Technical Analysis of Commodities
I’m supposed to be doing my homework, got a math test in the morning and a paper due for my English class on Wednesday that I haven’t even started yet, but I feel like writing…
I used to read a magazine in prison called “Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities.” Technical analysis is a technique for trading commodities or stocks based on price patterns - basically certain patterns as seen on a price chart are supposed to predict the future price movement.
A couple days ago after my Middle Eastern history class (that I had just finished writing a 10-page take-home midterm for), I didn’t feel like just coming to this house and sitting in my room doing whatever bullshit on the computer I usually would do, so I went for a drive to a shopping mall. Kind of an “upscale” mall. I hate going to malls, but in this suburban shithole society there are not really a lot of other options for places to go or things to do on short notice and within my house arrest time limits.
So I drove over to this mall and walked around inside for an hour or so. The only store that even remotely interested me was an Apple computer store, and since I already have a bunch of Apple computer shit, I didn’t really see anything I didn’t already know about or have myself. I don’t even recall seeing a bookstore, although I find it somewhat hard to believe that there wasn’t one there - I do know there used to be one outside the mall proper, don’t know if its still there since that was probably 12 years ago at least…
But what really stuck me was the setting itself and how the people interacted - or didn’t interact, as the case may be. Most people were either single or in a small group, and basically said nothing to anyone else, except the store employees. And the setting of the mall itself really began to disturb me after I walked a bit and started to think about it.
Consider the opulence of this mall, not just in the consumer commodities for sale there, but the building itself. I thought in particular of the people of Iraq, who have had their entire country destroyed by the imperialist imperative to secure more resources, commodities, and markets for profit. The people there have had their homes decimated, their lives destroyed, yet here are all these people obliviously strolling around in this climate-controlled Temple of Capitalism. Not just that, of course, but less than a year ago I myself was sitting in a segregation cell in a maximum-security prison 24-hours a day, and I know personally hundreds of men still there in those conditions, not to mention the other millions throughout the American prison system. Et cetera.
Not even just this mall, but even in my college classes its not that different. Obviously the goddamn purpose of the college system is to funnel people into jobs that corporations require, so I guess its not that surprising that the college setting mirrors the larger society. And at least there is somewhat of a pretense of learning things, even though primarily what you are learning there is the “skills” required by the corporations to whom you have to sell you labor and your soul in order to survive in this society. The teachers I’ve had have all been pretty cool, and I respect what they are doing, but no matter what they personally really want to do or not do, they too are bound by the chains of the system to work within the preestablished boundaries. And the interactions I see at the college are not that different than the impersonal non-interactions I mentioned from the mall. I mean, at least some of the people in the college seem to know each other and have some “friendship” of some sort or at least hang out together, but its still mostly these isolated individual commodity relations.
In any case, I just don’t understand how people can continue to remain willfully blind to the realities of their existence. Well, I understand that this entire system is designed to indoctrinate people into this ignorance and indifference, but how can people fucking accept this shit? This isn’t to say that people shouldn’t be able to enjoy their lives, but I just don’t understand how they can accept this lifestyle…
