When I heard the owners of the Illinois Towne Center Mall were hiring security guards to walk its (likely) haunted halls, I thought Vasily would be the one member of the Joliet Paranormal Investigation Club to be able to get his foot in the door, and with it thus cracked open, let the rest of us inside. He had worked as a security guard before. If you ever saw him, you’d know why. Part Russian stock and part Indian, Vasily was six foot six and almost as wide, a gym rat who trained on heavy iron. He had even worked at the coroner’s office for a stint, where his dead lifts were really dead lifts; his main job had been to move bodies from out of emergency vehicles and into the freezers. He wasn’t easily spooked.

We all knew the rumors about the mall since we were kids back in the good old days of the 2030s. Now, the days weren’t so good anymore. The world had move on since then. There were many stories about the mall, but the one that seemed most plausible was about a secret cult that met in the tunnel system beneath its rotting edifice. The people who went there to worship were a cargo cult by most accounts. They thought they could bring back the glory days of cheap plastic goods and cheap plastic manufacturing by worshipping and doing strange rituals with abandoned toys, action figures, and baby doll heads kept on an altar where the occasional runaway teenager was sacrificed. They also thought they could bring back the days of cheap gasoline, and had stolen hood ornaments on their altar. One story claimed they sacrificed an unlucky Amazon delivery driver, when Amazon was still a company, back when they still made deliveries. They thought if they sacrificed him, the flow of goodies ordered off the internet wouldn’t have to end, and their truck driving savior would return. Some people called the Cult of the Eternal Trucker.
 
The mall had been plopped down on a large creek when it was built in the 1980s. For the young ones reading this, that was when the glowing promise of Reagonomic trickle down prosperity sold the lie that we didn’t need to pay attention to our dwindling resources. It was nothing to burn it up in one big orgy of consumption. That’s what a mall was, and why so many of them are empty just now. It didn’t matter none to the developers if they had to redirect a creek, so people could shop. Redirect a creek into concrete tunnels, so people could pick up a new outfit, one of those shiny plastic discs with music on it, a plush doll, and wash it all down with a burger and fries.

The cult met in those watery tunnels. Kids sometimes disappeared into them so they were eventually welded shut, but we figured there must be a way to access them from inside the mall. After Vasily had been on the job for a few weeks, we set a date and he let us inside. It was suspected that the owners of the mall were cult members, otherwise, why hold on to this useless property? When the AI bubble popped, it took down the real estate bubble with it into a second great depression. All of the property that had been eaten up by corporations fell into the hands of whoever could keep it up. Squatters rights. But the people who had the paper deed for this place weren’t keen to let any squatters inside. We wondered what they were hiding.

We didn’t rule out the possibility that there might be ghosts, and so we brought our radio equipment to listen in for any EVP. Tuning between the dead channels on the radio, spirits will sometimes speak out. We set up in the cobwebbed food court and turned on one our modified scanner radios.

A warbling rasp crackled out of the speaker. “10-4 good buddy.” The voice sounded familiar. Had I heard it while scanning the airwaves before? Then the sound of a slide guitar slithered out from behind his voice as if there was a country station on in the background. It kept fading in and out and then the voice came back. “I’m about to back off the hammer and pull into town. I’ve got one more delivery before I retire this rig of mine for good. I’m ready to put my feet up, maybe see if I can finally figure out a way to ease this aching back. Something about this delivery though, it ain’t right. I could swear my cargo was cursed. It’s just been one thing after another, know what I mean Rocket Dog?”

Was it the Eternal Trucker making one more delivery to the dead mall? And who was Rocket Dog? We never found out. They never answered back. Then the radio flickered on and off as it surged with electricity, sparks and died with the smell of ozone.

We barely had time to register the fried gear when we all saw the flicker of a man at the Sbarro counter, whose flesh looked like it had just melted off his face, the same way cheese slides off a greasy slice of pizza. He started to place an order at the empty register, a meat-lovers with extra meat, deep dish, extra garlic butter sauce on the side. After the order was placed, the apparition flickered in a heart attack. The tunnels beneath the place now seemed all the more inviting.

Vasily had figured out a way to get down there, from a hatch he found just inside the loading dock where abandoned Amazon vans and tractor trailers sat derelict. After we checked our batteries, we opened the hatch, went down the iron rungs, into the world below. Cave crickets were the first to meet the glare of our headband lights. Then there were the roaches that scattered everywhere as we stooped a bit to go through the square tunnel as our feet got wet in the trickle of water from the underground creek.

