MacKenzie, on a whim

The following is a short paper written for my Political Geography class in response to Michel Foucault's Crime and Punishment. Additionally, I watched a Swiss documentary entitled The Panopticon  by filmmaker Peter Vlemmix which can be found  here!  Feel free to leave thoughts/comments/questions etc. It seems since the beginning of modern societies there has been a question of how to control the people who are a part of them in attempts to create a Utopian society. Governments, from monarchs to democracies, have used different techniques to accomplish this goal. In the beginning there was the spectacle; those suspected of committing crimes were publicly humiliated, beaten and often killed. This form of punishment, however, had a downside. It often led to public protests in which common citizens demanded the release of the accused and physically assaulted the executioner. In the end, instead of instilling fear, this technique perpetuated deviance. At the end of th...

I'm going to write something every day. Well, almost every day. I don't care if it sounds eloquent or intelligent, hell, I don't even care if it "flows". I just want the honest truth of each day, the moments that pass unapologetically, the thoughts harassing my mind as I'm trying to convince my wired body it wants to sleep. Once again I find myself on the bus, riding up and down the beach front. South to north, north to south. I've been wearily watching this pattern develop for years now. North to south, south to north, sad to north, now to south. Back and forth and up and down and sometimes even inside out, filling and emptying, filling back up and falling down and emptying out again, spilling and spreading down the coast. Salt on a snails body, late hot nights in the summer on the back deck, laughing while I squirm. At the beach I have to transfer buses. Everyone empties onto the street, young girls with messy makeup returning from their spring break fes...

I think what it boils down to is I believe the world could have turned out a lot better without European imperialism. This implies that the world would be a better place had my ancestors not met on boats crossing the Atlantic, it'd be better had my grandmother never moved from Brooklyn to a New Jersey suburb with her seven children, had my parents never met in whatever bar and I had never been born. That's part of why I want to disappear sometimes. I want it all to disappear. The state, society, the rules and regulations, the meat industry, car pollution, charity organizations and public transportation. Fuck our iPhones and the tantalum being mined in Australia and Africa, are the lives of those being disenfranchised worth the newest technology for your thirteen year olds birthday? How have we gotten so far from what's important. We are drowning in our comfort, snuggies and instant coffee, name brand clothing and swimming pools in every back yard. Consume consume consume, w...

Rising early to ride the bus to St Petersburg. After an hour, the sun is finally shedding light on the palm trees and flowering bushes. We pass a waterway and I imagine it's ancient form, dark skinned peoples navigating their way through it on wooden canoes. They heard the earth, they felt the migrations of animals and knew by looking at the clouds everything they needed to know about survival. I told him I used to be able to cry on demand by thinking about my father being hurt or sick or worse- dead. I told him about the nights I worked as a dancer sweet talking CEOs and Wall Street bankers, getting inebriated to convince myself I was okay with what was happening. Once I lost my boots in a cab, I came home crying and barely clothed. My sister and our roommates took me to the diner downstairs from our flat, right in the middle of Manhattan in the sea of winter. I don't know why I told him these things, they're things I'm ashamed of, that I don't even like thinking a...

"A sunrise has no stage fright." The sun is setting in St. Petersburg. Jess and I are sitting on a seawall in Vinoy Park. The moon is a few days from fullness and it brightens as it climbs the sky. The horizon darkens to a purple and pale pink, reflecting off a large sailboat as it crosses the skyline from South to North. The park is filled with families, dogs, lovers contemplating the city's skyline from a bench hidden by trees. This city is alive and in it I have found new life; I have a new understanding of love, of compromise, comfort and coalescence .  It's chillier now and she sits, boots on the edge of the concrete wall, intently devoured by her hand's desire to write the beautiful thoughts in her head down. She is writing in a book from Samantha, sent to me while she was studying in India. I was drowning in anxious tears and fits of hysteria in my Saab on campus. Jessica was saving me, wine nights and bedrooms smoke filled and shared. This life is s...

I've been trying to sleep. For the next 36 hours I have nothing pressing to accomplish. Of course, there are plenty of emails to send, events to create, pages to read. But nothing extremely pressing. So I decided to sleep, something that is usually easy and enjoyable for me. I lied in my bed for two and a half hours, unable to get anything remotely close to sleep. Relaxation? Maybe. The sky is purple and it's spring time in St. Petersburg. Here we go again, whirlwind for the umpteenth time. Okay, okay, maybe it's only the fourth time in the last year. But how many times in the last two? Or three? Too many to count. At this point it's like a profession, maybe an addiction. The therapist I was seeing accused me of using it as an escape, a defense mechanism. I guess she didn't understand it's just in my blood, it's something I need to survive and stay sane. Look at that, months of depression and as soon as moving comes into the picture everything turns around. ...

