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Shucking Oysters: The Self-Inflicted
Shucking Oysters: The Self-Inflicted
By Alex Allen
WARNING: The following contains explicit depictions of potentially distressing subject matter.
The first recorded case of death while taking a selfie was in Utah’s Spanish Fork Canyon in 2011. Three teenage girls, two sisters and a friend, oblivious to the Union Pacific train hurtling towards them, were huddled together for a self portrait by the train track. The train killed two of the girls instantly while the third died later of her injuries. Sadly, since then, there have been so many unnecessary injuries and deaths involving oblivious selfie thrill-seekers.
A Canadian tourist had both of her hands bitten off by a shark at Turks and Caicos Islands and had to have one of her arms amputated below the wrist and the other halfway up her forearm. A Russian tourist died in Sri Lanka while she was hanging on a train car’s foot board, on the Podi Menike railway line. The woman’s head was smashed and she died at the hospital of her head injuries. A British tourist died in Segovia, Spain, while he lost his balance, falling backwards on a ledge leading to the Postigo del Consuelo with views of the Segovia aqueduct, and died at the scene. An American man who tried to scale a metal fence at the Colosseum in Rome became impaled on it and remained impaled for more than 20 minutes until rescue could free him. After receiving 80 stitches, he survived – barely. A Chinese businessman was grabbed and dragged by a large walrus at a wildlife park in Rongcheng city. It was apparently playful behaviour, but the walrus drowned both the man and a zookeeper who tried to help.
All to get the perfect selfie shot, all for that fleeting five minutes of fame and glory. For many social media influencers, iconic selfie-taking is big business, and getting that oh-so-daring shot is one sure way to stand out in an over-crowded market. As Ned Levi wrote, “It seems as though the competition for social media followers, likes, loves, and comments is too often turning smart adult brains into mush and causing deaths and serious injury.”
Sources suggest that there were over 500 selfie fatalities last year. According to one study, falls from heights are the most common in selfie-related incidents, followed by drowning. It used to be only the self-obsessed, celebrity-seeking, reality TV-show-wannabe folks took selfies. Not anymore, with almost five billion smartphone users globally – and all having a built-in camera and inner influencer in them, that’s a lot of selfies.
Mark Griffiths, a British professor of behavioural addictions, ran a study in 2018 on “selfitis” (or selfie addiction) and it’s not a new phenomenon – “we’ve had storm-chasers for years. It’s a kind of bravado or machismo. The difference is now you can record it.” Griffiths notes that taking and sharing selfies is also tied to self-esteem, especially in adolescents and young people. “You get a feeling of validation when your selfie gets hundreds of likes. That motivates people to compete with one another for attention and look for something which gives them the edge.” Even with deadly consequences, such fragile ego contests continue in popularity.
In her book The Selfie Generation, Alicia Eler charted the rise of selfies, from becoming Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year in 2013 to transforming pop psychology, marketing, and visibility for desperate and insecure people. In 2014, selfie was officially accepted in the game of Scrabble. Today, selfies have become as normalized as tattoos. The essential purpose and meaning of a selfie remains the same. What has changed is where and when people snap selfies.
Once again we can thank the Kardashians for this modern twist on narcissism. In the early 2010s, Kim Kardashian pioneered the selfie. “I can look at any photo of myself and can tell who did my hair and makeup, where I was and who I was with,” she gushed in her unapologetically titled coffee table book, Selfish. An updated volume offers 64 new pages of some of Kim’s favourite selfies – from her “throwback images and current ultra-sexy glam shots” to celebrity selfies with Serena Williams, Hilary Clinton, and Barack Obama. Ever the opportunist, Kim could be seen at the Sanchez/Bezos wedding spectacle selfie shooting herself with abandon, no doubt for her next book, Look at Me, Looking at Me.