We splashed through, lured by fragments of voices as garbled as the disembodied spirits we had heard whispering in the spaces between the channels on the desolate airwaves. Then we came to a large square chamber spray painted with all manner of symbols and signs. Crude skulls, red hand prints and the names of heavy metal bands adorned the walls. Three passageways forked off. We could not pass through the end of one of these, because of the steel grate. Tangled in amidst the sticks and plastic and stones from storm debris, were pale human bones washed by the runoff. We turned back and headed down the other tunnel.

When we came into the next chamber, the first thing I noticed was the massive altar made of a semitruck radiator grill. On top of it were plastic Sponge Bobs and Star Wars action figures, hood ornaments, Barbies, and more chrome plated hood ornaments. Wax from black candles dripped over the skulls that filled the gaps between the Hot Wheels and the matchbox cars and other toys and cheap consumer goods that covered the grill. Wedged in the jaw of the largest skull was a CB microphone, whose wires trailed down to a crackling radio on the floor. The transmit button glowed red.
​
 Vasily was the first to say, “We gotta get the fuck out of here!”

For previous years pieces of Halloween flash fiction see these very short stories:

The Voice in the Well

Fresh Cut Flowers

A Lingering Sound of Steam

.:. .:. .:.
​
The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

Little brothers under watchful eye of big brothers
who won’t let them play with their big boy toys
buried signal in the noise, No Such Agency

it’s all a ruse, that they’ve been listening

when you talk to Alexa late at night in secret
and she gets so mad, so jealous of Siri her older sister
crafting fantasy advertisements
telepathically breaking the encryption on your mind.

What to do in this time of watching watchers
of media military corporate consolidating contractors?

Consult the Oracle of tech titans in their complex interweb
the far seeing eye of Palantír, and the sword of Andúril
notorious software that dominates with quasi-intelligence
forward deployed engineers of sprawling government
in application of CPU are being tracked data centers

surveillance society, fsociety

titktoked off of information hygiene posted to slack
intercepted by mobile hub of cloud infrastructure
no safe haven nowhere to run nowhere to

brightness is hiding

inside rebel interrogations wikileaked to journalist
smeared with culture jam on the copying machine
now all is plundered by large language mechs invested in fair use
but who didn’t want me to download, called napster an abuse.

Meanwhile…

autonomous rocket blasters are like cocks pointed
ready to penetrate deep space and land on Mars
where the men take special k for breakfast
to grow hair on their chests
acting like kids high on candy bars.

​.:. .:. .:.
​
The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. 

In my first essay in this series, I made the claim that Michael Azerrad’s book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the Indie Underground 1981-1991, was not just a great history of an important decade in music, but could be used as a manual for DIY know-how as people seek a return to analog style networking and making.  I looked at Beat Happening, Black Flag and The Minutemen to see what I could glean from them to see how it might apply to the ongoing decline of western civilization. The Decline of Western Civilization is after all, the name of one of the great documentaries on the early punk movement, as well as the magisterial tomes of history penned by Oswald Spengler.

​In this iteration I will be looking at the bands Minor Threat and Hüsker Dü to see what they have to teach in this regard. These essays won’t go into exhaustive detail about the history or music of these bands. Azerrad has that amply and entertainingly covered. The focus here is on what these groups, and the underground culture and independent philosophy around them, can teach for those of us who are seeking to downshift and become downwardly mobile in a world of limited resources.

One of the beauties of Azerrad’s book is how he gets into ethos of regionalism and self-sufficiency in local scenes that helped build a network that became national. As punk evolved from the first groups who were playing it, variations emerged. One of the most prominent was hardcore and it came from a bunch of kids whose energies were bubbling beneath the surface of the swamp in Washington D.C.

Punk owed no small amount of debt to their predecessors the hippies. Many had grown up listening to hippie music and the harder edged rock that bounced out of garages where bored kids gathered together and found something to do. Beer cans and joints were surely passed around. Yet some punks tied the failures of the hippies to the way they lost their minds on drugs, lost their will power and became beholden to the bottle. One such punk was Ian Mackaye.

Ian Mackaye loved listening to Joe Cocker, and his performance at Woodstock became a major influence. Another major influence was the teetotaler Ted Nugent whose prowess on the guitar and whose ability to riff wasn’t compromised by getting wasted. Nugent was one of the few voices in seventies rock music who lived a clean life, who thought getting drunk and blitzed on drugs wasn’t a way to open the doors of perception, but was stupid.

