V

I'm not entirely pround of it but I've made mix CDs, which were the modern equivalent of mix tapes until a few years ago when Spotify made it irrelevant and redundant to have any physical music or even think of music in terms of your own collection. The idea is that you balance the rockin songs and the songs which express your feelings. This might be the perfect form of expression for me, since I can a) impose my musical tastes and b) care while pretending not to care, hiding behind the shield of the obscure prog rock acts I stick in all the wrong places to break up anything resembling a cohesive emotional message. To mangle the whole digital mix tape format even further, I would eschew the time-tested structure of alternating feelings and rockin, and instead put a rockin core in the middle surrounded by a thick layer on both sides of mid-tempo songs and Red Hot Chili Peppers b-sides. I should leave that kind of thing for people who can take themselves seriously, who can express themselves without a paper trail of disclaimers and a six-inch lead plated wall of irony.

VI

All music used to be shared. Even if it was just one caveman singing about skinning a deer, it would be heard. When we invented drums and flutes, making music was a communal activity. The only way you could make music was with other people in the drum circle. The other participants had to hear what you were doing, you had to hear them. If you wanted to hear music without making it, someone else would have to make it for you, and you would have to share some kind of experience with them.

For thousands of years, hearing music was almost always a communal act. Even royalty with private chamber orchestras would have at least one family member, a vizier, or maybe even a eunuch present. The only way to hear that hot new symphony or opera was to go to a public performance. The only way to hear those piano preludes in the comfort of your own home was to have your daughter learn the piano and play it as you gathered in the salon, and this of course required you were wealthy enough to have a daughter who didn't work, a piano, the means to educate said daughter in the arts, and a salon in which to gather. Maybe someone in your one room homestead could scrape some tunes out on a fiddle. You would sing while working in the field or while driving your horse to market. If you lived near a town you could go down to the pub to hear some errant troubadours.

With the phonograph came the ability to listen to music without any musicians in the room. But it still had to be played through a speaker, meaning everyone in the room was having the same musical experience. (Ok, we could get into how every consciousness is its own frame of reference but we won't. Let's just settle for the fact that everyone was likely hearing the same thing.)

Then we got headphones. Music could be compartmentalized to the individual listener, but it still was sedentary. You had to be where the record player was. Then the Walkman gave us freedom from even a physical location. And it was only an awkward pause in human history before the mp3 player gave us the ability to take all our music everywhere.

The new paradigm is that if you want it to be, music is an entirely private experience. Not only are we supposed to be insulated from the world, but we are supposed to keep our music to ourselves. I remind myself of this every time some asshole is blasting music on the bus. (And almost always you can only the drums and a few s and t sounds from the vocalist.) It's a miracle that most of the time, people can listen to their own music without getting anyone else involved. And that I can listen to my own obnoxious music at a volume close to the threshold of pain without dragging anyone else into my sonic experience is also a canonization-worthy miracle. But still, every time I hear someone on public transit playing their music loud enough that everyone can hear, I get angry, when I should really be marveling about how much of an anomaly it is that the conditions have even been created for this to piss me off.

VII

Today, across the world, thousands of teenagers are going to discover Led Zeppelin for the first time. I cannot express how much I envy them.

They are about to have their Zeppisode. Your Zeppisode usually starts sometime between 12 and 16 years of age. It mostly affects males but has also been observed in female populations. It occurs when you first hear Led Zeppelin and are captivated by this hitherto unfamiliar sound. It can be as short as a single play of Immigrant Song, or it can last into your twenties. It's an interesting phase, because you're trying to define yourself as your own person, but the only way you know how to do it is with traditional symbols of rebellion. And there is that appeal. Yes, it's loud, so it communicates your angst. And yes, it's slightly more acceptable to be that weird kid at your high school who decks himself out in Led Zeppelin shirts rather than just that weird kid at your high school. It gives you a reason to check The Hobbit out from the library. They carry with them the whole mythology of rock and roll. It's the first time you can be conspicuously into something which is decidedly adult.

But there's a reason beyond the identity that so many dazed and/or confused teenagers have such an affinity for Zeppelin. Even if you have heard everything that comes after Led Zeppelin, you have never heard anything like Led Zeppelin before. Even if Jimmy Page did allegedly steal all of his riffs, no one had played those riffs like Jimmy Page and no one will. And when you first hear it, you feel like no one has ever heard this before, and no one has ever felt this way before. It doesn't matter that everyone alive in the last 40 years has heard this before and they have all felt the same way. Led Zeppelin makes you feel like an intrepid adolescent explorer. And once you wander far enough, you will cross the known world into the sublime, where you will find your people.