Beyond tourist destinations, the world of culture has also been getting concerned about selfie intrusion. British art critic, Jonathan Jones, warned sternly that selfies are a “spiritual menace” to museums and galleries. Rather than allowing “an extraordinary moment to infuse our spirit,” it’s all about recording being there. The experience has become more important than the experience itself.
In The Guardian, Kenan Malik observed with irony, you’re one of six million people that visit the Mona Lisa at the Louvre each year and, “What do you do? Look more closely at that enigmatic smile? Wonder at the subtle gradations of light and shadow in Leonardo’s rendering of the face? Admire the illusion of depth? No, of course not. You turn your back on the painting, whip out your phone and take a selfie. And then you move on to your next prize.”
NaAsiaha, “Ny” Simon, CEO of NaAsiaha Simon & Associates Public Relations and Planning Firm, in Ohio, has over 19,000 selfies in her cell phone and proudly shares how empowering her selfies have been in her life. Her favourite selfie is the group or celeb selfie, not the self-compassion selfie where you’re showing your warmness towards yourself and others, but the one where you’re just showing yourself off to others. Selfies are “our power and it represents our substance,” she enthuses. Yes, I agree, vacuous and desperate.
But I’ve seen them from the beginning. It’s certainly never boring to watch. Never, ever dull.
Gabriel Jeroschewitz, July 1st, 2025. Inspired by Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht, and Tom Waits, humanity is kept alive. From the Three Penny Opera, the author has abridged the story to keep it from being overkill.
Ah, humans. Please just sit down, if you can remain still for more than ten seconds without checking a small, glowing rectangle or scratching an inexplicable itch. I would like to tell you about humans.
I’ve been observing things for a while now. A very long time. Longer than mountains have been mountains, certainly longer than oceans, decided where they wanted to sit that eon. And in all the swirling cosmic nonsense, the grand ballet of creation and decay, the sudden, inexplicable appearance of things where there was nothing, and the equally bewildering disappearance of things that seemed quite sturdy – nothing, absolutely nothing, is as perplexing, and frankly, as riotously funny, as the human insistence on its logic.
“We are rational beings,” they puff out their chests and declare. “We think, therefore we are.” Oh, they think all right. They think they’re in charge. They think they understand. They think they make sense. It’s adorable like a particularly confident squirrel trying to explain quantum physics while burying a nut in a flowerpot.
Because, observe them. Watch them navigate their day. They wake up, often at a time dictated by an artificial construct called a “job,” for which they exchange their time for pieces of coloured paper or numbers in a digital ledger, which they then use to acquire things they often don’t need, to impress people they usually don’t like. Logical? Where exactly does the logic enter this transaction chain, beyond the primal urge for survival twisted into elaborate games of status?
Consider their priorities. They will spend years acquiring elaborate mating rituals involving expensive shiny objects or cleverly worded phrases to obscure their intentions. They will dedicate immense brainpower to devising complex game rules involving balls or little plastic figures. They will then expend vast emotional energy arguing whether a rule was followed correctly. Meanwhile, the air they breathe warps, the water they drink becomes questionable, and they invent new and exciting ways to be miserable while pursuing “happiness” with single-minded, illogical fervour.
You hear them, too, in their little pronouncements. “We must address the seven deadly sins!” they cry, often the ones who have just had a particularly satisfying second helping of something rich or spent a weekend in bed. They wring their hands about Gluttony and Sloth and Pride, as if these are abstract concepts that arrived via ill wind, rather than inherent, almost delightful, consequences of being a creature built from the universe’s leftover creative energy mixed with impulse control issues.
One old, cynical poem I overheard them muttering once had it roughly right: gentlemen who preach about morals should focus on getting everyone fed first. Because the human capacity for altruism and lofty ideals seems directly proportional to how recently they’ve had a decent meal and how comfortable their shoes are. A hungry human, cold one, or simply one whose daily commute is irritating, is often a creature whose grip on their proclaimed rationality is tenuous at best, and whose inner beast taps impatiently on the cage bars.
