Godsmack Inspiration

In the new paradigm of temp services and unemployment alternatives, a person can find themselves in the most hellish of musical circumstance while immersed in the muck of industrial quagmire for the sake of paying the rent.




For the past few weeks I’ve been working as a temp at a windows factory on the North side of Evansville. My duties are menial and sometimes inhumanly brutal both physically, and mentally. The physical aspect is easily dealt with because of my long history with nightmarish labor jobs, but I’ve happened upon a torture worthy of international inquiry, "Godsmack" overexposure.



One of the potential perks of this horror show of a job is an unbelievably loud stereo on each line that one can slide his or her own CD in to enjoy while carpal tunnel syndrome sets in destroying the nerves of said person’s hands. There is one serious problem with the musical situation on my particular line; my direct supervisor is a "Godsmack" savant.



At first I thought my twenty-two year old window glazing mentor had just forgotten his other CDs and decided to play one CD repetitively throughout my first day, but unfortunately this was not the case. "Godsmack’s" guttural vocal styling and fast paced instrumentation must be a subject of fixation for the guy. I had to admit that the metal made my pace on the line pick up a beat or two; sometimes from anger, and sometimes from resignation.



After a weeklong bombardment of never ending windows and "Godsmack", I decided to make a bold move and bring some of my music in to see how it would go over. I knew that most of my tastes wouldn’t jive with the industrial accommodations, so I compromised and brought in some; “Led Zeppelin”, “Mr Bungle”, “The Black Keys”, and “The Beastie Boys” to name a few; but my attempts at compromise were met with an uncomfortable silence amidst the deafening noise of the factory. My young windows pedagogue even did the unspeakable; he ejected “The Black Keys” midway declaring, “This is too slow.” Absurd!



This past week I found myself deconstructing "Godsmack" lyrical clichés, which there are too many to count, and deciding whoever wrote the lyrics had mother issues and an obsession with death. I sometimes found myself laughing out loud at the thought of how this third rate band and the many like them were selling millions of records and influencing popular music blaring out onto the streets of American trailer parks and out of speakers perched on factory lines haphazardly with mutilated wire hangers.



There is one redeeming quality concerning my "Godsmack" nightmare, inspiration. As I’m finishing up this piece I’m listening to the haunting genius of Jeff Buckley’s, “Grace” album, and am gearing up to polish my resume. While Buckley inspires me to break down the walls of my subconscious to find my inner truth, Godsmack inspires me to riddle my resume with white lies to escape my immediate circumstance.



Someday I will be exposed to "Godsmack" in a different setting and may possibly find some good qualities I may have missed in their dynamic due to association, but I seriously doubt it!







©2011JerryAllenMasterson

The Resolution

An inverted season and another impromptu alibi

for why I haven't quieted the mind to escape

the hive


Drudgery on a production line

to fertalize neurosis


Looks and laughs shared by inmates

in cages made of skin and clocks


Another number assigned to identify a

corporate relation to the system,

a prole role as an extra in a comedy for the gods


A resolution is conjured arbitrarily

for the annual let down of tradition


This time it will be different.

This time it will be.

"Modernity Revisited" a Poem by Allen Masterson

All around, digital clocks involuntarily report time,

HD images turn leaves, perpetually color

Loops of an Autumnal Equinox

Pixelation love affairs, 3D trysts in phantasmagoria

While slick Presidents strut up to hovering tele prompters to

Haunt our broken dreams of an abstracted concept of change

A shoe, a book, a naked man

Can’t shatter the manufactured reality propagated

To enslave us with catch phrases developed in focus groups

Polls read the pulse of dying consumers in death throws

On wireless worlds where words shed their meaning with

A wanton dictionary’s evolutionary Newspeak whisper

Our days burn upon us with solar flares that melt our

Individual icecaps, drown our individual expression

In seas of analog egos

We can only hope to meet on the other side

Of fiber optic gateways, and modem magic

To love in purity, having escaped

To the infinite breath-Nature

E version of 1000th Monkey with Apocalypse Retrofitted

1000th Monkey (E Version)

The Dust is in the Detail by Allen Masterson

I've worked hard most of my adult life. I'm talking "fingers to the bone" type work. I've only had a few cushy jobs like; bank teller, suit salesman, security guy. Most of my employment history sounds like a "what's what" of careers which are detrimental to one's health: screen printer, hod carrier, lumberyard guy, sign painter, gas tank removal, and the list goes on. I've never actually sat down and created a list of all the jobs I've suffered. I've never made a detailed list of my sexcapades, either. I guess I'm not a list type a guy.

