Image Credits: Maria Kassab.

First of all I would like to apologize from the organizers of, and participants in the #Feb27 demonstrations for not having joined their crowd of 3000. As a consequence of that, my account of this day will always be second-hand, and lacking on an essential quality: an understanding of the participants’ energy. However, I will do my best to articulate what I think of the whole deal.

In principle, I am as committed to secular values and institutions as every other person who actually participated is. Nevertheless, I feel that there is some mixing-up in the demonstrations’ demands. Corruption, economic fragility and lack of social justice are not the products of our political confessional system. They are the products of either our confession-based political fetishism, or (to grant ourselves the benefit of the doubt) a lack of political choice. Let us keep this point in check and move on to the real argument.

3000 participants is not bad at all for a count, but compare it to the crowds who gather in speech feasts in Martyr’s Square or in Dahiyeh and you will be reminded of the bitter truth: We ARE sectarian. Unlike citizens in Tunisia, Libya or Egypt, we are not oppressed. Those demonstrating on that rainy day are the idealist, leftist fringe, not the mainstream. And without the impetus of the mainstream, no change can happen. The problem is with us, not with our political elite. Two rounds of elections and we’ve brought the same elite to power, because it is in their protective shells, or acid sectarian speech, that we find refuge for our deeply sectarian psyches. This is why, please allow me to repeat it for the nth time that what we need at this stage is a reform at more fundamental levels: education, media, and certain laws.

We cannot be liberated from our own-induced plight without a real change of consciousness. And this will not happen when today’s change agents are stuck with dependent media that publish and broadcast sectarian-poisoned content 24/7, and without exception (No, Al Akhbar is no exception). Change is also unlikely to happen when tomorrow’s change agents are stuck with an educational system that treats scientific truths on equal footing with Biblical phantasm, and when logical frameworks on seeing the world are delivered in many cases under the hoods of clergymen. Today’s and tomorrow’s change agents cannot dream of effecting any change when hate speeches and gibberish are freely delivered to their ears on Friday sermon hautparleurs. Today’s and tomorrow’s change agents will always be alien to change when our Muftis and Patriarchs have a (deeply seated?) influence on politics, and when our elected MP’s run to them for benediction as a matter of protocol, brand-building and public appeal. In our existing void of true political vision, and once the bubble façade of consistent political agenda of reform explodes, our politicians and their media vehicles implode to sectarian discourse. In other words, this is our lowest common denominator. Not so flattering, eh? So what change can we think of in the house of our own beast, my fellows?

That said, I am not being a pessimist, I am just saying that instead of parading panels screaming ‘The People Want To Bring Down The Sectarian System’, we should really be whispering to ourselves ‘The People Want To Bring Down Their Own Sectarianism’. Consequently, my friends in Laique Pride and #Feb27, let us be more concrete with what we want:

1- The People Want Educational Reform because we cannot inflict the intellectual injustice of creationist protectionism on children anymore.

2- The People Want Political Alternatives in the form of new political parties with secularist and reformist agendas, who are consistent, and who have clear commitments with measurable results, and who will hopefully run for the next elections in 2013 and hopefully win the majority in 2017.

3- The People Want a Newspaper and a TV Station, Real Ones because what matters is the motivation of the mainstream, not that of the intellectual elites, the leftist circles of Hamra, the activists of social media, or the information-exposed of the Internet in general. Because we have the right to media outlets that perceive us as clients of objectivity, rationality and truth, not as flag-waving marionettes.

4- The People Want Whatever Last Year’s Laique Pride Wanted because we should not forget the basic that is achievable as of now: a proper civil code.

So friends, may we detach ourselves a little from the zeal of the 2011 revolutions, and observe our own particularities (and thus requirements) not to end-up needing another (even more difficult) revolution in 2021?

On the 6th of November 2010, Palestinian blogger and activist Waleed Al Husseini was arrested by the Intelligence Services of the Palestinian Authorities in his hometown of Qalqilya in the West Bank. Waleed has anonymously created the widely controversial (and now defunct) ‘Allah’ page on Facebook. He also blogs about atheist issues (often stealing and/or plagiarizing other atheist writers while appropriating the text). As the official press clip reveals, The 26 year old was ‘caught in the act of diffusing atheist thought’ in an Internet café  by Intelligence Services after being duly tracked for two consecutive months.