VIII

I feel that in time I will experience what every human has experienced and will experience. I do not mean that I will find some universal common meaning. No. I am of the delusion that I will actually have every experience that has been had, I will live every life that has ever been lived. I will one day take shelter in the acropolis while Athens burns around me, I will spend six months puking over the deck of a clipper ship for a chance to mine ten square feet of land along the shores of the San Joaquin, I will reach my head out of the porcelain factory window in Novgorod and proclaim that it is now in the hands of the workers, I will be a stoned dropout sitting in my pickup truck with my brand new Dead Kennedy's cassette tape. I still believe these will all happen to me, because the only thing I really want is to experience everything.

IX

How could you ever be sad at IHOP? Just imagine endless stacks of golden pancakes, emerging from a gleaming kitchen, each time the door opens the smell of frying dough and bacon wafting out and caressing your nostrils; picture the smiling faces as they spread some kind of delicious voodoo butter on their steaming, perfectly proportioned and perfectly round tall stack, then luxuriously drizzle three flavors of syrup over it, until it spills off the pancake and ever so delicately laps up against a side of crisp yet tender bacon, the symmetry of its waves reminding one of the harmony of the universe. And as you cut into that golden, fluffy pillow of dough and put it to your lips, you are overcome with a sense of calm, a sense of warmness, a sense of oneness with everything in the universe, as if you were being enveloped in the bosom of God. At IHOP, there can be no tears.

X

They asked him why he did it and he told them the truth. The truth was that he couldn't really wrap his head around the fact that people who weren't himself were having entirely coherent streams of consciousness and making decisions autonomous of his control. This did not suffice as an adequate explanation. Upon hearing the allegations he thought that jumping from a reasonably high place might be an adequate way to express himself in this situation. It would have to be one high enough where he would definitively die upon impact but not high enough that he would have any time to regret his actions on the way down. For obvious reasons this would have been a bad decision, but not for the obvious reason that first comes to mind: he did not have sufficient control over his legacy to be a martyr, and if you're going to die for the purposes of protesting the complexity of modern life, he thought, you had better have the right people on your side.

The thing to do would be to go out in anger, taking a gun and holding hostage those who had wronged him. He would have them tied up, he thought, pointing the gun in their face, yelling, throw in a few pistol whips to remind them what was ahead. Probably a murder-suicide type deal, no one wants to do the time for what he was considering. But it would be worth it, seeing that fear in their eyes once they realized they had no control, that they were going to die. And that, he thought, would make me a perfect artist, giving someone, just even one person, that pure, uncut feeling.


XI

The people of this rock learned long ago to trust the currents with their fate, scanning the horizon for their departed leader. Before we were born, a generation or so, he got his hands on an angel suit complete with an airtight glass halo, set his sights on the sky, and when the people asked him where he was going, he only said he was "going up." They say he strapped forty seven bottle rockets to a chair, attached wings of tarpaulin together with dental floss and chewing gum, and perched atop the southwest minaret of a local mosque he lit a fuse. We haven't seen him since but they say he's coming back. The tides are strong, even the most intrepid assholes don't get very far away. Sometimes we'll rig up canisters of condensed milk and dried mashed potatoes with another bottle rocket, if we can spare one. Then we shoot it off in the direction we last saw him going. The first time we sent a can opener. We might be stuck here but we're not stupid. We sit in bars, huddled under the TVs, waiting for some news. We don't know whether we hope he'll come back, but we know one of us will have to be the next person brave enough to defy this rock.


XII

There's nothing good I have to leave you with, but it doesn't mean I have nothing good to say. Just nothing good for this occasion. There's probably a good story or anecdote with which I can tie this whole project together and wash my hands of it, but I can't find it. Truth is, not much of substance can stay on the surface of my memory for very long. Not long enough to be written down anyway. Maybe I chuckle, maybe I cringe. Every once in a while I'll yell something to drown out the thought. This is probably how the people who yell at me on the train got that way. It all started with a few regrets and a bad coping mechanism. For a long time writing, or at least storytelling, was my coping mechanism. But that doesn't really suffice anymore. I can no longer write in service of myself. I can't say exactly what it will be for, but it if I am to make anything it will have to be with a sense of greater purpose. I can't say that it will be high art in service of the revolution, but I can say it will be a decent attempt at making a decent world.

I won't be flying the spaceships, but I can take you to space with my stories. I won't be the next charismatic leader, but I can write his speeches. I won't be playing on the next album that defines a generation, but I can at least write the liner notes. And these too will go out of style and deposited in the filing cabinet for the ideas of a bygone era, then eventually burned when it no longer suits the purposes of the people from the edges. Thank you for supporting this folly. I don't need your applause, I can let myself out.