My latest increment in Job Purgatory, is auto detailer. With all my previous experience with mind-numbing work, I fit into this occupation like a murderer fits into a noose.

"Misanthropic Me" takes over as I clean the filth of others from between the seats of Ford Focus's,  Mercury Grand Marques, Flex Fuel Expeditions, yada-yada.

Everything about car detailing sucks. Every piece of lint I find after the fact makes me hate the human race and the laws of physics. Cleaning chemicals coat my nostrils and leave my mouth tasting like I just ate a sandwich made by Jack Kevorkian.

I know I have bad Karma. There's no question in my mind I have toxic energy seeping through the walls of this particular incarnation. This may sound a bit defeatist to the average person.  No one wants to acknowledge their life may be influenced by factors beyond their observations. I have learned Eastern  ways to possibly minimize suffering due to the residue of bad Karma; but the discipline is monumental while the concept is fairly simple. In other other words, it's easier said than done.

I'm realistic enough to lay down my sword, pick up the Shop-vac hose, and curb my rage while sucking up the half melted fragments of a discarded Clark Bar under the driver's seat of a Ford Taurus. It's all for a good cause. I'm scrubbing away at the nastiest stains in my soul; to give my next vehicle that showroom shine...

Selfless Selfishness by Allen Masterson

We inhabit a planet comprised of many different systems. Our very natural environment is an intricate and beautiful system which most of us look upon with awe and wonder. We try and master Nature by instituting a system called "The Scientific Method". Human civilization is made up of many different systems; from global trade structures, to family units. Ideology and Theology play big roles in constructing systems created by humans. The systems created by Man and the system we witness in Nature are as different as nightmares and freshly squeezed orange juice.

As an individual, I attempted to make sense out of my environment by taking sides on certain issues, and finding fault with those which ran against the grain of my self-admitted conditioning.

Taking a stand and pointing out the injustices of my reality and perspective kind of validated my existence. If I could only make others see things the way I did, and inspire them to do the same, then I could look at reality and say, “I’m alive, I exist”.

I sharpened my rhetoric on whetstone barstools. I read Freud and Jung. I sought out the Extreme to get their perspective. I made errors of judgment. I had “AHA!” moments of complete delusional enlightenment. While in prison I examined the criminal mindset and mentality. I studied Eastern philosophy and practiced Zen meditation techniques. I experimented with entheogens (and still do) to face my hidden demons. I have brought myself to the brink of suicide and death just to catch a glimpse over the edge of it all. None of these methods have led me to join any political group, religion, adherent of any school of thought permanently, however.

I have often heard of great men who had gone through amazing tribulation, and even depravity, to emerge greater for their experiences. Most great and inspirational stories left from these persons of Herculean will are twisted and fragmented into quotes for speeches given by ideologues with ulterior motives. I often hear the great Martin Luther King Jr. quoted by politicians and media pundits who have just enough cunningness to get a camera on them or get majority vote out of a populace. It seems to me no one can translate the great lessons of another without attaching an agenda to it.

So here I sit with no seeming point of reference, and becoming more and more misanthropic by the hour. But I’m beginning to realize something significant I may have missed if I were at this point earlier on in life. I’m not completely miserable; actually, I’m quite content. Exhausting my efforts in pursuit of ultimate answers has allowed me to look inward, and examine my experiences more objectively.

I no longer get angry with any seemingly opposite point of view. I’ve taken my view almost completely out of the equation. I’m not so bold as to say I can completely sympathize with religious fanaticism, or hatred and biasness of any sort. Any time I get worked up over an issue, I check myself. I eventually recognize the pitfalls of passion when it comes to a shared reality.

Most would throw terms like; apathetic, lazy, or even coldhearted at me to get a rise out of me. Whatever tricks passionate people use are easily thwarted when I point out the very passion that fuels their beliefs are also felt by their opposition, but from different perspectives. For some strange reason, that throws the tempo of a discussion off. The usual response is, “But they’re wrong”.  

I have but one more direction to take to justify my existence, and that direction is inward. I’ve decided to detach myself from any so-called concrete issues, or systems of belief. I will reflect back on all my experiences during the course of my life as if I were examining a completely different person. To keep this all as pure as I can, I will attempt to reignite whatever way I happened to look at the world during certain events in my life and share them with others through my work. I’m not only going to dig deep into sore spots and completely dissect my ego, I plan putting it on display for any and all who wish to examine themselves.

