| other words | top | Fear of a Tad Planet by Tad Kepley A Tad Planet practices selective breeding via forced miscegenation. Its businessmen mind their own business, its feminists are. Anyone who fucks with anyone else gets blown away on a Tad Planet, but only kids are allowed to carry guns, and we expect the brats to obey that order. No porn on a T.P., everyone has easy access to the real deal. Constant travel--no bullshit *stationary* "community" here, everyone is a nomad; bad-assed traler-court Bedouins in methane-driven Broncos thrumming and caroming from parallel to parallel across cracked and bubbling asphalt. Here is there here--movement a communal abuse of speed for its own sake. Anything that anyone ever paid for is redeemed only through fire...non-liberatory commodities are trashed in spontaneous bursts of arbitrary flame, not to assuage guilt but to celebrate and commemorate the supercession of their usefulness. Theft has become the preferred mode of exchange--no property is held comunally here for no property is *held*--when immediate use of an object has ceased, it's up for grabs. You never know where you'll be tomorrow here, and you're glad. Everyone is socially responsible for being *equally* socially *ir*responsible. We specialize in *de*specialization, we're centrally *de*centralized...we take freshman philosophical paradox as the maximal tenet of our lack of ideology. "Art" (with a capital A) doesn't exist because it implies the stationary; sand paintings sprout on the overgrown roadsides as grafitti's exquisite corpses adorned the crumbling city walls...The only way one communes with the land on a Tad Planet is by crossing it. No one tells you what to do because *no one cares* what you do. On a Tad Planet you get high on life by doing drugs (ritual abuse replaced ritual use), you imprison yourself with freedom. Everyone is a potential lover and always a potential enemy--both if you're lucky. Stapled by gravity to the side of a Tad Planet we disobey our own orders, we contradict ourselves and tell you we didn't, all rules are made to be broken. A Tad Planet has compassion without condescension, "rebellion without guile." The slinking, snickering coyote is our familiar. Our global emblem is the horseshoe crab--like our species, a resilient evolutionary anomaly. Our colors, never worn, are rust and the green of the aurora; the farewell flash of the sun. The nose-breaking, septum-searing stink of creosote and rose-pink diesel our decorative stenches. The tornado is our totem, convection's consumate creation; atmospheric thermodynamics our only exact science. Our endless summers are spent trailing interesting meteorological phenomena--we summer chasing thunderstorms from rockies to mississippi, we ice drinks with our hail. We worship only ourselves and each other on a Tad Planet, we all have U.V.-sevsitive tattoos on this ball--visible only under the black lites that illuminate our shanties and teepees. Brutality is beautiful here: the most direct form of communication, it punctuates our appreciation of life...The only contests here are won by concoction of the gel explosive with the highest foot-per-second dispersal rate, marathon spinning on a tilt-a- whirl, achieving orgasm the most times and with the most partners in one swing of the sun. Sex has nothing to do with "intimacy" and everything to do with selfish pleasure, our genitals don't have scabs, they've got battle-scars. We measure our body temperatures in degrees Kelvin...we party in rooms sealed full of nitrous oxide and helium. A Tad Planet's music is the warm warble of high tension wire in a stiff wind, the infrasound throb stirred by harmonic tectonics, accompanied by harmonica, mouth-harp and didjeridoo, with a snot-nosed percussion section of several calibres (rapid fire .223 and .308 snare, 10 and 12 guage bass, .22 and .25 hi-hat at a distance--the lilting cracks and booms best appreciated through a half-mile of thick air). On this tilting terra-infirma, the manipulative die of inertia. We revel in flauting the "laws" of nature--defying and decrying cruel gravity as sizeist, converting energy from useless states into useful ones, shucking fucking edenic entropy as silly, burning both ends of a parafin ouroboros, daring ourselves to die as a celebration of life. The surety (on this viral more of an orb) is that nothing is *ever* easy, nothing is *ever* done for you--all is challenging and vibrant, a corruscating lacy latticework of carnivorous chaos ponderously pickle-eating pregnant with prurient possibility. Caveat emptor.
Originally published in the anarchist zine Black Eye (among others). Please reproduce and distribute freely.