They rose from the primordial chaos, a bubbling stew of elements and improbable reactions, guided by nothing so much as chance collisions and the urgent, illogical drive to replicate. And into a state of chaotic interaction they will undoubtedly return, individually and perhaps eventually collectively. Their cities are monuments to attempted order, grids and schedules and traffic lights, all overlaid upon the unpredictable, often bizarre behaviour of the individuals within them. Watch their roads – rivers of metal guided by beings simultaneously listening to music, shouting into a phone, thinking about what’s for dinner, and convinced everyone else on the road is an imbecile. I don’t know what it is if that’s not a microcosm of ordered chaos.
And this duality! This breathtaking, baffling duality! They are capable, oh yes, they are capable of astonishing acts of beauty. They produce sounds that can make your non-existent heart ache, images that capture light in ways that defy probability, and structures that reach for the sky with elegant defiance. They can show incredible tenderness, sacrificing their comfort for the well-being of another, human or otherwise. They can feel empathy, connect across impossible divides, and create intricate tapestries of relationships and shared meaning. They are, truly, capable of being the most wonderful, beautiful things.
And then… oh dear. Then there’s the flip side that proves they haven’t strayed quite as far from the muck as they like to pretend. The casual cruelty they inflict upon each other and the planet that sustains them. The way power seems to curdle their reason, turning them into preening, posturing figures obsessed with dominance. The sheer pettiness! They will wage wars over invisible lines on maps, persecute neighbours over differing opinions on mythology, and sabotage colleagues over the slightest perceived slight or the chance of a fractional increase in their paper/number hoard.
They talk of keeping humanity alive through brilliance; they have flashes of it. But truthfully, as that poem hinted, humanity often survives not despite its darker nature, but because of it, or at least alongside it. The drive to compete, to hoard resources, to defend one’s territory – these are not rational choices, they are primal urges, ancient echoes of the beast that lived before the logic story was invented. Their ability to repress their inherent chaos and bestiality is patchy at best, and often it’s the exercise of these ‘bestial acts’ on a grand or petty scale that dictates who gets the food, who gets the shelter, who survives. Survival isn’t always a clean, logical process; it’s often messy, brutal, and deeply illogical from an ‘enlightened’ perspective. They are kept alive, in part, by maintaining a delicate, unstable truce with their inner animal, a repression that occasionally fails.
So why, you might ask, do they cling so fiercely to this notion of being logical? Perhaps it’s a comfort blanket. A way to feel special, distinct from the animals they pen up or romanticize from a safe distance. Maybe it’s a necessary illusion, the scaffolding that prevents them from collapsing into outright, gibbering madness when faced with the undeniable evidence of their chaotic nature. Perhaps admitting they are simply complex arrangements of stardust and impulse, capable of writing a sonnet in the morning and keying a car in the afternoon, is too much to bear.
Whatever the reason, watching them strive for order while inherently being creatures of chaos is a constant, unfolding comedy. They build intricate plans that are immediately undone by a sudden mood swing or the arrival of doughnuts. They declare universal truths based on particular, fleeting personal experiences. They yearn for peace while perfecting the art of passive-aggressive warfare in staff meetings.
They are illogical, chaotic, sometimes horrifyingly bestial, and capable of breathtaking beauty. They are the universe’s most entertaining paradox, a walking, talking, often tripping, contradiction. And they think they’re logical. It’s magnificently absurd. And in that absurdity, in that beautiful, terrible, funny mess, perhaps that’s where their truth lies. Not in the logic they preach, but in the glorious, unpredictable chaos from which they came, and to which, with any luck, they will return with suitable dramatic flair. It’s certainly never boring to watch. Never, ever dull.
Stream of Consciousness/Chill Out Time/2025
Decades ago, I shared a love of light as one part of a gypsy commune. Carrying a vision of self from self to self into society, we followed the vision of the Most Holy Moly Mostly Unlikely, until he got lost in his name.
