The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world has culminated in a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The Spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving. - Guy Debord   We do not exist, so this is true expression.   This spectacular world. The slips of pain in my head are daunting. Fibrous slimy pink hemispheres pulling apart the middle so slowly that I'm feeling every little weave away from me. Wet feet ringing into leather. Sticky, sweaty face.   I keep trying to get intimate with this moment, trying to be intimate. I've taken too many drugs into my system. I haven't felt well for years and who is to blame? How much energy will I waste on crap thinking? How much energy not getting involved in the things I care about? I can type ninety words a minute yet still can't capture my dumb hick voice. I want to talk about Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle and how it fails.   It fails because it's been the only feature in the last ten years of my life that has always been stable. I love the Spectacle because I don't have to worry. I get it, this invisible layer in our communication. All this ongoing pop-mediation-image complex whatever. Hum in the shower of made up show tunes, pitching early Beatles and Rihanna lyrics 7:15am. I got to stay clean, because I'm afraid to smell. I keep asking people if my room smells because I spend so much time in there, hoping to find a job so I can leave it.   A lot of theory has this lazy war tactic, where a term gets defined over and over again as, “this thing is.” It's a hijacked value, straw poll results. I bet I could string a pretty long line of anal-beads when Debord does it.   So, how can I define it. John Courie, my closest adviser, says it's in the first chapter in SOS. Separation Perfected. But, I think that's it right there, the title itself. The urgency of desire is need in children. Desire pools until reaction voids the user. The most brilliant advertising campaign for alienation we'll ever get to watch has always been us.   The Spectacle is separation perfected.   For example - when I was a kid, I'd punish myself. When I was an adult, I'd punish myself. I wouldn't do the project or the paper. I'd ground myself for two months. My father's dead, so I'm grounded for a year. Why do I still think I can save people? You can't save anyone. I thought "love" could save me, but it's just the dried whistle of the Spectacle.   Love can't ever save you from yourself. The Spectacle cuts me up, makes me think of ending it for weeks on end and then I pull out for a peek, breathing again. It feels good to get up and walk around and do nothing. I can type out this note thinking it's, like, not really brilliant, a whole bunch of me saying nothing for nothing. I'm so far back into the past that my hope is buried deep inside a love that can't exist and won't exist, that has no heart, hits me, takes me into the parking lot with a crowbar.   The post-spectacle, where the raw self negotiates identity.   I smoke again and it's now like 4am and I don't need it. I've got the television on all the time, because I have bad tinnitus in my left ear and it blocks some of the wheezing, but I don't want those narratives anymore. The narratives where people are little baby gods with credit card payments they never have to worry that they can pay. This fucking money, this stupid has-been that is only money, doesn't want anything. It barely wants to reproduce anymore. The only escape is through my identity, this is what comes.     Behind the glitter of spectacular distractions, a tendency toward banalization dominates modern society the world over... Stars (spectacular representations of living human beings) project this general banality into images of permitted roles... The function of these celebrities is to act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner. They embody the inaccessible results of social labor by dramatizing the by-products of that labor which are magically projected above it as its ultimate goals: power and vacations — the decision-making and consumption that are at the beginning and the end of a process that is never questioned... But the activities of these stars are not really free and they offer no real choices.   Debord wrote The Society of the Spectacle as a 1967 software update to Marx's pretty little OS from 1867. He was a charter member/non-member in the Situationist International from 1952 in Alba onwards. He built a little bitty world around conquering the arts, theory and finally the government. They were all about conquerers, which they learned from their Moms and Dads during the Dubya Dubya Two and Lenin and Lukács and Lefebvre and Clausewitz and Buddy Holly and Watts Riot, on and on. Our lives, this mass production noise, this accumulation of commodities - like, what are we doing, what are we doing? We big-up production on ourselves and then we mass produce images of ourselves and then those images mass produce themselves into a reality that isn't even really all here and now. So, this little protocol runs around and around for years, and still runs, but like, I'm so done with this bull. Dog shit on my face, exhaustion coma one million and five.   My Dad didn't believe in the Spectacle. Hell, I tried to explain it to him and he'd be like, “this is over my head,” and he'd feel stupid and I'd feel stupid, be like why can't I tell him what's really going on in my mind and if I can't explain it to him, what can I do? I mean, our conversations around theory and Marx and the proletariat misses over and over again, that the masses must rise up on their own. The play-books are written in such an esoteric nuanced kick-start, that you'd have to eat Derrida Wheaties or something to just be like, I'm not here. Who the fuck are we that we refuse to show everyone, that we leave people behind? Our pride is so gross.   