First and least, I would like to congratulate the Services for their great achievement, building on painstaking and meticulous work. You know, when you’re a nation project under occupation, and wishing to gain the sympathy of the international community by proving that you CAN be a fully-functional nation which assumes the natural rights of its citizens, and when your occupier spares no PR muscle to position himself as the only ‘civil democracy’ in the region, your best bet is to follow and prosecute people who are committing the devious act of propagating their ideals.

I would also love to congratulate the Maan news agency for their brilliant journalistic flair. Not only have they sided with the Intelligence Services in demonizing Waleed for spreading atheist thought, but they have absolutely failed to understand that the Allah page on Facebook was all about discrediting the divinity of the Koran by proving that there’s nothing superhuman about its text, and instead reported Waleed as claiming divinity. I really would have respected you much more for acting professionally by denouncing his arrest as strongly as his plagiarism . Meanwhile, I’d rather turn to Haaretz for more reliable news on the Palestinian issue, which is a little ironic.

Last and most, I would like to applaud with unprecedented fervor the jaw-dropping tolerance of those people who commented on the article (most residents of Qalqilya as it seems?). Their calls for the cruelest acts of punishment against  Waleed (aided by wishes of divine sadism) is a crystal clear display of what religion truly means beyond the vain denial of apologetics: a well of bigotry, of censoring difference, of panicking at any attempt of  intellectual search and discourse, and of willing to forgo the tie that binds humanity: that basic instinct of geographical community. Waleed is not the son of Qalqilya anymore because he dared to differ. By ardently calling for his execution, you’re basically telling the world that an Arab/Palestinian individual exercising his basic human rights is much safer within the 48 territory than within the territories governed by his own kin. Again, well done. (Check this appalling community string in Arabic as well. It says it all. The only negatively rated comments are those which defend Waleed!)

Enough sarcasm. We have a pertinent issue here. We have an individual who was exercising his right to self-expression, and who’s facing dark uncertainties both from his government and (unfortunately) his own community. Please sign the petition to free Waleed here. Also please visit the Facebook page dedicated to his cause here.

Update 1

I have to say that my opinion on Waleed has changed since the time I published this post. A note on facebook suggests that he was plagiarizing the content of his blog. I verified some of the links and unfortunately found out that the claim is true. To me, Waleed is no more a freethinking hero, but more like a thief. Even with this realization, I maintain the conviction that he should be freed. What he is being detained and threatened for is his atheism, while he should be held accountable for his plagiarism. We all understand that both ‘crimes’ are not equal where he is detained and consequently our action to free him is still very much justified.

I must start this by complimenting you on your complexity, and your elusiveness. I’ve been trying to send you a letter for a few days now, even before you started, but I couldn’t put a finger on who you were or on how I must address you. Every time I tried to look you in the eye, it felt like I was looking through a mirror, at my whole history, my identity, my context and my genes. Thus I really could not address you in an angry or offensive way. There is so much of you in me that despite my disillusionment with the mess you have made, I can still at least sympathize, or secretly enjoy your drama.
Allow me to compliment you on your charisma as well. You’re not exactly cover page material if you’re to be assessed with regular, rational standards, but you have this sort of presence that lets even the most vigilant guards fall, effortlessly. Maybe all those years of chasing your fleeting ghost have made a legendary creature out of you, but you have definitely succeeded at training and intoxicating us to your unconditional observance. I could see this sweet intoxication in the eyes of your admirers on your first days. There is this dreamy, detached, watery quality in their eyes that speaks of their trance. It may be a forced, or an induced one, but it is a trance nevertheless. It feels like the intoxication of young, unhardened love. The kind that sees beauty in every curve of the lover, and prefers to capture a grainy portrait where blemishes are whitewashed.

We’re ready to embrace your madness, and your crankiness, for the sake of all the love you give us when we go to bed. The quality of romance in our daily life over 30 days, and in our history together, transfuses to you shortcomings. So your hallucinations become comfortable. Your father’s fables about our origins, our functioning, our purpose and our destiny acquire a certain quality of bitter-sweetness. We can go further than accepting them. We can put them above the reality we see and observe around us all the time, no matter how elegant or fascinating this reality might be. You and your father demystify this reality, or even demonize it. You’ve wrapped your fable candy with an electric coating that sends sudden bursts of blindness to our neurons. Very well done, indeed, and we take it willingly. Maybe because this is the only sensation, or texture, that our taste buds have met since tender age. Or maybe it is our memories of playing hide-and-seek together in the courtyard. So even when you are unrealistically harsh to us, we love it, and embrace it unconditionally. Even if it means damaging and depriving our organisms. The soul food our love affair provides more than compensates, and for that we’re willing to deny our suffering, and even our organism altogether. We have willingly made an offering of ourselves on your altar, without you explicitly asking for it. Streak of genius.

