A shout out to my history teacher who makes the time to teach
for I’ve picked up on the subtext she can’t speak:

if you teach to the test no one’s really being taught
all we learn is to chase empty numbers
and you wonder
why we’re all burnt out
when the end goal isn’t our happiness now

when the very organizations meant to support education
profit off those who have no choice but to turn to them

when the ones who can pay to prep
the ones who work until they can't see straight,
the so called “high achievers”
are the only ones who matter
and we ourselves kick everyone else off the ladder

if standardization is supposed to make education equal
then at the very least it should teach
that we all have a spot,
that in society, we can all be contributing members,
but it’s not.

like my history teacher’s given me,
we need lessons to life rather than to test

it’s time we set a better example for our students
Teach us that even when the blocks have fallen down, we can rebuild the tower

It seems to have spontaneously combusted, but it didn’t. The disease struck long ago, brewed in the petri dish of Depression, WWII, and convergent technologies. Well before that, really, but that was the point of critical mass. By the 1950's, it was an epidemic. The independent Republic of individuals, small towns, coherent communities, distinct cities, local diners, shops and stores tied together with two lane blacktop was crumbling. Things only got worse faster. It was a disease of toxic, lulling dreams. American Dreams. And standardization was its crushing foot that flattened everything and left a homogenized wasteland in its trail. The old gods vanished and the new became despots. Go anywhere in America, Boston or Biloxi. You can’t tell where you are. Most shop at the same stores (real or virtual), eat at the same chain restaurants, wear the same clothes, gulp from the same Internet, swallow similar information, and think (within acceptable variations) the same thoughts. Even sin has become tediously consubstantial. Knowledge has been supplanted by content. Words are squeezed of meaning. Everyone is an expert and no one knows anything. Except Siri and Alexa. The Dreamtime of consumerism, consumption and conformity dominates. All that remains to come is the dominion of AI. Then we will all be watched over by machines of loving grace, free to graze in bovine bliss in the cybernetic meadows of bland utopia.

Croydon was never the same
after 65
when it was sawn in half.
Wellesley underpass like
a strewn underbelly,
gave the Motor vehicle its commensurate order.
Whitgift middle schools playing fields uprooted south
making way for the,
Whitgift Centre, old before its time,
like Dorian Gray in reverse.
I recall Grants department store closing in 1980.
presiding over an omen, we could not afford a niche,
only for it to become an entertainment venue.
Standardization became our
inalienable right
with the soul of the centre dying
death by a thousand cuts,
not helped by the recent riots.
But Croydon will survive.

Each cause is lost,
drowned in satellite waves of radio,
buried somewhere behind
the crystal gleam of the plasma screen.

My love and I sat sidelined,
watched all our friends
aim to be different in all the same ways,
the standardization of the soul,
it's unclear if anyone can cut the seams.

Try,
we will.

Die,
we will.

Trudging through the barren wasteland
of busted marble statues,
bleeding artistic antiquity.
Starving stray dogs,
just her and me.

The vultures will circle,
the sirens will sing pop songs,
teenagers will be settling divorces,
and our heads will scream, carniverous, cancerous.

Try,
we will.

Die,
we will.

But with my love's hand in mind,
I feel no fright staring in the eyes of night.
I only dream of what beauty
we've already buried,
of what lives,
that never got lived.

