An Excerpt from the Preachings of an Angry Man

"Embrace your headaches! Your sores and your bad days! Learn to love the perpetual emotions of anger, frustration and discontent! Reject the illusions that comfort you! Become intense in your loathing of all the wrong in this world! And claw your way out of the stale womb!

Never accept low-key! Never hold a position of subservience! Never be meek! Never be shy! Choose to explode and avoid fizzling out! Inactivity is your greatest enemy! It will cause you to atrophy and rust and crumble! Pathetically.

Suffer hard for the sake of expansive consciousness! Destroy your ignorance with great prejudice! Engage your mind in the most impassioned violence - against complacency, against fear, and against all that is responsible for the devolution of the human!

And always keep in mind that the first thing a baby does when it enters the world is cry."

EDIT: Angry men shout.

Fuck da po-lice.

http://www.whittierdailynews.com/ci_7938419

Give me one good pig and I'll give you two exceptions.

I know this isn't entirely appropriate to my blog, but it feels fucking good to just even type "Fuck da police."

Territorial Minds: Intellectual Property and the Public Domain

Since I haven't posted anything up for a while, here's an article I worked on for the upcoming Forest Fire issue. This is the first tasty raw draft of the article before it goes to the slaughterhouse to be chopped up, nicely packaged and released to the public. Truth is I didn't know shit about intellectual property laws before writing this article. A couple of nights' worth of research and a spoonful of bullshit made this entirely possible.

And be easy. This is my first attempt at serious journalistic writing.

But if you want to do me a real favor, rip it apart.

Intellectual Property is the umbrella term for the exclusive rights writers, musicians, inventors and other creators have in relation to their product. Laws include copyrights, patents, trademarks, industrial design rights and trade secrets. The term “intellectual property” was first notably used on October 1845 at a Massachusetts Circuit Court ruling in a patent case in which Justice Charles L Woodbury wrote that “only in this way can we protect intellectual property, the labors of the mind, productions and interests as much a man's own...as the wheat he cultivates, or the flocks he rears.”

Intellectual Property regulations exist to protect the personal interests of the developer and to ensure credit and rewards from a product rightfully goes to the maker. Without these laws, theoretically, creators would be under compensated for their ideas and other contributions to the public domain. Thus intellectual property policies take the same approach to abstract products of the mind as policies that are applied to physical property – only the creator should be able to reap what he has sowed and do what he like with it.

Many of America’s bureaucratic systems have a trend of providing supposed rights and protections to the public, at the surface, but when implemented are flawed, unequal and unbalanced as to who receives the most benefits from the system. The IP system is not guiltless of this trend. It also holds its fair share of rough edges and blemishes that need to be smoothened and polished by debate and improved policies.

To apply concrete, cold regulations to abstract “properties” conceived by the mind is a flaw in itself. Because of this, a problem lies in the “monopolizing” power of patents and copyrights often utilized by large companies and corporations. For example, a dominant pharmaceutical company gains proprietorship of the patent for an extremely effective cure for a widespread disease. It is costly and developing countries that may need it the most can’t afford it at the price set by the company. Due to the legal restrictions of the patent, companies in developing countries are red taped from creating and distributing the cure at a more affordable price and are instead limited to less efficient generic medicines and treatments. The patent successfully fulfills its selfish duty.

Although ideas, unlike physical property, are indefinite and can be re-used and duplicated indefinitely, the public domain is at the mercy of the companies who hold the intellectual property – products that could benefit all of humanity. Only those who have the money actually benefit from the discovery. This unfortunate situation can also be applied to many other corporate-owned intellectual properties like college course books, efficient car engines and other essential designs, inventions and innovations.

Many copyrights are directly tied to large corporate entities that have the power to enforce the policies, but may also hinder creativity and innovation due to the influence of corporate ideologies. Musicians are especially affected by this when they agree to work with major labels that obligate them to a set of policies that dictate what they can and cannot do. Also, major label contracts tend to contain a mile-long list of technicalities pertaining to royalties that weigh heavily in the favor of the company. So in the end, the musicians can get screwed over while the company cut-and-runs with the money.

With free global information exchange made possible through the internet, precedents set in the music world by Radiohead through their optionally priced album In Rainbows, and the start of the community-based licensing group Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/), the masses are starting to take back the power of intellectual property from the rich few. However, the issue remains full of complexities that cannot possibly be covered in this one article. It’ll be a long while before we attain the ideal equilibrium between the interests of the public domain and the creator, and a world in which great ideas can be freely distributed, used and improved by the people.

Updates are a' comin'.

A letter to a close friend. Speculations on human sympathy, fate and free will.
Thoughts on the failures of my and our generation.
An introduction to a short story - a project that's been boiling in my head for a while.

So just wait. Don't phase out. It'll all materialize soon.

2:25 AM Fear

Shit. Shouldn't have done it. Something dark is coming on. I can feel it.