Dear Entity, more than waning with time, you’ve ridden its arrow. And more than getting lost in space, you have duplicated yourself in many of its molecules and became even more omnipresent. I wouldn’t be surprised if your RNA replicates itself in its void as well. Your brand now uses every channel, every tool and every technology it could put to use. It uses them for free. Just like us, they also offer themselves willingly on your altar. Specifically on these days, you are the buzz. The one. The ultimate.

Dear Entity, as our love is now old and tarnished, I can’t remember what I felt on our dates when our love was still young and pure. I remember you used to whip me. Close to the break of dawn, you would ask me not to drink anymore. I could never understand this demand, it scared me, and I never really bought your argument that you’re teaching me sublimation. I now know that what you’ve been really trying to teach me is subordination. And you’ve adorned this subordination with artifacts that made them more accessible. A song through the ether of the night, a perfect timing to detach from a fresher reality. A deprivation that numbs judgment. I cannot even hate you for doing that. Forget the lovemaking and the pleasure of bonding with you, and with my tribe through our collective love for you. More than those, I can’t deny the fact that we’ve made you. That you’re the daughter of my biological and social make-up. No wonder then that you could be so spoiled, so sadistic, and so charming at the same time..

Best Regards.

Aljazeera only consolidated its association with Islamist movements following its firing of Shlomo Pfeffer

‘It is a sad day for media in general, and for social media in particular’. Judging by the number of retweets, this would easily classify as the most popular among the Israeli Twittersphere in the wake of Aljazeera TV’s disengagement of Shlomo Pfeffer from his responsibilities as its Senior Correspondent in Israel and the Palestinian territories. This controversial move from the Arab world’s prime mouthpiece in the west comes after an equally controversial tweet from Pfeffer, where he expressed his sorrow over the permanent vegetative state of ex-prime minister Ariel Sharon on its 4^th anniversary. Widely seen as the enfant terrible of Arab media, Aljazeera has been trying hard to carve itself a niche among both western audiences and audiences of Arab nationals or descent in the west, an effort it concretized with the launching of its English service in 2006. The channel has been trying to reverse its general association with Islamist and other guerilla resistance movements following its airing of the infamous Al Qaqeda videos starting 2001, and to maintain a code of professional objectivity that never managed to escape suspicion. By recruiting local journalists *slash* brand ambassadors, the channel hoped to establish the sort of credibility nurtured by grassroots relationships between its brand champions and their local context. Amidst the controversy, and before the rumors of the disengagement were confirmed, Pfeffer issued a statement on Aljazeera’s blog to explain the real motive behind his tweet and clear ambiguities around it:

‘What I really meant is that I was sad because regardless of his atrocious war crimes, Mr. Sharon was a man with a lot of dedication to his own people, someone willing to go to extremes to further their cause and interests. He was also credited with the courageous act of withdrawing from the Gaza strip, despite wide critique and disapproval among his electoral base. I once interviewed Mr. Sharon and asked him about his long-term vision for Israel. He lightheartedly and bluntly replied that it is every Israeli leader’s dream to establish the borders of the Greater Israel from the Euphrates to the Nile, but there would be room for non-Jews to exist. We will allow them to. Indeed, this deserves respect and this is why I expressed sorrow. I apologize if this was misinterpreted’

Apparently, this explanation did not help much, and did not convince many, especially in Aljazeera’s native geo-political context who saw in Pfeffer’s statement clear bias by his nationality towards a figure so unappreciated yet so central in the Middle East conflict. To Aljazeera’s audience in the Middle East, Pfeffer had no credibility left. He could not be trusted with objective reporting of the daily maneuvers for existence in this sensitive and volatile region.

Reactions among Aljazeera International’s western audiences were of quite a different nature though. The channel’s move was seen as motivated by its origins and political affiliations rather than by its effort to safeguard its professional integrity.