If you can't communicate, you can't feel good. The streamlined veneer you hear at bars and bus stops about how to call a phony a blank, a blank a dick, a dick a-know-it-all. Names. Tissue, organic movable cogs gussied up and horrified that they too are dumb. Louie says, “Chickens are dumb.” Our governments are dumb. Their holy moment is power, never money. The power to guru the distribution. A kind of telepathy of funds. The individual does not work. The collective does not work. So, the hallmark characteristics of capitalism and socialism are not really working. The shit has a shape that's too diluted.   I mean, what is left? Art and sex and drugs to enhance the art and sex, but drugs aren't really power-ups or demerits when you add them into the mix for too long or too short. My head is ribbed with dark spots, little puffy air spots underneath the skull. I can feel them when I don't have sleep behind me and the Spectacle lives in all the spaces that you or I over use. The Spectacle resolves itself in your exhaustion, the places where you thin blood.   The relationships I care about feel so tenuous, old rotten chocolate bars, always crumbling. Our bodies are. Network. 1976. We exceed to be the trap.   I wake in the morning and I take a shower, so that my body doesn't stink. Because, stinking is unliked by people. I walk to a car in the sky or under the ground that then drops me at a building where I sit down and type things and then move around and make sure there is enough this or that. I don't do anything. This is no real experience. This isn't robotics. It's how I live. I leave this building and go to another building where I take in a variety of fluids that create a difficulty to just walk around, which is all I can do. My throat choking from poison I've never been able to give up on. I stand up to myself in the mirror saying things that only I know hurt. Get home. Cum. I know the way I breathe, the way my body goes limp. I just need it off my back. I want to be so far away from my room. Don't know where I am. I long for something that isn't the Spectacle.   And yet, I know, I totally know–– that I can live without the SOS whenever I want. Over the course of these 10 yrs, I've been trying to be its opposition. I've tracked down tons of gestures as an attempt to defeat it in my own life. Be it poetry, or chaos magick, friendships or sexual expression. It's evasive, it eats away at my body and my body is that organic thing I keep mentioning, this gooey stretch of something, viscous strands of ruby pink brain parts. Everything is true, permitted, everything is purity. Everything around is real and good and has a real hearth to be burnt up in and eaten up and sucked up and I don't believe in anything. We are a culture of emotional gluttons and slack-jawed Nick DeBoer's.  I don't believe in what I say, what I feel, what I do, what this is, what I just said, this actual moment. All I'm trying to do is write simple from complicated memes but I don't know how the word 'is' works.     Workers do not produce themselves, they produce a power independent of themselves. The success of this production, the abundance it generates, is experienced by the producers as an abundance of dispossession. As their alienated products accumulate, all time and space become foreign to them. The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map that is identical to the territory it represents. The forces that have escaped us display themselves to us in all their power.   What do I really want cause I'm so hooked the fuck into this. I'm afraid I'll go homeless the moment I stop trying to reach out for money. But I'm so sick. I hack in the mornings when I shower and I worry that I see blood but I can't see anything without my glasses on, so I can't tell, I'm not sure, so I get down on my knees and I'm fine or it is blood or my eyes don't work.   I am the entire world and at the same time I'm nothing. I've never been alive. I've never never ever been ever never in this whole thing object universe that I can't really get close to, nor can really imagine or think works. I'm so sleepy. The sleep in my eyes caves in. It's too much. I get it, the Spectacle, it's all inside the insider. It's in the pictures, right there sworn to my face.  When I met Guy Debord I was 23, I thought he could save me. Get me on that guy's boat, it'll solve my problems. Oh please, baby world, save my ass from my ass.     Ideas improve. The meaning of words plays a part in that improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress depends on it. It sticks close to an author's phrasing, exploits his/her expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with the right one.   Fuck. It's in my coffee. It's in my coffee and so I'm in it as well. I've been addicted to so many things for such a long time that I don't really do any of them now. I need to finish writing this long poem that hates on Ezra Pound. I mean, I certainly can't imagine reading him again. I wanted to solve the puzzle of his epic, find some Superparadise in it. But it's all solved by applying anti-semitism to it. What a bummer, what a prick to work-around obscure language in bitter racism, to posit between Confucius and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Fornication rites and the balance. To so grossly speculate.   So, I started work on my epic, which would remove the problems of Pound and add the enemies of Debord. Take-down notice of thy vanity or whatever. I do that Dante-goes-down-into-the-shit thing. That's how I'll become famous. That's how I'll go through my brain and find my imagination within my imagination, to escape from the Spectacle. Find a safe space. I don't want to feel the slow creak rent open anymore. I can't. I mean, I just need to get the fuck free. I imagine a long walk - the evolution of the brain where we start to actually feel and register it's component parts. The epic is the longest memory of imagination, it pulls our story through time.   - NICHOLAS DEBOER Nicholas DeBoer is a poet, collagist, activist, and chaos magician living in NYC.  He is the author of many chapbooks and broadsides, as well as a co-editor for Elderly with Jamie Townsend and Cheer + Hope Press with Geoffrey Olsen.  He also is a member of the Potlatch Discordian Network, a magickal organization operating out of Ridgely, MD. Currently he is prepping "The Singes", the first in his epic arc "The Slip", for publication.  He is also also most certainly alive.