I hit the water pipe again, all alone in my parents' house bedroom. This was some potent, devilish stuff. High-grade marijuana, kush, they call it. Now I'm overwhelmed. After years of experiencing this modest plant, my toleration's boosted leading to gentler trips. But, this is kush, a whole 'nother animal. And it's sitting fat on my chest. Never underestimate the high-grade. Valuable piece of knowledge to have in Southern California.

...

A few cigarettes later and I'm still not cured. I'm wide-eyed and looking often to the right. The corner of my eye is suspicious. Wasn't something just there? The shadows are shifting. Dark figures are forming and fading simultaneously. My mind is falling to pieces. I am questioning everything and unfortunately, everything isn't pleasant. Doubts come up of my ambitions, my ideals and my purpose. The ego stands alone. It is being interrogated. Ruthlessly.

...

Nightmare scenes play in my head. A large audience is reading some of my written work projected onto a white screen. There is an unbearable moment of silence. I become congested with the greatest anxiety. Soon, it becomes apparent. My anxiety becomes justified. Nobody is convinced. Faces change from disgust to gleeful ridicule. They are jeering at my words. My sentences. My paragraphs. "Boo."

It is confirmed - I have absolutely nothing important to say. They know it. I know it. How could a middle-class, had-it-easy suburban kid like me achieve anything meaningful? I've been comfortable. I was socially acceptable: not too ugly, brushed my teeth everyday, not a goat fucker. Made it into college. Was mostly polite. Clean police record.

Oh Jesus. My fate's spelled out for me. I'm just going to follow a career path and live a true American lifestyle, complacent in shallow success. I am already boring as hell. My life's been devoid of any color of great strides. I haven't proved myself to anybody. A deathbed submerged in defeat awaits.

Paranoia's disguised as truth. Its voice is terrible. Says I haven't suffered a true suffering. Says I was always fickle and lazy with my passions, quickly hopping from one to the other. Smart enough to start it up, too much of a coward to follow through. What if writing's just another temporary fix? Another futile and eventually abandoned attempt at producing something eternal?

The "Fear", as Hunter would put it, dictates that I will die like the rest of them. Just another corpse goin' to worm feed, righteously buried with their rotten wasteful lives. One unfortunate existence joining billions of others. A sad story of wasted potential that has become a redundancy.

The night, along with the "Fear", will die when I go to bed. Will feel better in the morning.

Dear Reader

I only ask of you to contribute your honest, most brutal opinions. I cannot afford false compliments and superficial feel-good comments. That will only instill in me a false sense of security in what is in reality a pool of shit, piss and filth. And that would be the end of me. So please consider my state of well-being with constructive criticism and genuine opinion. There are some things I can't do alone.

I only got into the "writing game" just recently, so I am still in an infantile state. And just as a child learns not to touch a hot stove by actually enduring the painful and stupid experience of touching a hot stove, I can only possibly learn how to write better by the contribution of your most searing, corrosive criticisms. Point out any boring clichés, insignificant drivel and amateur mistakes I may and most assuringly will make. Also, point out anything specific that you liked, for the sake of my most sensitive ego and waning motivation.

You have my most heartfelt thanks for braving the reception of my hopefully thought-provoking pieces.

In complete and utter love of the most vile and most heavenly qualities that make us human,
T. Lee

This was December 24th.

It's almost 2AM and it's almost Christmas. And I am bleeding America onto this paper. Happy Holidays.

Today I bought a pack of cigarettes and smoked most of it in one night. I have no regrets.

My friends are sleeping in New York City dreaming of New York City. I am hopelessly awake in Los Angeles and boy, is it lonely.

To my loved ones in the East, look outside of your window and to the West. Squint your eyes real hard and focus. Now, can you see it? Herds of 2 ton metal boxes blinking in the night?

Can you see it?

A God-loving bum sleeps cold and dirty somewhere on the shoe prints of his brothers and sisters. Oil rigs rest and suck on the open wounds of the Earth. An immigrant, his hands calloused and pricked by thorns, smells of tomatoes and dirt. The Los Angeles river is caked with sludge and it moves lumpily.

Hollywood contemplates suicide with dark circles around his eyes. Melrose sinks into the sheets, comfortable and fat and dreaming of vampires. Venice Beach is strung out and drooling into the sand. Beverly Hills is rotting, putrid with the stench of indulgent swine and complacent corpses. Compton, savagely beaten, bruised and raped by the American way, slumbers with one eye open.

A cop fucks and sleeps with the whorish law, a happy gun underneath his pillow. A real estate agent removes his skin and scrapes it raw against jagged metal. Money tumbles out. A business executive is on his knees, praying at his bedside to snakes slithering out from underneath.

And woe to the failed dreamers and the dreaming failures, their heads resting on pillows made out of their hair.

Los Angeles sleeps alone tonight.