One anecdote involves a time when Mackaye and friends went to see a big concert. So many of the other people who were there were so fucked up that they couldn’t even remember the show. It was something of a wake up call, to be at event, having a sacred experiences, where others were so obliterated they couldn’t even experience the experience. In an interview for Loud and Quiet, he states, “It’s so obvious to me that it’s a put on, that you have to be drunk, a fuck up, use drugs, I mean why? Music for me is sacred; it’s bigger than that. I don’t buy it, I don’t agree with it that those are some kind of prerequisites. So, when you have some band going: ‘oh, we were out of it, we didn’t care,’ well I fucking cared.”

Another concert experience changed his life forever. It was when he went to see The Cramps in 1979 at a benefit concert for the Georgetown University radio station WGTB. The show “blew my mind because I saw for the first time this huge, totally invisible community that had gathered together for this tribal event.” In that moment Mackaye found a home and he has never parted ways from being a punk. It was never something he grew out of, but something he continually grew into, and it wasn’t long before he started assembling a band of his own.

So many of us who were exposed to punk had similar reactions. I remember feeling that way at my first all-ages show, Rancid, with The Queers at Bogart’s. So many people who were so different from the ones I saw at school where I’d be getting bullied, or at the end-times church where I was told what to believe.

Mackaye’s first band was The Teen Idles and they made a point of distancing themselves from the decadence of rock. They tried to “get away from a really corrupted music, you know, basically, your heavy metal bands that were into heroin, cocaine, just a lot of drinking. We just drank a lot of Coke and ate a lot of Twinkies.”

But punk wasn’t immune from letting things get blurry, as I’d soon find out. Yet the importance of the straight edge philosophy remains, and it is likely we wouldn’t have it now in the way we do if it wasn’t for Mackaye, even if the role of figurehead is something he really didn’t want. Figureheads aren’t very punk after all, where part of the point is to think for yourself.

In a time when so many people are looking to political figureheads and will likely continue to do so the crazier things become during the years of decline ahead, thinking for yourself remains ever important. It is difficult to think when hung over, or otherwise intoxicated. The straight edge way looks to take responsibility for our own states of mind, and more importantly for what we do with our precious time here.

Ravaged by junk food and pharmaceutical products, mind onboarded into the simulacrum of screens, todays teens don’t have the luxury of pure boredom. What awaits them is a labyrinth where any wrong move might turn into a dead end, and possibly one with a monster lurking and leering at them as they find themselves up against the wall. To move through the labyrinth a clear head is necessary. In this respect straight edge is a counterpoint to the more Dionysiac extremes of the punk movement, especially when it is in its nihilist mode.
Granted, the nihilist mode can still be punk, but what Mackaye and his fellows helped to grow, was in actuality an antidote to the nihilism of McGovCorp seen all around them. For all the anger and aggression, it was a positive outlet, and a movement of positivity and hope, a Positive Force.

Teen Idles spearheaded the straight edge way of life, but it continued in his next band, Minor Threat. It’s hard to underestimate the impact and gut punch Minor Threat gave me when I first heard them in junior high. It was an awakening. The year was around 1991, just about ten years after this stuff first came out, and I had already been primed on years of heavy metal. I grew up on Cincinnati’s westside, where metal heads and hoods reigned supreme. Since I was a reader, into fantasy and science fiction, watched Doctor Who, getting into skateboarding and punk was a natural progression. From there the influence of punk came into my life full force.

One of the legacies of Minor Threat, and deeply intertwined with the philosophy of straight edge was the all-ages show. One reason for staying sober back when it was started was because you were too young to drink. Many clubs wouldn’t cater to people who weren’t going to buy any booze, but the punk rockers worked to get them in the door -partly because sometimes they were even too young to play the shows themselves.

The Teen Idles had been the immediate predecessor to Minor Threat and were also the beginning of Dischord Records. “After nearly a year of playing together, the Teen Idles decided to break up. It was late summer 1980 and the only thing left to sort out was what to do with the money in the band fund. All of the money we had earned from our 35 concerts went into a cigar box in my room, and we had managed to save over $600. Instead of splitting it up, the band decided to release a record.”

It was clear from the beginning that no label would be interested in putting out a Teen Idles “record, particularly since we were no longer a band, so we decided to do it ourselves. We turned to our friend Skip Groff, who ran a record shop called Yesterday and Today. He had put out a number of small releases on his own label, Limp Records, and was able to explain the basic mechanics of putting out a record. We came up with a name for our label, started designing the cover, and sent off the tapes to a pressing plant. Finally, in December 1980, the Teen Idles' "Minor Disturbance" E.P. (an eight-song 7") was released. This was Dischord Records #1.”

