The Opening of WASTED...

(By Blu)

(MUMBLING TO HIMSELF AS HE ENTERS, SHUFFLING WITHOUT ACKNOWLEDGING THE AUDIENCE. HE IS DRESSED IN COPIOUS LAYERS OF CLOTHING. HE TAKES HIS TIME UNTYING THE TRAILER) Consciousness, context, content, contempt … conscience! What a waste? Just words without form, but with a definite function! Consciousness, context, content, contempt, conscience… All conveying nothing of substance to the unconscious! Such fools; such idiots! But I must talk last because I am the biggest fool of all; I am the original idiot! Sweet words and passion and noble ideals – enough to enlist my bleeding heart in this hair-brained scheme! (HE POSITIONS THE TRAILER SPECIFICALLY) Such irony; raising consciousness about waste and at the end of the day, all of the effort will more than likely be wasted! Why would anyone care? Its just waste after all: rubbish, dirt, refuse! I should have refused. (HE CHUCKLES TO HIMSELF) Fucking fartists! Trying to make a statement: turning all this kak into art! If this is art then art is kak! (HE HANGS THE BIKE IN POSITION AND A LIGHT GOES ON AND A FAN BEGINS TO OSCILLATE. AS HE TURNS, TO THE AUDIENCE) Good evening and welcome to this wasted journey…

Mana Neyestani

HERE...

I think about the million moments, some forever burned into my memory, others – so many others – forgotten, lost forever in the general anarchy. The endless journey, the infinite paths down which I wandered in search of the next picture; the people who shared their joy and misery and the last morsel of food with me; the many lovers who shared their beds and mine; the endless nights and interminable days that led me here...
(From A Tale of Extra Ordinary Madness)

FEAR

Sometimes being in this cell is a comfort. I am afforded the space to be fearlessly lucid; to see things with a clarity that details what the dominant reality truly is: as opposed to the intriguing, deceptively beguiling veneer and the fear that stops us from seeing things as they really are.

Inside these four walls I do not have to compromise my perception because I am compromised by my actions.

I do nothing therefore I can think everything through with a clarity and honesty that penetrates the often self imposed haze of preconception and dogma; the recitations detailing right and wrong and morals and values and views and opinions. And if you ever wake up you realize that your identity was handed to you as a puzzle in a box and you put it together incorrectly: squashing pieces into spaces where different parts were supposed to go.

Out there the frenetic pace of living becomes a distraction and when people can become anything they want, they choose to be one of those gaudy, clay garden gnomes.

For all of the supposed sophistication and nouveau-cultured civilization there are very few trees left in the forest of humanity: mostly it’s just shrubs and weeds and creepers trying to cling onto the exposed roots of the few giants who once stood tall, or those who remain towering for now; mostly untainted by the malignant rot.

We become too afraid to be!

Too afraid to observe or even contemplate the irony and contradiction and the unthinking, unquestioning mindlessness that we’ve been convinced is the only way for us to be within the fragmented collective of our species-defined humanity.

Inside these four walls I am forced to befriend my demons even after they have been gauging deep scars in my flesh; I have to rip the scabs of fear from all of the wounds that have never healed.

My dignity pillaged; humiliated; denied my physical freedom; prodded and probed and dissected; stripped of my humanity I am finally able to observe through an untainted, pristine lens: finally I am the observer I have always aspired to be, and I have no camera.
(From A TALE OF EXTRA ORDINARY MADNESS)