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A balanced person is true to his or her nature. A guru persuades the vulnerable to be what’s good for him. The living discard their possessions and ambitions, while spirits in the Dead await results.
Not me, in part because I’d nothing to lose. I’d endured power trips in martial arts. We trained as warriors, but were disciplined like soldiers. My antipathy to authority wasn’t news. Cults are Religions. Words are interchangeable. Talk is cheap. So why are the overly holy so well paid!
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We crisscrossed the continent along power grid lines. Guided by a corner ripped off a mystery map, we sought the true pattern that numerically ascertained an uncertain grail. In a perpetual a&a fog, with high beams alight, we’d peer through driving rain at obscure street signs. And on bright days we’d stare into oily rainbows floating on sun-drenched parking lot scum.
We travelled in convoys in cranky, oft ticketed graffiti adorned vans with shocking auto osteoporosis. With gardens on roofs concealing the buds, and carrot patches on trailers, we made our way from nowhere to nowhere in an era when gas was affordable.
Into our public persona, we appeared as green elves, phosphorescent gnomes, or long hair bag beings sporting ponytails and buns. Children of our age in a circus age, we acted out a creative anachronism as anarchists on an anti-Establishment express.
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(Chain toking grass junkies sit in a circle, sharing a purpose to oblivion.)
The past shadows the present, then not. Has anything change? Systems still create crimes to profit from crime. Laws are designed with bribery in mind. Traffic cops are slot machines on a quota. Lingering malingering archetypes die without friends.
Vice is rife when punishment is directed at souls who play. Where freedom is a commitment to uncorrupted truths. And jails are for free spirits who are right with their souls.
Being insightfully stoned wasn’t deadly, as it is now. We’d act out as anyone else as we explored the edges of death. I’d find answers beyond the obvious from my spirit teachers in the Dead. Years later, the monk felt something similar, as an indistinct identity in a monastery.
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Anecdotal old wives’ tales had rehabilitated into New Age superstitions cloaked in quantum nonsense. Pastoral mindsets about the climate continued to mix and mash with contemporary communalism. The line dividing the meta and physical was as always thin.
Differences of opinion were based on personal biases, not stereotyped prejudices. Ignorance was seen as willful, or a result of stoned stupidity.
Either way, we held biases to be honest, as opposed to correct. Typecast by real world experiences, a person was left feeling safe or betrayed. But feelings, not results, were germane.
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Like the radical progressive evangelicals of today, life was a presence, and the astral a current that was shocking to established mores. Free love was a replication of the cross pollination found throughout Nature. Inevitably, every adult was a child’s nurturing parent. When they grew out of their clothes, we exchanged the kids.
When life is tedious, folks have them. It’s a pleasant surprise to discover the excitement they provide.
Imagine the social effects if they aren’t taught to be terrified of altered states that are happy states. And don’t overdose on drugs they learned nothing about, because addictions arise from needs denied.
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With change comes growth in maturity. All got to experienced the intense physical wear of parenthood. And the soft, subtle sweetness of laughter and giggles. That happens all the time when free time goes on all the time. Where life isn’t micro-managed by economists skilled in ivory tower arts of bullshit, charts, and communication resolutions.
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With the buffoon, The Incredible Bladder, prodding DogSlobberDodger with a liberated tank of pressurized air, (farting like some kind of bagpipe), we organized paraplegic hootenannies, guillotine balloon block parties, fume Fun Festivals, and scandalous birthday party food fights. At halloween, Buddhists dressed like Dracula. Zombies dolled up as corpses of the prior body, visiting at the reincarnation christening.
Incorrigible to an extreme, invented music, oft obscene and insulting, meant a third of an impressed guest audience split by the first set. But those who stayed had a pretty good time. And were rewarded with farce.
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At one most Politically Correct Olympia we competed to put the healthiest booty in the kids’ Halloween bags. Walnuts, dates, figs, and dried bananas; all organic, as a matter of course. At the pagan solstice feast, on the whistle many hands ripped apart a turkey or two, finger spooned the stuffing, sucked cranberries up through straws, padded Brussels sprouts, ping-pong style, with greasy palms.
