h.u.m.a.n...b.e.i.n.g

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' - Network, 1976

Busy. So busy.
Work hard.
Play hard.

Every moment of everyday filled with tasks and options and deadlines and obligations.
With parties and booze and music and film. And television.
Keeping busy. Never stopping. Bills have to get paid.

Mouths have to get filled.

We run and we search. Stream and pour through subway lines and side walks.
Have to get by there is work to be done.
Stimulate and saturate and exacerbate.
Don’t look me in the eye.
It’s a dog eat dog world.

Not a moment to waste on thinking and thought. And criticizing and wondering why it is.
We are afraid to leave our houses.
Afraid of our neighbors.
Our friends.
Our lovers.
Ourselves.

Divide and conquer. The beginning of the end.
We don’t trust others.
We can’t.
It’s not safe.

When we stand side by side. Yet so apart.
Isolation and alienation.
The real terrorists.
That grow and devour.

Never so alone.
Divided we all fall.
Down.

It’s not just us versus them.
The blacks the whites the reds the oranges the women the men the gays the straights.

It’s me against them.
It’s me against you.


Just let me get by because there is work to be done.
There are important things that I need to do.

All human beings are becoming humanoids. All over the world, not just in America. We're just getting there faster since we're the most advanced country. -Network, 1976

I want to look and feel.
Not as if I grew from a Hollywood script where love conquers all.
And the free and pure reign.

I want to know that my life was not already imagined and explained.
Rehearsed and recycled.

I want to connect with a human being because I can.
Not because I saw it on a television show.

You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here, you're beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do. Why, whatever the tube tells you: you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs. In God's name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion. - Network, 1976

Alone.
We will fall apart.
We are falling apart.
Fallen apart.

Divided and conquered.
Separated and segregated.
Scratched out and erased.