(first pass) Towards an Anti-Fash Sprituality, Temple, Sacred Community, Sacramentology, …
What would it take to become spiritually antifascist?
What are the mechanisms, situations, salutations by which we [orientate ourselves] make known our political relationships, institutions, and tendencies? When I worked that hellish month at safeway in the high summer of Plague Year 0 and that boss denounced any cooperation with a schedule arising from a second job of mine (calling me to my face a slave) they tought me to ALWAYS LOOK FOR BOB. it bore a resemblance to anti-t€rror¡st messaging more precise then i felt comfortable commenting upon. BOB was out there, prowling our ailes, hauntingg the battlefield. oh of course it was a war, a warzone anyway, with the death toll pilling up, the clashes between the Quarantists and Anti-Lockdowners, Profit-Realists the Alarmists, a divvying up of supply lines and mutually constituting camps of affluence among the long LED-lit hallways of the cruel dark forest.
BOB was an acronym, not a person or organization, though the acronym was also those things too. It stood for Bottom of the Basket, the location most likely to be overlooked, intentionally or otherwise, by a frantic, overworked, emotionally deadened, temporally disorientating, soul-evicted sales clerk scanning the items you have piled up on his black moving altar, their passports checked and barcodes scanned and all the paperwork rites of a Formal Exchange of Ownership processed again and again and again and again, with sometimes the only interruption for hours on end being when a customer usually a lady who looks at you in a way that makes you think she's seen better sales clerks then you every store of her life for the last 200 financial quarters and she'd like you to know it, the lady hands you an item with a bar code that wwon't scan it simply wont do it you know it has scanned before you scanned ten of theem (well you scanned the first and then scanned it nine more times) just two late shifts ago but here it goes it wont scan and you think it might be because of the condensation on the curve of the metalic surface simultaniously glossy and rough in a way that makes you want to climb under you bed--not under your beding but under your physical matress which is against a wall and another wall and a door frame on thee third side and just lay unmoving on the gritty weirdly sharp like aggressivvely sharp carpet , between the carpet and your matress on top of you crushing your body with the weight of a 40 pound weighted blanket and a 15 pound second weighted blanket and also the weight of three flannel blankets and three pillows and three weeks worth of Clean Unfolded Laundary and also the weight of the mattress itsself, which is to say, the weight of the mattreess and all of the things on it, and let that weight just cursh you and maybe muffle the silent jerky sobs of the memory of that glossy rough weird wet curved unscannable barcode dislodges itself. it is a wad of nucleaar furnace grade plasma hurling itself from the surface of the sun in a explosive solar storm, resembling nothing so much as a great apocolyptic sneeze by the sun of entire worlds worth of plasma only for it to fall back into a rapidly deterioriating orbit above or around or along the arc of the star, from you this memory is being detached and from this memory you are falling away from and then raining back towards this memory of this Unscannable bar coded item, and all the time you just want to hand the lady the thing and say fuck it it makes no fucking differnce to me if you pay for this or not my boss would evict me out of the window of upstairss apartment for the chance to buy another self check out machine and those things are the easisest to steal from of all, so just take the damn thing and don't make me type out and double check and tripple check the numbers below the barcode into the systeem on the mostly broken touch screen register and three times in a row get an ERROR message or worse yet interrupt one of the other, more powerful sales clerks whose already had to reescue me twice tonight from an overload of procedural misapplication viz. two different interactions with three different fized income seniors wwith a caashier's check and a paper voucher for a coupon which must be validated on an app and verified with an email. please lady, just take the thing, its a gift, take all these grocceries, tell your friends, i'll peersonally load them in the cart for you but don't make me your weird little clerkcopclerric. but when you make your offer, making sure to package it in a joke for easeir lapse of ceremonial script and maximum plausible deniability that, hey, if i can't scan it i guess that jusst means i have to give it to ya!, she looks at me with offense, the kind of offense you learn to recognize after you see it a second time on the same person after she's asked to see and then subsequentlly seen and also talked to your manager. I don;t want you to give it to me if its not free. is it free?
well no obviously there is a price and a bar code at least it has a bar code but its not in the system but its really ok
will you be giving me the rest of my items for free
well i mean i scanned them and
then scan this one
or
^when the next customer tries to get the same treatment...
Who do we meet on the street? What did they teach us about when the guy takes the truck to the place?
The sacramental general strike