‘Leave #Pfeffer alone, you pathetic Aljazeera!’,

‘Shlomo we love you, and because we are your friends, we are unconditionally by your side’

‘Who said that someone with the twitter handle @ShlomoAljazeera is expressing the views of Aljazeera and not his own?’

‘So what? Shlomo cannot express his own views just because he works for Aljazeera? After all he is an Israeli, he must owe something to Sharon, despite the latter’s unclean record. Can’t a journalist be human after all?

Those were examples of messages that circulated on social media to express ultimate disdain for the channel, and uncritical support for Pfeffer.

If you too, think that Aljazeera has been unfair, please raise your hand and/or leave your reason why. I shall compile your comments into an official petition.

Disclaimer: in the extremely rare event that you did not see this as a fictive story and a direct allegory to the Octavia Nasr/CNN incident, please take note of that.

Photo courtesy of blog.independence05.com

Lebanon’s march for secularism on April 25th was special and significant in many ways. To begin with, it was the country’s first ever event of this sort, and even though the numbers of attendees was less than the 7,656 who have RSVP’ed with a nod on Facebook, the few thousands who were there said a lot about the aspirations of a generation. I said ‘generation’ because the demographic profile of the attendees 18 years of age or more roughly reflected the distribution of social media users, with a skew to the 20 and 30 somethings. This is hardly surprising given the fact the event’s ‘recruitment’ happened mostly on social media, and the fact that the post-war generations are likely to be the ones most cynical about sectarianism and its (non-)significance.

However, what was most significant about the parade is that it transcended its message and call. Beyond university students whose enthusiasm is still pure and centered on ideas, or the communists who felt like they were drowning in the obsolete, most other participants did not seem to have gone there to call for secularism as an end, but as a means to assert two things: their identity first, and their aspirations second, the two being tightly interwoven of course. From the tail of the troupe where my friends and I were, there was Nassawiya, the feminist collective, with their charged and powerful presence, a group of Capoeira enthusiasts, entertaining us with trans music (that I kept clapping, and even dancing to), and a group of participants covering themselves from the shades of the gorgeous sun on that morning with a rainbow-patterned umbrella. There were also the Hamraiottes, those urban dwellers who find in Hamra and its neighborhood semiotics an identity home. There were many sub-groups, interest groups and niche communities at the long end of the social tail sending out the clear message that secularism is nothing but a platform, without which they could never fulfill their true identities and aspirations. That is simple, for the absurdity of sectarianism, and religion in general, feels like an identity tag that annihilates all the more diverse and more significant tags of a human being’s identity.

The long end of the social tail (Photo courtesy of Samer Chehab)

Then there were our friends from our generation, that we found randomly as we marched, that we hugged, stalked, joked with or flirted with en route from Ain el Mraysseh to the Nejmeh Square. Those friends who shrugged to the authorities prohibiting them from reaching the main parliament square, and headed straight to enjoy the rest of the day in cafes by the sea. And who would really wish to spoil the pleasure of that day with banal details? The sheer confidence, determination and complacency that was in the air was the perfect antithesis of everything the authorities’ prohibition represented. Who needs to head to that chic, but damned and toxic building that houses all the country’s turmoil, when you know you’re there to signal the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one?

This was no angry or frustrated march, but a happy parade that sees the future and knows it belongs to her. In this sense the total indifference and smooth parting at the end was also significant in its own right.

So now what’s next? How do we build on this? The way I see it, we do not need to plan much, for the parade itself barely feels like it was an instigating move, and more like a latent event that was waiting to happen and found in social media the right medium to materialize. It suffices to keep the discourse going. It suffices for us to remain authentic about who we are, and clear about what we want and things will take care of themselves. Our society will evolve and assume the successful individual qualities in its DNA. We just need to keep these qualities inserted in the replicating DNA. And remember, despite all its dramas and conflicts, we live in a beautiful era that is especially empowering to the individual voice, and thus to its collective expression.

P.S. Check other LebLaique-related blog posts from Nadine Moawad, Funkyozzi and Maya Zankoul. Twitter-fed images of the march can also be found on Lebanese Voices.

Here, allow me to oscillate between ‘We’ and ‘I’ because even though the experiences described are personal, they are not unique. They are rather standard for people of my generation who grew up in my social setting or in clones of it. Thus it is really more of a collective experience rather than a personal one.

We grew up in Liberal Islam. A version that believes in the supernatural, but remains appreciative of life’s value. One that does not take veils seriously, and sees them more like an age-image accessory for grandmothers. One that integrates playfulness, optimism and earthly ambition into it. And above all, one that does not invade the territory of personal choice.