I don’t want to win over adherents, or change the status quo of any system but my own. I have realized how selfish I ultimately am, so I give my selfishness over to the world, selflessly.

Apocalypse Retrofitted

Ever since my early childhood, I've been fascinated with the end of the world. I remember when the first television show about Nostradamus aired back in the eighties. My Mother's side of the family talked about the end times incessantly. Almost every civil conversation would inevitably find itself on the subject of the end. I've been loosely studying prophecies and the plethora of conspiracies about any given subject just to be able to find missing clues to what I consider to be a very near apocalypse.

Through all the trials and tribulations I've endured trying to acclimate and thrive in a society I believe to be ultimately doomed and horribly flawed, I've never once bowed down to optimism; though I have put on temporary facades to navigate certain circumstances comfortably so as not to be labeled a nut job or god forbid, a pessimist!

I've been on the brink of suicide a couple times due to the wear and tear of the many conflicts I have internally. These conflicts are precipitated by the misanthropic mindset, and the innate survival mechanism found in every thriving creature on this planet; a needing to live and experience versus the cold realization that humanity as a whole is unnatural and not worthy of its status.

I try like a man possessed not to dwell on the negative, and to hunt ferociously for all the beauty and positive qualities the human race has to offer, but I am hampered at every revelation. A general rule of thumb for me is that if you get more than five human beings together for any purpose having to do with an action which takes longer than a few days, they will begin to combat on a subconscious level and an alpha human will subjugate the rest; thereby instituting a spontaneous caste system and retarding the optimal collective process. Now that corporations have more rights than individuals, they are always going to be the alpha ego guiding us to a total system collapse.

But corporations, governments, religions, and a list of other institutions are nothing but apparatuses designed to give the few power over the many. These systems can only last so long separate, but if combined, they become the ultra control state which has been foreseen by many, and is what I refer to as the "Beast" to kind of give a nod to one ancient perspective.

You don't have to go back to ancient history to see the systematic implementation of a global super state with all the amenities of religion, commerce, and coercion. Going back a mere sixty-five or seventy years will get your thinker thinking.

There are but a slight percentage of the population that believe this system is thriving. And the reason for their indifference to the rest of the human race is that they believe most all humans are not worthy of power or even truth. They hold secrets handed down by the ancients that we just aren't privy to here in Middle-Of-The-Roadville. Once in a while they'll let loose a rogue teacher to recruit from the hiring pool of longing initiates but these prospects are only allowed to go up the ranks so far. These fools are referred to as "Gate Keepers", but I like to call them "Pressure Valves".

The one thing the elite of the world are prepared for is the inevitable frequency shift about to go down in the very near future.Whether there is a comet strike, pole shift, sun burst, plasma burst, etc., our beloved elites believe this current caste system should be maintained. The push is on and the shit is going down.

Many of us find solace In religion and meditation to make sense of this crazy world. I'm with you guys, I've tried. I really have, but every time I get into the doctrines, or essence of a certain religion, I find gaping eerie holes jumping out of the woodwork. No amount of faith can make me go blind. But when studying many religions, I inevitably find correlations and similarities that help me to see and go further into our past.

I discovered bits and pieces of the Mystery Schools of ancient Egypt and may go as far back as ancient Sumer. I started researching the Mystery Schools about the same time I began researching Quantum Physics and reverse engineering. When CERN's Large Hadron Collider was kicking up the rhetoric on the doomsday scene, I did my best to make any connection I could sniff out.

"AS ABOVE, SO BELOW" began to echo in my mind on a daily basis. Looking at the SOHO images of the sun while reading about the Mayan Calendar for me is like David Carradine tying his noose while admiring the sexy curvature of the hotel closet's light fixture.

After a few bouts with my own personal apocalypse done by my own actions, I realized the show is too entertaining to walk out on, my role hasn't been written off.

The only savior I've found in this madness that surrounds me is my very own imagination. I used to think my creativity needed to be directed towards what others' expected, or whatever would make the masses feel entertained. I've fairly recently discovered this to be a misnomer on my part. My imagination is much more than connecting with other beings, it's the tool which is aiding me with an ultimate connection with my higher self.

Whatever events may play out on a global scale, I've found my role in my own private apocalypse retrofitted especially for me.