Conversation started Thursday 27/02/2014 04:21 Tommy Piehl So last night I couldn't sleep, too many thought racing through my mind, thinking of the various responsibilities that would require my attention today...the next day....the day after that. I wanted to get away, travel somewhere right then. Strangely these thoughts made me think of you. I remembered your stories from class of travel and adventure, and a blog that you wrote from your twitter. Now I know what your thinking. That secret blog full of your personal thoughts that you probably thought no one would ever see, or maybe your just thinking about how to get a restraining order on a guy that you haven't had a conversation with in months and is writing you a story about your personal diary...anyways The point here is you are an amazing writer. Your writing is so personal yet not, at the same time, as if you are telling a story of someone else. It is complex and flows like poetry but is relatable...

When I woke up this morning swollen faced and worry hearted, lazily I pulled the covers over my head, the way you do in the late afternoon when you are trying to get me to come back to sleep with you. Under there, away from the brightness of the day and all of the birds busily chatting, I could smell you, cinnamon and sweat. Sometimes leftover vodka or whiskey morning breath, cinnamon and sweat. And I wanted you, instantly. I start salivating, dampening, wriggling and writhing in the sheets even though you tell me, "Fuck the sheet." I cannot resist the thought of you arguing vehemently with your professor, a stranger, my friends, me. Challenging and brooding when you lose at darts, a drunken smile and too much weight leaning on my body, so tiny in comparison to your height. I want to be the cigarette between your long fingers, sticking to your top lip as you inhale, I want to be breathed into your lungs. I long to be the vodka sliding down the back of...

What the hell was I wanting to write the other night in bed? I was hearing things, music in my ears, making up drum beats with my eyes closed, words were spilling from the sides of my thoughts. "Maybe the noise is coming from outside," I hoped, realizing once and for all maybe I am delusional. Something about the moon; Setting as an upturned crescent, large, golden, glowing low in the midnight skies over the Gulf of Mexico, collecting snow like a tea cup. Freezing, killing, coming full circle on the fourteenth of the month. Would it be appropriate to call this irony, Adam? I know you've explained it many times, it is wet and does not stick like I'd wish Maybe I should wear my nightgown inside out or not at all. Not in a strangers sheet, though they may be washed and dried at the laundromat on Central and 28th. A man came in while I was reading, questioned me for quarters, starred at my thighs crossed over one another on the plastic seat until I ...

For periods of time I quit writing. The thought to never crosses my mind, I continue on with my daily activities (usually which include writing for academic purposes) and slowly, fits of anxiety and depression creep upon me, lightly coat my body with an eggy negativity and I go ever so softly into a coma of monotony and boredom. I rediscover myself in some sort of meditation, usually a time where I sit in one spot and listen to music thoughtlessly for a while; the bus, subway, a long car ride. Words strike me quickly, they are fleeting and flowing and unless I get them down in some definite sort of way I will lose a part of myself forever in the infinity of my mentality. The further the words get away from me, the more of myself they take with them. For as long as I remember, I have been attracted to art and artists. I've dated numerous musicians, painters and poets, befriended actors, photographers, all people with a medium with which they express themselves. Always envious of t...

Ruin is a gift, ruin is the road to transformation. My heart broke today thinking of you, of the comfort in lying with you, wrapped in your arms, your sheets, I just needed to feel you to forget  To forget the sadness, the ripping apart of my veins from my arteries,  of the strings attaching my heart to  the rest of my body Dark red droplets falling from the sky, expanding like rivers through cracked and dry lands infertile desert.

      That summer, the summer after the storm, after all of the storms, I stayed at the beach where I grew up. The boardwalk was brand new and there were trucks along the beach where the restaurants used to be. Shiny silver trailers selling greasy beach food to the tourists gawking at the new beach, complaining about the rocky sand. I stopped writing because, well, I pretty much had stoppped doing everything that I found enjoyable. I drank too much, smoked too much, worked too much, I didn't leave much time for thinking because thinking hurt and I was sick of hurting. I bought a lot of things I didn't need, trying to fill some gap in me. I knew it wouldn't work but I tried it anyway. I was never alone. Maybe I was tricking myself into appreciating lonliness by never allowing myself to feel it. My heart was closed and all the reiki in the world couldn't keep it open. Most of the time I felt pretty happy, enjoyed the silly things I was doing, giggling while sneaking champ...