#412

Going hard with collecting rocks, yes. This basically involves theft. Almost everything does, so it's all about who has the most muscle to back up their justifications and rationalizations. I live in the modern empire that proves this par excellence, having learned its lessons well from its mother colony. Each of its citizens is an expert at excoriating the part of the empire they don't like and protecting the part that they do. None of them affect the smooth function of the whole machine, which runs as designed, year in, year out, feeding its masters.

I put a rock in my pocket. Maybe it "belonged" at the edge of someone's garden, or was "part of a parking lot". Maybe I prise it out of hardening mud in a yard or field which does not belong to me, or take it from the thousands of rocks a construction company put at the side of a huge square brick warehouse-style building as opposed to grass or woodchips. Maybe the rock was on some woodchips. This can often be the case.

In taking the rock, I am taking something that does not belong to me. But I do not recognize that it belongs to the person that would assert that claim. I'd return it, or give it to some third more legally backed "owner" if asked, or told to. Why not? Then I'd steal it back, plus two more. Something to occupy my time. 

Who gives a fuck? Some Swiss piece of shit that works for a bank and is seen as a productive and moral member of his nation and community is counting the money that making arrangements to transport one million slaves across six borders netted him. It is more money than I would accept as recompense for saving the world. I have a rock in my pocket. He has that. The world keeps on spinning.

Only God can do the math. So it goes.

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What am I doing with these rocks? Building an illegal castle? Art project? A boon to "my own" "property"?

No. Just havem. Just gottem. Just put them on shelves, or generally around. Look at them and think about fractals, about time, about our miraculous planet. Hold them in my hand, feel their texture and weight, consider their molecular composition, their structure, their relative hardnesses and densities. They're rocks. I'm me. We are in the same world, made of the same stuff. I consider this, in the time I have before I die.

 

--JL