marketing the moustache.

you are now buying a copy of the cookbook.

mateo has been here for some amount of weeks. our handsful of nighttime love guitar. a few days of sunshine and a lot of trips to the internet.

and marketing. see bill hicks for the orthodox take on marketing ("anyone involved in marketing please kill yourself. right now. i'm not joking"). and i'm learning, once again, around and around the wheel of life, that

1. everything matters
2. nothing is other than what it is
3. judge not
4. to be the self, one must know the world

and this While or two, it's marketing. which can be, if done out of deep personal attachment and with single-minded precision, a sort of dusty run-up to the Divine.

this all goes back to a large indian prophet named 'Prem' (love) who gave mali and i each copies of a book entitled "mind-power" after a three-hour freelunch/diatribe on his life and how the only way he could escape from the thorny mistress of alcoholism was to self-hypnotize himself out of it.

so i started reading this book and naturally mateo has been into this stuff for years and now i'm totally convinced, irrespective of the "current" position of the universe, that i am now selling 10,000 cookbooks. i somehow know that i will have no problem doing whatever i need to do in the near future because i am now selling 10,000 cookbooks.

obviously, in order in for this actually to happen, the second edition will be called, as one of my customers of the indian edition attempted pronounced the title: "cooking can be god".

it's a dangerous proposition, to use the higher regions of the human mind for narrow personal gain. i think dick cheney and the other members of the advanced lizard cadre are probably experts at it. and i don't often think it's appropriate to fight fire with fire, even for the oft-repeated "highest good of all". but this is where the experiment has led me and this is what i'm doing. right now.

this leads me back to that dangerous busride to kalpetta, which was almost the end of days, and, inevitably, to marx.

two things about india have recently and consistently amazed me.

a. everyone here understands that 'god is one'
b. seemingly irrespective of wealth or profession, people are incredibly happy to be with their families, to have one day off, and to work at their duty.

why is this? i have neither clues nor tools to get to dig down to the roots, but my surface appraisal points to the role of the family in anchoring one's stability, one's path, one's dharma. when people ask or tell about religion, they are speaking more to family than to caste or belief. they want to know what rituals your family practices, for that defines who you are. they don't care what you believe in, normally, because this isn't a culture where the possiblity of your disbelief is a live option. i think that -- religion is tied to family, to your very blood -- is why everyone can be so chill and believe in different gods and have them all be one. how hindu rickshaw drivers can be like "jesus, allah, oh yes, shiva, god is one" and have their index finger stridently aloft through the polluting energy of nearby camels, oil wells, and military bases.
with jobs it's the same -- people are psyched to be doing what they're doing because there's no option in doing so. you're basically assigned or groomed for a profession since your well-behaved childhood, and the 'consensus reality' is strict enough that you understand a Shoemaker is What You're Doing and that sunday when you can ride the bus 2 hours to see your family is real the rain of all blessings.

these perspectives have been shat upon by the modern world, and -- and here im getting back to our favorite four letter word -- by the bourgeious destruction of the family, as marx's points out in his little manifesto:

"The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation."

so there's that. interestingly enough, in 1848 when marx published the manifesto, this destruction of the nuclear family into pitiful atomic units had not yet occured. there weren't even televisions or microwaves to supplant the factory labor system. so, my concern here is whether in his phraseology and critical zeal, marx actually created the result he prophesied.

these are the dangers inherent in marketing. and that's what i'm dealing with. so, you know, buy more cookbooks and i'll see you in amerika. gods willing.