In liberal, Mediterranean Islam, people could selectively pick whatever suited them from among the inconsistencies of the Koran to produce a version of religion that is tolerant and detached. Liberal Islam was a faint moral backdrop, and a series of cultural ceremonies. It was another serving on tables of Ramadan, a call to prayer interlude between happy audiovisual, and a pretense to wisdom among what I remember to be a more vivid and more diverse cultural or political discourse.

In my memory, nothing abstracted the Islam we grew up in better than Egyptian TV. The best Ramadans came in the summer, for the then the Mediterranean winds were calm enough to allow broadcasts from Cairo to reach us. They had religious programming. Clergymen delivering sermons so sterile that I basically remember nothing of. Groups of people clad in white circling the Kaaba against a backdrop of calls to prayer sung in the sumptuous voice of Sheikh Mohammad Rifaat. But above all, Egyptian TV had programming brimming with joy and imagination, the most noticeable of these being the daily Fawazir.

As a child, my religious ethos was pretty much the product of this context: infused with fantasy, borrowing from music and Manga dubbed into Arabic. On one occasion I had to memorize a passage from the Koran that described paradise. I did memorize it along a theme of disco music, with imagery borrowed from Treasure Island. It was really more like Gigi in Paradisco than a solemn fixation on the after-life. Growing up in liberal Islam did often send me into crises of guilt, but didn’t really suffocate me. I grew up with choice.

Between the 80’s and 00’s things in our region have changed. Between economic malaise, induced tribalism and imported Wahabism, liberal Islam gave way to a more stern, more extreme, and more invasive expression of religion. What seemed liked a benign, harmless entity turned into a tumor making Middle Eastern societies go haywire. What was in the background suddenly became the Alfa and Omega of everything. What was a cultural serving became an existential raison d’être. What permitted choice became the guardian to a massive intellectual gridlock.

And again, there’s Egyptian TV abstracting the religious mood of the era. The two videos below are from a mainstream music channel, and a niche religious channel, respectively. To those who do not understand Arabic, the first one shoves Hijab as an ultimate virtue and a necessity in the consciousness of children. Note minutes [1:11-1:55].

The second one, in its colossal horror, features a child preacher delivering a sermon on the virtues of sacrificing one’s life in martyrdom and in the service of religion, on the premise that earthly life is transitory and worthless. It focuses on the usual trade-off: the highly sensual/sexual rewards to be expected from wives (a.k.a. sexual objects) in the real life (i.e. the after life).  Children learning and adopting Middle Ages speech tactics, with a content so mad it can only belong to the Stone Age. Notice the glimpse of the clergyman/presenter in minute [01:51], and the ugliness of its meaning.

Please allow me to make a clarification. I am not saying that all of our media has fallen into this decadence. In fact, you’ll find most voices criticizing decadence on the other end of the spectrum, whether sexual or other. Media has swollen and segregated, but religion in the Middle Eastern media of the 00’s is what it is on the ground: anything but liberal. I can cite many other examples of horror, but these deserve a post on their own. What I find most troubling is that this content is targeted at children.

We as adults are free to consume whatever media we choose. After all we did grow up in liberal Islam, and we were given the choice of where to situate ourselves on the spectrum of religious belief (or lack of it). What we are not entitled to is indoctrinating our children, or even exposing them to this monstrosity.

We owe almost everything to our childhood. It is our only opportunity as human beings to be what we are meant to be: agile, receptive, creative, destructive, silly, happy. All of our adulthood is nothing but a collection of faint crumbles of these superior capabilities and talents of childhood. We owe our children their right to grow up in imagination, in distant worlds, and in beautiful melodies. We owe them our silence over our own intellectual convictions (religious ones included). We owe them the tools to form their own convictions later on in life. In one word, we owe them CHOICE. Indoctrination of the kind exemplified by the videos, so pervasive unfortunately, is obviously not the ground that fosters choice.

I would like to thank my friend and fellow activist Ghassan Yonis for bringing to my attention the meaning of the Birds of Paradise, which happens to be the literal translation of the name of our region’s foremost religious channel targeted at children (Touyour Al Jannah). Apparently in Islam, souls of (children) martyrs inhabit green birds in paradise (http://www.islam-watch.org/AbulKasem/IslamicVoodoos/Part13a.htm). So basically the channel, free-to-air and included in any cable package, is all about branding death and packaging disregard for life with ‘religious music for the young’?

