O’ Chicory, My Chicory

Everyone has their voice. It’s always there. It’s processed through five senses into your mind and then assembled into ideas and then deposited out through those same five senses. Think of conveyor belts bringing goods into the factory of your mind through your hands, eyes ears, nose and mouth and a different set of belts bringing repackaged goods out wrapped up as ideas. Sometimes improvements have been made on the ideas. Sometimes they have been completely reassembled into something new. Sometime simply a sticker has been put on them that says “approved for redistribution.” Sometimes they are tossed into the furnace.

It is not only the so-called “brilliant” minds that run these factories, it is us all. And when the factory really starts going, it begins producing enough products that it needs to find methods of distributing them. And lucky for us all, in this day and age, there are plenty of those. So everyone’s idea factory is exporting at high levels and their products are global commerce.

Some aren’t very good. But somewhere in there, more ideas HAS to eventually mean better ones.

The conveyor belts coming into the factory are filling it up very fast. The furnace fires are burning bright. The smoke is billowing out of the smokestacks. And it’s not just the useless, repetitive ideas they are burning up in there anymore. Now it’s the stuff they just can’t even get to. The warehouses are filling up and there just isn’t time to get to it and more stuff is coming in and what’s the CEO to do? He has to just run at maximum capacity and throw the other stuff in the furnace.

And you don’t want that stuff piling up in there. Some of the packages are hazardous materials. Some contain rare bugs that need to be dealt with and, if ignored, the bugs will get out and eat up the walls of the factory. Some have containers of poisonous gasses that can break and harm the factory workers.

So the factory has to be run well just to keep all this stuff in order. The conveyor belts that export the repackaged and hopefully improved upon goods have to be flowing and the smokestacks need to be billowing. That way the factory can pass all it’s safety inspections and keep producing.

For a long time The Chicory was a great method of distribution for my factory. After the Flood, it helped me sort out and package and record and redistribute the packages that were coming in. Most of the best products from The Chicory came from the “Commentary” category where the more carefully prepared posts were placed. “On The Second Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina” was perhaps the clearest example of this time. The ideas were coming in through many other local bloggers (and the steadily churning factories of their minds) and were used to build other ideas in my own. Like global commerce, these other factories were essential building materials needed to make my own product.

Business at the factory was booming. It was a time when many factories were working overtime. Three shifts. A 24-hour operation. The voices were strong and The Chicory was an excellent method of distribution for all the packages I was shipping and the ones I was redistributing. All our voices were strong. Research and Development could barely keep up with what we were putting out.

But then there began to be other methods of distribution. The smaller, less complex packages began being distributed through Twitter. And the less profane, more middle of the road stuff through Facebook.

And then there came another, weirder, more esoteric method of distribution.

And then slowly the old Chicory “super highway” of distribution began to slowly trickle down. And not without good reason. The Chicory is a time consumer. Blogging is a time consumer. I am already over the estimated amount of time I mentally budgeted on THIS post. So resources to process the ideas are being used up. Linking, fact-checking, spell-checking, making-sure-nothing-you-said-is-stupid, it all takes time.

And also, the recovery of New Orleans after the Federal Flood (which fueled the factory) is set in motion. It isn’t complete but, there is certainly a notion that it doesn’t need to BECOME something now that it IS something. For better or worse it’s under way in its current form. And there is nothing The Chicory is going to do now that it didn’t do in the past in hopefully some small way.

So while the ideas are certainly not in any sort of era of austerity, the usefulness of The Chicory isn’t the same as it used to be. This conveyor belt is being refitted.

I used to have a strict “all New Orleans,” rule here. I didn’t think anyone cared about the personal mind farts of my life and I didn’t blog about that. If I did, I made sure I showed that it tied into some bigger picture somehow. At least I tried to. The Chicory was essentially a “recovery blog.” One of many and they were all fucking beautiful. Amazing factories churning out and distributing exquisite ideas about exactly what New Orleans needed to be after the storm. And I am glad the answer was, “as close to what it was before as possible.”

I think it’s safe to expand now. What R&D has come up with is to process products from the factory that deal with humanity. Humanity right now. How a factory can process its ideas. What those are. How being “spiritual” should really mean being “human.” Not the idealized human but the real human. How we fit in here.

I am going to try and make some art that fits the theme of blog posts as sort of a visual component as well.

And if anyone has ever heard me speak, it’s will unfortunately be profane. I fit into the Universe by being the son of a sailor and a social worker. Both of who in other lives were a mechanic and a waitress. So I’m never going to be able to shake that necessity to take things right down to their filthy base. Where sometimes they belong. We do come from the dirt you know. The flowers in the Spring come from the dead.

As a lover of the absurd nature of The Universe I promise not to take myself to seriously. Though, I certainly will at times.

So The Chicory is going to be about being human. And more importantly, human in New Orleans.