Like Winston Smith,
I think it’s time to start a diary.
Follow me now:  it’s April in Oceania,
The cruelest month,
The silly season, printemps,
A regular I see London, I see France.
I see Winston’s Underpants.
If you catch my drift?
La Primavera: Vivaldi’s rocking the
Juke box and the vote, Botticelli’s painting,
A mural on Jerusalem's wailing wall.
My diary will be hard evidence of thought crime.
Thought crime: one of the more severe varieties of
Religious experience & the most psychotic form of mental illness,
In a category known as antisocial personality disorders.
Thought crime means never getting into any serious trouble,
Until you’re caught, can we at least agree on that?
So, we'd better add the DSM to our stack of essential literary classics.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
Published by the American Psychiatric Association,
Providing a common language,
A shrink’s Esperanto.
DSM-IV codes classify mental disorders.
The DSM: a Frommer’s travel guide &
User’s manual for life on planet Earth.
So, like Orwell's Winston, I start a diary of my own; but
Unlike Mr. Smith, I address my message to the here &
What’s happening now, not the future, not the past but
N-a-zayer, N-a-zither NOW.
That's right, I write for the present:
“If thought was ever free, it is not free now."
If truth exists it is a closely guarded secret,
Although McLuhan’s observations hide in plain sight:
“The new electronic interdependence, recreates
The world in the image of a global village.”
Which makes us all global village idiots.
We are no longer different from one another;
The age of groupthink is here.
I write to you from an age of security & surveillance,
Warrantless search and predator drones,
An age where no man is ever truly alone.
From an age of standardization, replaceable parts,
Whirling dervishes, dabblers in spin control,
Newspeak and doublespeak,
Atlas shrugged, drugged and fugged,
The new world order:
All but the faint of heart need apply, …
*"I send greetings.”

Here in America, number who knows what in education,
Where we excel in standardization,
Of souls and resumes
Where you need a 4.5 gpa
And hey, I know I’m one of the ones in the 1%
I’ll repent for my hypocrisy in saying “break free”
I know, poor me, being reduced to numbers just isn’t my thing
4.33, schedule block B, math, PE and chemistry
Sometimes it’s hard to breathe
I can feel my chest cave and shrink
That chewing glass feeling
And imagine the kids sitting on the brink of failure
Which has grown to become something:
A cacophony of the anti American dream
And therefore we’re stripped of autonomy
In the land of the free
“I pledge Allegiance to”
The US public education system which finds its niche in the fact
That witchcraft seems to be the way to survive it
Deviation from the norm is only embraced for a profit
So basically unless you’re an actual prophet I’d color in the lines
It’s not like you could find the time
After the 7 hours of school, 3 for homework, 2 for sports, 7 for sleep, 2 for eating, and half a minute for breathing
So on Gregory, on Denise, to your 9 to 5s
Of course there’s those that thrive
Living their best life outside the American Assembly line, like in algebra there’s an exception to every rule
So I’ll run the rat race September to December to spring break to summer and then start it over
I’ll chew my glass, if you’ll fill one up with champagne for June of 2020, when the real world begins,
Because the world of high school and imaginary is where I live.

What is a daemon?
In computing, a daemon (pronounced DEE-muhn) is a program that runs continuously as a background process and wakes up to handle periodic service requests, which often come from remote processes.
------------------------
Did no one ever tell you, child,
never swear for no excuse,
plead guilty,
confess you was beguiled,
indeed. By some when
back then you had kin, what
made time to preform
the secret baby making.

Once upon a time,
we were always orphans,
from first whipper snappers used
to scrape tar from industrial chimneys.

Songs of Innocense in a new age,
learning old religions decay to mythos,

whence new religions tie memorium,
whence each season we return to recall

our broken spirits, how so and so sang,
lala live for today, la la live for today,

some same stories we recall, links,
URLs, to old sessions recording history,

close your eyes and drift away, listening,
much as winds seem to do, returning
on their circuits from collection
to collection, paid attention tokens, believed
to soften the hull on the gospel seed sown
to a cultivated faith, planted to propagate,

the idea of a secret code Truth uses in spirit form,
the Truth of truths, which, if known, even once,
makes the captive free,

mentally, happy as one can imagine,
under unchanging immutable terminii enforcing
order.

Order, called for, order in the court
of geeky oddball poetic discerners of like or love or not,

Thought traditions trades across epochs forming news,
too much to think about while considering sidereal extents.