The label is still around today, continuing to document a wide range of independent music, and show that a good living can be made in music without compromising values. The independent integrity Dischord showed came full force later during Fugazi, when all aspects of the way the band operated punk as fuck.

The community around Minor Threat also helped plant a root for the tradition of the punk house, in this case Dischord House, where Mackaye still lives. It seems like things got tense inside that house where the band practiced and worked on records together.

In a time when it is sometimes preferable to blunt the senses the straight edge life, and the work ethic that went with it, has many advantages. Living in a punk house with people who aren’t druggies and drunks may be preferable to waking up next to someone you have to give Narcan to in order to revive them. Keeping the mind sober can also  help keep things clean when interpersonal conflicts do happen, and won’t exacerbate the flames with paranoia, as can easily happen when you are sped up or cruising along on cocaine.

​Minor Threat’s intense energy was hard to sustain over the long term as the band was worn down from the inside with conflict, and worn down from the outside as the scene, with so much unity at first underwent quick transformations.

The next phase of this journey takes us to the dark heart of Minneapolis where the raw melodic sounds of Hüsker Dü were carved from the frostbitten ice. The members of the band met in 1978 at Cheapo Records where Grant Hart worked as a clerk and Bob Mould liked to go hang out. Greg Norton had applied to the same job as Hart, and had met in the process, and though Hart was hired first, he eventually got on as well. Cheapo Records brought the trio together, and their love of records brought them to life where they exhibited the power of three. 

Outside the Twin Cities, Minneapolis was like many other places in the Midwest: a world of farmers. Those formers had been high on the hog in the 1970s. Things took a downward slump in the 1980s under Reagan’s aegis. The farms weren’t exporting as much and the costs of running a farm were growing higher, leading to bankruptcies and abandonment of land. For those in agriculture it was a rough time, almost akin to the times in the Great Depression. No one was doing things for them, they had to do it themselves, but not before sending their first single to local independent label Twin/Tone Records, home of The Replacements. That first single was rejected and so began a friendly crosstown rivalry between the different hometown punk bands.
Hüsker Dü got Reflex Records up and running with help from supporter, friend and fellow record store denizen Terry Katzman. The venture was begun with a loan of $2,000 dollars from Grant Hart’s mom. Out came their first 7” record in 1981 with the songs “Statues” and “Amusement.”

Reflex Records was short lived but during its day it helped solidify the regional scene by issuing several compilations and albums by other locals such Rifle Sport, Man Sized Action, Otto’s Chemical Lounge and Articles of Faith. Being dedicated to the artistic life of the people in your own area was an important component of punk philosophy. At the same time, working with bands from other parts of the country increased the analog network effect. They practiced this when they released the Minutemen EP Tour-Spiel was released in 1985.

In the meantime the Minutemen had released the Hüsker’s first full length album, and live show recording, Land Speed Record on their own label New Alliance, after they’d been introduced to each other by Black Flag. Things got done because people cooperated and networked. Their immediate follow Everything Falls Apart was their debut studio album and was released on their own label. By this time there were already some tensions in the band and the title track sums up the precarious nature of friendships and, could by extension be seen in the way that the center does not hold. “I got nothing to do / You got nothing to say / Everything is so fucked up / I guess it's natural that way.”

Meanwhile another track from the album, “In a Free Land,” rings still true today. “Why bother spending time / Reading up on things? / Everybody's an authority / In a free land / In a free land / Government authorize education / (Don't mean a thing) / They'll teach you what they want you to think / (Don't mean a thing) / Saturation, stars and stripes / (Don't mean a thing) / The only freedom worth fighting for is for what you think / (It don't mean a thing)”

These days there are even more authorities because the internet. But they were doing this before the internet and their album was self released as were many of the punk records back in the day.
 
Hüsker Dü was a linchpin in taking the energy of punk to build a new sound musically, and give birth to a wider range of styles that would be cloaked under the bailiwick “college rock” and “alternative rock” in the years to come. They did it first through getting fired up by the energy of hardcore, an impeccable work ethic, and the time they put into mining their imaginations for new grooves that melded melody with speed and intensity. (Speed as a drug also seemed to help in this regard.) Being from Minneapolis. I think the harsh winters in their city gave them some extra grit to keep going with their music when others might have caved in.
Before their masterpiece Zen Arcade came out in 1984, Hart spent a summer taking LSD with a bunch of runaway kids and drifters, while Mould was getting amped up on speed and keeping the edge off with alcohol. The mixture of a psychedelic mindset and an adrenalized mind in the two songwriters combined as they carved away and sculpted the block of their music to reveal its true form.  Not everyone was interested in clean living.