Amidst this nausea, and while several families in our region have still not blocked Touyour Al Jannah and its clones on their receivers, I shall leave you with one of my very first memories from TV. An intro to Fawazir from Egyptian TV, one of my favorite audiovisual as a child. In my subjective, emotional, nostalgia-driven opinion, it remains among the most beautiful audiovisual ever made.

With the emergence of social media, the ChatBox era discourse on the ‘online persona’ evolved into a discourse on the ‘personal brand’. The issue was not about projecting a set of transient characteristics anymore, or an online ‘temperament’ that could very easily change with every login. It was about constructing and maintaining a single, stable and consistent online identity.

Between blogs and social networks with different currencies, some (rare) users chose to keep their personal brand positioning across platforms. Most others simply chose to keep their unrelated activities, characteristics, or interests as independent persona ‘silos’ over different platforms. Most of the time a platform’s social currency guided the construction of this silo, for your audience, and consequently the kind of information you share on professional networking sites is fundamentally different from what you share on more personal, more casual sites. As long as these platforms were disconnected, it was all too simple.

The case is not the same anymore. The post-Facebook Connect era changes the rules of the game. Inter-network linkage challenges the mere concept of the ‘personal brand’. Here’s why. The fundamental quality of brands is consistency. Brands can and should offer different products to different audiences or targets, but fundamentally they remain bound by their core values. If an online persona is to qualify as a ‘personal brand’, then it has to follow the same guidelines. Some –mostly highly visible public profiles- do it. Queen Rania of Jordan does it. She’s a philanthropist in her public life, and a mother on Twitter. That’s a consistent brand with the umbrella positioning ‘human’. Richard Dawkins does it. He’s a rationalist and a humanist on RDFRS.org, in his public speeches, publications, and (again) Twitter account.

How about us, mere mortals, not propelled by online PR strategies? As it happens, the cases are very few when a real life persona is consistent. A hardcore rationalist can also have a thing for astrology. A total pacifist can cultivate an interest in weapons. A philosopher might have a penchant for kink. A racist can also be a philanthropist. A chamber jazzist can have a taste for Kitsch.  Most real-life personas are constructed on dynamic interplays between opposites. Note that I am not talking about multi-interest people who are happy to advertise their personal richness as part of their online brand. I am talking about thoroughly inconsistent traits with regards to public perception. If your blog is about rambling in existential angst, do you really want to share it with potential employers or business partners on LinkedIn? If you use your Facebook account mainly to stay in touch with family and friends abroad, do you really want to link it to a YouTube account infested with bondage video favorites? Yes you can, in principle, if you’re somehow nuts, or if you belong to the vanguard of users who are re-defining the very meaning of the post Web2.0 online (and offline) persona. Most people on the other hand will not. They will only do so when perceptional norms have changed and inconsistency is assimilated in mainstream values. Just another regular adoption graph really. But even if and when they do, they cannot be a ‘personal brand’, for the mere fact they are inconsistent. At best, they are super-personas, grouping antagonists and exercising them in interests, activities and communication that is open to everyone over the Web. Meanwhile, we have selective sharing, with a central and predominant ‘personal brand’, surrounded by a satellite of ‘private matters’ that will most likely remain private. No, thank you, I do not want you to know that I played at least 10 games of Goo Deluxe while writing this.

P.S. Thanks to @aymanitani for the inspiration during his presentation at #GeekFest.

and without missing, without regrets, without love and without memory
there will be no passion, and sex will no longer exist

if this wet and hazy terrain of matter condenses into a single, suffocatingly beautiful grain
just short of being a black hole
then the split fragments of consciousness will collapse back into each other
like a middle-aged man migrating back into his mother’s womb
and the mother suddenly turning younger, in white gown, horny and shy
only then
the supernatural will disappear, and the logical becomes funny,
the metaphysical becomes boring
curiosity and meditation become pointless
thoughts a waste of time
and words become, well, Ha-Ha

In this bliss of continuity and desensitization
there only exists a super-reality,
a very well informed numbness
Like ageless photons, we never age
and live a new set of non-emotions
addicted to fusion
our sole aim is becoming one-er and one-er
denser and denser
until the limits of infinity
until it all becomes white background noise.