Desiderata, poetic license, madejathank, Christian Nation,

Conquistadores were still heroes in 1954,
when the generation first born in the United Nations
victory forever standardization of historical information,
- Boomers stepping aside, survivors come to remember
- first were we to be graded by machines for marks
- made in Number two pencils rounded to one swipe
- width, right answers, only, only, one swipe between
- the lines, esoteric practice for precision aim.

to be overseen by servants of the victorious economy,
as pieces resorting to old formerly used rules of conduct,

smell the wind the strange idea carries,
worth weight, pushing power, pumping umph,

known cost of use, userer's fee, faith, the story held true,

with the evidence in the box, the bag, the sacred bundle,
all but forgotten, faith becomes the evidence of things unseen,

children are told
to hold these truths, those being taught you,
as you line up
in patterns
of proven paid attention, facing the flag

child, you should remember, wordless, for lack of a phraze,
thinking What? What am I pledging, what is pledging, I swear

I mean, I swanee, by golly, gosh ****, shucks, I ghucking did not know.

I live in this Town
This ******* Town
I walk at night making these street lights my northern star
You see, the lights are point to the gas station near the high school
Because this is where my friends are

My friends welcome me with open arms
Because the see what I see
They hear what I hear
They think what I think

They see this town turning
They see that this town is no longer filled with opportunity
The tire swing is no longer there
It melted away like the rest of our dreams
The blue skies have gone away
All my friends see are the street lights loitering the gloomy roads.

My friends hear useless rumors
Rumbling in their rusty gears called boredom
School has imprisoned our creativity
And forced us to become a number in the standardization of this world
School told us that we can't all be astronauts.

I want to leave
This town is slowly putting chains on me.
I can see it in my older friends
They smoke cigarettes at the park were they used to swing their lives away.
Thank god I have college to swoop me up
and put me under her wings

But now before I fly away,
I see that girl who was kicking my shins in Elementary
School covered in the slums called darkness,
You see the Town took her spirit away
And now I can the monsters crawling out of the closets and roaming the streets

I looked into my shadow,
black with such ignorant purity,
yet with the good judgement
I am void of
to shout out
"Don't look at the mirror!
Don't you dare even glance!"
Why not? I'd ask,
foolishly looking into
the reflective glass,
eyeing the pink,
pudgy,
fat,
stupid,
repulsive
stain on society that is me.
Cringing at the image that displeases me so,
the image that has caused the scars on my wrists.
the image that haunts my days
and steals away my nights.

it hurts.

"Because the mirror is a liar"
My shadow replied.
"Because the mirror is a monster,
what you see there is not you,
what you see there is pain.
Look closer,
for that slight warp in the mirror
that gives you a slant to your mouth
is not a malfunction of manufacture-
but of the mind,
carefully crafted
and polished
by society
that you are not good enough,
that you are something you should be ashamed of
until you hand them those so easily torn papers
you've spent so long working for
so you can be chiseled down to nothing
and pumped with plastic
to satisfy a twisted need
for standardization.
That is why you don't look in that mirror.
Because you will not see yourself,
you will see a false projection
of everything you've been told
is not okay."


I tore my eyes away from the mirror-
And for a moment.
just for a moment.
I believed that I was pretty.

Beyond definition and standardization,
Beyond understanding and categorization,
Beyond bold ambition and extreme perfectionism,
Beyond cheerful optimism and renewed existentialism.

Beyond love and understanding,
Beyond fear and high-goal setting,
Beyond hope and conformed learning,
Beyond joy and great triumphing.

Beyond arrogance,
Beyond rebirth,
Beyond growing,
Beyond changing.

Don't you want to move beyond?
Don't you want to be better?
Don't you want to be free?

Well--
You can't be.