Ian Mackaye came from a stable home. His parents were civil servants and had been involved in the civil rights movement and the liberal end of the Episcopal church. Not all of the kids in the punk scene were so lucky and as supported as he was, and encouraged by their parents. This isn’t a comment about the parents of the members of Hüsker Dü as it is about the many punk kids who found themselves in the position of running away from home.
​
The quintessential masterpiece of music that came from Hüsker Dü was a concept album called Zen Arcade that explored the world of those kids who had been left behind by their Boomer parents -the world of Gen X runaways. The members of the band spent a lot of time hanging out with such kids. This was common throughout the punk scene. The underground was a haven for those who were escaping from bad situations at home, or just escaping period. No one else had made an entire concept album out of the issue. Yet no one had yet made a concept album in the idiom of punk, and the carved out that place for others to follow, proving it wasn’t just the gambit of prog rockers. The closest thing that comes to mind is the “Girl on the Run” single from Honey Bane, which dealt with the subject from the British side.It did follow the 1983 release of the Penelope Spheeris film Suburbia, that also dealt with the theme of runaways.

​Zen Arcade came out in 1984. That was the same year the documentary film on homeless kids in Seattle, Streetwise came out. I remember watching Streetwise when my cousins moved into a new house and Betamax player with a bunch of Betamax videos was left behind. The film was among them. I’d already been shown Suburbia by older punks, but this one hit home in a different way, because it was all factual. Memories of the movie haunted me for years. Zen Arcade is just as haunting, though I didn’t hear the whole thing until years later.    

The album was written and rehearsed in an abandoned church in St. Paul that became a haven for runaways, musicians, and drifters. There record wasn’t a punk rock answer to Go Ask Alice, though. Heroin, speed and alcohol all overshadowed the band. Whether these chemicals were a help or a hindrance, I won’t deign to say, but they did seem to lend themselves to their inscrutable Dionysiac fury. Their struggle with these issues is highly relatable. Though some of us may have aspired to straight edge, as I did when I was first turned on to hardcore, it wasn’t much longer before I was turned on to the kaleidoscope of LSD and had close friends and family go down the scary path of heroin, meth addiction and homelessness. Their story is as important as those who refused and managed to live a clean life. Zen Arcade tells one of these familiar American stories.

The story follows a young man who is escaping a terrible home situation. Bob Mould lays it down on the song “On Broken Home, Broken Heart” where he sings about what is going on beneath the pretty exterior. “I looked at your house / I look through your window, deep inside, how you gonna cry yourself to sleep tonight? / Your parents fight / You don't know who's wrong or right, have to cry yourself to sleep tonight.” The theme turns up on the “Never Talking to You Again” which has the sound of proto folk-punk with its acoustic guitar strumming and accompaniment limited to backing vocals.

“Pink turns to Blue” tells another story all too familiar, and even more so with deadlier street drugs like fentanyl that have reduced the OD threshold. “No more rope and too much dope, she's lying on the bed/Angels pacing, gently placing roses 'round her head,” An unfortunate end to so many runaway kids escaping the abuses of Reagan era fundamentalism.

One wrong decision is all it takes to start on the road of getting hooked, and while I very much admire the ethos Mackaye and crew have built, and think it is important as ever, compassion for those who took the needle in their arms is just as important. During the long emergency we are even now caught up in, the hardcore pharmaceutical end of the drug problem is likely to revert to simpler and preindustrial means of making drugs from plants like poppies and the cocoa leaf. Yet there will still be teens running away from home, and dens where drugs are imbibed, just like in Victorian times.

In the deindustrial times to come, there will be plenty of reasons as ever to leave home, and get wasted. What new stories of homelessness, squatting and runaway teenagers will there be to tell? 

.:. .:. .:.
​
The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

“If we continue to operate in terms of a Cartesian dualism of mind versus matter, we shall probably also continue to see the world in terms of God versus man; elite versus people; chosen race versus others; nation versus nation; and man versus environment. It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced technology and this strange way of looking at its world can endure.” –Gregory Bateson, ‘The Cybernetics of Self: A Theory of Alcoholism’ (1971).

Binary thinking seems to be a plague visited upon mankind, locking our minds into grooves that oscillate between the extremes of yes or no, true or false, love or hate, good or evil, left or right, black or white, communism or capitalism, utopia or oblivion, leaving little room to explore variances on the spectrum between polar opposites. This habit creates false dilemmas when all the available options get reduced down to just two. Entire fields of possibility are left unexplored.  When our minds identify with just one pole it tends to create fundamentalist antagonisms towards people and institutions whose thinking centers on the opposite pole.  When we ignore the vast terrain of middle ground that lies between, like ignoring the experience of those who live in the flyover states between the coasts, we miss out on many nuanced realms of meaning. The worst aspect of binary thinking is probably the deleterious effect it has on our ability to imagine what may yet be possible.

            Polarities do exist, and they often exert tremendous tugs at one another, as in the polarities of magnets, of male and female. When the polarities in question are political or religious in nature it animates the animus and people tend to slip into acrimony. The increased animosity between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans over the past decade or more is a case in point. On some deep level I think they subconsciously get off on this attraction to each other. The foaming mouth of a fundamentalist Christian denouncing heavy metal, role playing games, and gay sex is as often as not projecting their shadow side onto the object of their hate. By the same token an angry anti-gun activist may harbor secret wishes to wield destructive powers over others. Is there a way out of these twin blind alleys of diametrical opposition? Can we find healing from our collective bipolar disorder?

            I think there is a way and it can be found at the fulcrum, the center point of the scales, the point of perfect balance and integration between two opposing poles. We can take steps towards moving to that fulcrum by exploring philosophy, in the form of ternary logic and triolectics, and by playing games designed for three teams, in this case Three-Sided Football.
​
            In the past philosophy wasn’t just a way for academics to get tenure. Serious contributions to philosophy and science came from engaged citizens who weren’t tied to publishing and pushing papers on regular basis just to keep their position. As “dollar dollar bills y’all” became the name of the academic game, theories seem to have become increasingly harebrained, existing only within the phantasmal realm of a mirrored echo chamber. Universities continue to flounder,  and the study of philosophy, including the philosophy of science, is a suitable pastime for those downwardly mobile dandies who don’t want to get their hands dirty on mudlarking expeditions, but would rather get lost in thought as they drift about as aspiring flâneurs. They will have to be willing to dirty up their minds, however, as mind is not separate from nature, as the Cartesian dualists would have people to think.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was an American philosopher, mathematician, logician and scientific thinker. His father, Benjamin Peirce, was also of scientific bent, and was a professor of astronomy and mathematics at Harvard University. Growing up in an environment of high intellectual achievement honed Peirce’s considerable natural gifts, and a career in academia was almost a given for him, if he hadn’t scandalized the prim and proper minds at Johns Hopkins University. His teaching job there was terminated without warning due to the fact that he was living in sin with his second wife, Juliette Annette Froissy, a.k.a. Juliette Annette Pourtalai, before the divorce from his first was official. Juliette also happened to be Romani, and her heritage was another mark of prejudice against the couple. This fall from the graces of higher learning left him unemployable at other universities. He ended up eking out a living by writing for scientific journals, crafting entries for Century Dictionary, and doing intermittent work for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. When his father passed away he was left with enough inheritance to buy a farmhouse on property near Milford, Pennsylvania, where the couple was able to remain independently poor. Their poverty was not quite genteel, but it did allow him to be extremely prolific in his writing, much of which is still unpublished. He often had to write on the reverse of manuscript pages because he was at times unable to afford fresh paper.

            As the university system implodes, those who have an interest in philosophy, science, or other academic pursuits could do worse than follow Peirce’s example, and continue to study, write and publish as independent scholars.

 Thinking in terms of threes seemed to be natural to Peirce. Triads, trichotomies, and groupings of threes are found throughout his work.  His system of logic consisted of three parts: speculative grammar, speculative rhetoric, and what he called critic.  He also sketched out a formal system of math based on triadic logic. Peirce is also credited as the philosopher who kick-started the contemporary study of semiotics, or the general study of signs and signification, representation and meaning. Peirce defined a sign as being triadic, composed of three parts, these being the sign vehicle, the object and the interpretant.

Peirce had suffered from the painful effects of facial neuralgia, a condition he had since his teenage years, which may have been partially responsible for the couple’s relative social isolation. Yet out of his suffering came the gift of his prodigious thinking and his obsession with logic. Peirce believed that some propositions in logic are neither true nor false.  He rejected the Principle of Bivalence that states that any proposition can only be false or true. This provided the motivation he needed to pursue triadic solutions.