Interchangeable parts are parts (components)
that are, for practical purposes, identical.
They are made to specifications that ensure
that they are so nearly identical that they will
            fit into any assembly of the same type.
One such part can freely replace another,
without any custom fitting, such as filing.
This             interchangeability allows easy assembly
of new devices, and easier repair of existing devices,
            while minimizing both the time and skill
            required of the person
doing the assembly or repair.

The concept of interchangeability
was crucial to the introduction of the assembly
line at the beginning of the 20th century,
and has become an important element
of some modern manufacturing
but is  missing from other important industries.

Interchangeability of parts was achieved
   by combining a number of innovations
and improvements (          ) in machining operations
and the invention of several machine tools,
such as the slide rest lathe, *****-cutting lathe,
turret lathe, milling machine and metal planer.
Additional innovations included jigs
for guiding the machine tools, fixtures
for holding the work piece in the proper position,
and blocks and gauges to check the accuracy
of the finished parts. Electrification allowed
individual machine tools to be powered
                                  by electric motors,
eliminating line shaft drives from steam engines
or water power and allowing higher speeds,
making modern large (  ) scale manufacturing possible.
Modern machine tools often have numerical control
(NC) which evolved into CNC (computerized
numeric control) when microprocessors
                                             became available.
Evidence of the use of interchangeable parts
can be traced back over two thousand years
to Carthage in the First Punic War.                                 Carthaginian
ships had standardized,                                      interchangeabl­e parts
that even came with assembly instructions akin
               to "tab a into slot b" marked on them.
In the late 18th century, French General Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval promoted standardized
weapons in what became known
as the Système Gribeauval after it was issued        
                                  as a royal order in 1765.
(Its focus at the time was artillery more than muskets
or handguns.) One of the accomplishments
of the system was that solid cast cannons
were bored to precise tolerances,  
            which allowed the walls
to be thinner than cannons poured with hollow cores.
However,           because cores were often off center,
the wall thickness determined the size of the bore.
Standardized boring allowed cannons to be shorter
                              without sacrificing
accuracy and range because of the tighter fit
        of the shells.                It also allowed standardization of the shells.

Before the 18th century, devices such as guns
were made one at a time by gunsmiths
                              in a unique manner.
If one single component
                             of a firearm                              needed a replacement,
the entire firearm either had
to be sent to an expert gunsmith for custom repairs,
or discarded and replaced by another firearm.
During the 18th and early 19th centuries,
the idea of replacing                                       these methods with a system
of interchangeable manufacture
was gradually developed.
The development took decades                         and involved many people.

      Gribeauval provided patronage
to Honoré Blanc,  who attempted to implement
     the Système Gribeauval at the musket level.
    By around 1778, Honoré Blanc began producing
                        some of the first firearms
                        with interchangeable flint locks,
                        although they were carefully
made by craftsmen. Blanc demonstrated in front
of a committee of scientists that his muskets
           could be fitted with flint locks
                    picked at random from a pile of parts.

                   Muskets with interchangeable locks
caught the attention of Thomas Jefferson through the efforts of Honoré Blanc when Jefferson was Ambassador to France in 1785.
Jefferson tried to persuade Blanc to move to America,
                                       but was not successful,
so he wrote to the American Secretary of War with the idea,
and when he returned to the USA
he worked to fund its development.
President George Washington approved of the idea,
and by 1798 a contract was issued to Eli Whitney
for 12,000 muskets built under the new system.

Louis de Tousard, who fled the French Revolution,
joined the U.S. Corp of Artillerists in 1795 and wrote an influential artillerist's manual that stressed the importance of standardization.
In East Asia during the Warring States
period and later the Qin Dynasty,
bronze crossbow triggers and locking mechanisms
were mass-produced and made to be interchangeable.
Methods for industrial production
of interchangeable parts in the United States
were first developed in the nineteenth century.
The term American system of manufacturing
was sometimes applied to them at the time,
in distinction from earlier methods. Within
a few decades such methods were in use in
various countries, so American system is now
a term of historical reference rather than current
                                      industrial nomenclature.