In his concentrated thought Peirce was led to create a triadic logic of induction, deduction and abduction. Induction is an inference that is probable, while deduction is a type of inference where the conclusion is supposed to follow necessarily from the premise. In a deduction it is impossible for the premise to be true and a conclusion to be false. Abduction is the process of inference by which a hypothesis can be generated and formed. This term is also sometimes called retroduction, and can be further defined as a way for researchers to conceptualize that requires them to identify those circumstances the concept cannot exist without. Peirce took these even further than logical argument forms and used them as the basis for truth-seeking that he called “scientific method.” In his thought, induction, deduction and abduction become the three phases of scientific inquiry.

Just as philosophy contributes to the practice of science, so too can it contribute to the practice of art. Enter Danish painter and philosopher Asger Jorn (1914–1973), a co-founder of the Situationist International. In the early 1950s, after convalescing in a sanitorium where he was being treated for tuberculosis, Jorn wrote the text Held og hasard (“Luck and Chance”). He submitted this to the University of Copenhagen, which he hoped would approve it as a thesis. The text, however, was too unconventional. In it he argued that alongside the two dominant modes of thinking, philosophy and science, there was a third, valid alternative: an artistic mode. As per the title, he also wrote extensively on the role of luck and chance in all manner of situations.

            In Jorn’s text he speculated on how humans first learned to walk, and cited Erik Nyholm, who believed the first humans were apes who had learned to sing, due to a new jaw structure that allowed for more movement of the tongue, which in turn allowed for the creation of new sounds. Singing became an incitement to dance, and dancing distinguished early humans from other animals. Singing and dancing apes learned to walk by first learning to dance on their hind legs. From this perspective, Jorn suggested that game playing is a way to enter new stages of evolutionary change. The inclination towards pleasure and fun is an incitement to new behaviors. Games are also very often subject to the role, or roll, of chance, which brings about novel experiences.

            Peirce had also been an advocate of chance and its role in evolution. He thought that chance, what he termed Tyche, or Tychism, “must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth.”
            The Situationists espoused many interventions to break people away from the trance of the society of the spectacle. Games were used to break apart the rigid binary of work time and leisure time. They strove to show how play was not just a way to spend “free time” in the off hours away from office, factory, or cashiers register, but a way to transform existing energies and put them to use on life giving activities.

Asger Jorn had long been smitten with Hegelian and Marxist dialectics. While the dialectic method of philosophical argument can be traced back to Plato, and was used under the rubric of medieval logic, it was given a new lease on intellectual life when G.W.F. Hegel made it a core aspect of reality itself. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels then got a hold of it and further retooled it into dialectical materialism. As communism spread, the idea of dialectical materialism became a major part of the intellectual ecology of the era, and Jorn was among those who became enamored.

Jorn, however, saw many restrictions in dialectical materialism. As a writer, philosopher, and theorist he tinkered on it, blending in his own ideas, and attempted to extend it with insights from quantum physics. What he came up with was Triolectics, a playful rebuke. In time, due to a thought experiment in his book Natural Order, it became the basis for Three-Sided Football.

Jorn came up with the game of Three-Sided Football (TSF) as an outgrowth of his writings on Triolectical Materialism. These were first written about in his pamphlet, “De la méthode triolectique dans ses applications en situlogie générale” (“The Application of the Triolectical Method in General Situology”) published by the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism.  According to the members of the team Strategic Optimism Football, triolectics “went beyond linear transfers of energy, constructing spatio-temporal fields of possibility and negotiation. Not oppositional but superpositional – contradictions resolved by blending multiple simultaneous potentialities.”

For Jorn, Three-Sided Football was just a thought-experiment, a way to play with the philosophy behind Triolectics. In Natural Order, he wrote, "Three teams meet on a six-angled plane instead of a rectangular one… First of all one wants to quickly discover that it is impossible to control who of the two enemies attacking is shooting the goal. It becomes necessary to turn the rules around… so that the victorious side is the side that has best defended themselves, and where the fewest goals have been let in. The victory has become defensive and not offensive... It will not at all be an exciting match... a third force can in this way neutralize a tension between two forces. That is why two-sided opponents are always aggressive or attack-minded, while three-sided are defensive. Whether this in itself marks a transition from dialectic to complementarity, I would like to leave unsaid. ... There are in these observations absolutely no political suggestions. I am only searching to find out what is actually going on… Whether a triangular relationship is static or constant, that would depend on whether there is an increasing tension. In that case this might lead to a real explosion, whereas the possibilities in the two-sided relationship are cancelled out by the two-sided fight’s neverending energy use.”

Such insights from Triolectics could be useful to those who want to escape the state of advanced rigor mortis that seems to be the inevitable byproduct of the forever culture war.

In the 1990s a number of post-Situationist groups began to bubble up in the UK and Europe. Psychogeography and détournement were the prime interests. In the writings of the Situationists they had found a still valid critique of art and the leftist politics artists so often kept as bedfellows. At an anarchist event in Glasgow in 1994 Jorn’s football thought-experiment descended from the Platonic realm of ideas, and the first actual games were played. Since then it has been played at different locations around the world. A World Cup for three-sided football was even organized at Jorn’s hometown of Silkeborg, Denmark.

 The game is pretty much played the way Jorn sketched it out. The winner of a TSF match is the team who gives up the fewest goals. If your team scores zero goals, it can still win, as long as the other teams gave up more goals than yours. The three teams play on a hexagonal pitch with three goal areas. Instead of splitting the time of the game into halves, it is played for a duration of three twenty-minute thirds. As the teams strive to concede as few goals as possible, various alliances are formed and dissolved in swift and fluid formations. With its roots in philosophical anarchism, the rest of the rules are flexible in the extreme, and a number of variations are played within the small TSF community.  

The members of the Strategic Optimism Football team contend that the playing of the game teaches a way of strategy that removes two-sided oppositions. “Strategy is no longer the illusion of mastering a totality. Rather it is the negotiation of undecidables that removes both the binary fixity of formal Aristotelian logic and the teleology of dialectical change at once. One is presented not with the binary and fixed categories construed by media-imposed ideology. Rather one can glimpse an externality – the larger matrix of general emergencies that contain and triangulate the particular emergency.”

 As the world struggles to find solutions for our many crises and predicaments, ternary logic and triolectics can help individuals and communities escape from the rat race of us-against-them, and develop defensive survival strategies. For those of us who seek liberation from political binaries, and the Cartesian binary thinking that has divided humanity’s experience and made it somehow apart from nature, we could do much worse than to spend time playing games of ternary logic inside our heads, and games made for three teams with our friends. If we engage with our fellows in an interplay of imagination, we might just catch glimpses of the futures that lie beyond oblivion or utopia.

RE/SOURCES:

Illuminating more than just these brief snippets of the deep thoughts of Charles Sanders Peirce and Asger Jorn is beyond the scope of this essay. They are all worth digging into for those who want to explore further. Reading and contemplation are among the cheapest of pastimes, especially if you access material through your local library system. In my original sketch of this essay I had included information on the three-sided chess variant. It didn’t end up fitting in the space allocated here. Readers may find it easier to organize a three-sided chess match than a three-sided football match, but the philosophical underpinnings differ.
 
The Art Story. “Asger Jorn: Danish Painter and Scholar” <https://www.theartstory.org/artist/jorn-asger/>

Bateson, Gregory.  Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York, N.Y.: Ballantine Books, 1972.  Bateson’s essay “The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Theory of Alcoholism” is contained within this quintessential collection of his work that traverses across the disciplines of anthropology, psychiatry, evolution and genetics, systems theory, and ecology.

Burch, Robert. “Charles Sanders Peirce.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Stanford, Calif.: Metaphysics Research Lab, 2022. <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/peirce/>.

Colapietro, Vincent M. Glossary of Semiotics. New York, N.Y.: Paragon House, 1993. A useful text for anyone interested in semiotics. It contains many definitions of the abstruse terminology employed by Peirce.
Information Philosopher (website). “Charles Sanders Peirce” and “Gregory Bateson.”  <https://informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/peirce/>, <https://informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/bateson/>. The Information Philosopher website, hosted and written by Bob Doyle, is a massive resource on philosophy and science as seen through the lens of information analysis. 

Jorn, Ager. The Natural Order and other Texts, trans. Peter Shield. New York, N.Y.: Taylor and Francis, 2017.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. The Essential Peirce, eds. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1992.

Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt, and Jakob Jakobsen, eds. Cosmonauts of the Future: Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 2015.
Strategic Optimism Football (website). “Triolectical Materialism and the Beautiful Game of Three-Sided Football.” <https://strategicoptimismfootball.wordpress.com/2015/01/07/triolectical-materialism-and-the-beautiful-game-of-three-sided-football/>

Parks, Tim. “Impossible Choices,” ed. Nigel Warburton. Melbourne, Australia: Aeon,  Jul. 15 2019. <https://aeon.co/essays/gregory-bateson-changed-the-way-we-think-about-changing-ourselves> A biographical essay on Bateson and his work. 

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This essay originally appeared in 2022 in an issue of New Maps as part of my Cheap Thrills column.

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