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There’s no need for punctuality when altered states are normal states. Hallucinating our way around on roadworthy rural roads was a sign of how punctual we weren’t.
We lived today copiously, as if tomorrow we’d die. And tomorrow as if happy to have survived yesterday intact. <Assumes you didn’t party through the night, and sleep away the day.> Um. Then it was our dreams we lived in and out of while the rest of the world worked.
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Without sponsors, an enterprising grubbie sold tickets to his annual bath and the washing of his clothes. With him in them. Charged a double bill for the double bill. (Bladder!)
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Personal development isn’t possible when mediocrity is elevated to adoration of a person with a larger than life charismatic talent. Not that most didn’t enter the New Age in a big way. Undersized under-appreciated pseudo-religious typecast cults thrive with a rare inflow of bright individuals who see the errors in conventional Religions.
They compensated for the outflows of those born into those Cults, who with a compelling need to cop easier ways, re-join established Religious sects that attest to their superiority through quantity, not quality. And guarantee their preeminence by cowing or annihilating the rare meat who won’t be owned!
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It ended when we met leering bigots, and bigotry, head on. I spent the morning with a gang of shopping mall grannies having the time of what remained of their lives, racing souped-up motorized walkers. The more daring darlings coasted behind on rollerblades strapped to leg braces. The crippled veterans cheered them on as they rolled walnuts around in their boots to massage their feet.
They christened their club: “Delirium!”
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The hat dropped during a wild debate outside the Bawdy Body Shoppe with an inbred family of ex-con cowboys hanging out around the local video store, viewing the new pornographic releases.
The pool hall manager was running a shampoo carpet cleaner over the tables. We agreed to meet at Rest Area, at the edge of town. More beer reappeared like a stale premonition. Shit happened with the appearance of the wrath of the prostitute, who went from serial sexual exhibitionism and giggles to a viral scorn of a life of umpteen times with an identical script. Which was much like the farting around lives of those angry inbred Republican voting turds exhausting their systems.
The mother of all trucker bikers out of Hog Wash said he ate hippies for lunch. I said I was an asshole. He said he ate assholes for lunch. Tongues sucked into the back of faces. Time off became time out as he wiped out.
Can a spirit be diseased by the form’s hate? The more violent bigots probably died of their bile, and came back as glowworms, nine/eleven, on parallel vertical airport runways in Manhattan. The rest carried on to smashed glass and nail-stomping parties.
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What did it take for a person to join a commune like ours? One guy’s brother was a Peace Corp volunteer who tried to introduce American pot pie to a cannibal tribe. He mistook cannibal for cannabis. They mistook American for pie.
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Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; the glue holding us together evaporated. The gravity of magnetism released us from our auras.
Onefork Shy and Nothanks Tuyu, she five foot nothing and he six feet much, opened a school to teach uptight folks how to be stoned.
No Chit, the repetitive journalist, commercially astute, pasted commentary on poles and placards, called himself a walled street journal, sat with his hat on his lap.
No Name rented himself out as a dial a hippy. Never paid rent. Circulated between houses, clearing refrigerators of leftovers.
Seshe Wasn’tme, and her adopted sister Yeshe Khan, insecure progeny of a Tibetan-Mongol mixed up marriage, drove a van for a security company. They never left the cab.
Half Black Jaw changed his sex. Rented himself out as a stud. Didn’t do the research.
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Letting go in my indelicate way, with the last gasp of my gas guzzler I drove the wreck into the white trash dumpster. Recycled trash in back was bagged in black. Launched that into the metal recycling bin. Then, as now, now and then ego makes a statement on how to create a diversion as a distraction, and safely split from a hostile town.
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With an open blister on my foot from the vehicular escapade, and me on crutches, the rest who were left signed my arms. Boxing Day, I opened a used toy box store beside the unlicensed “Som Gon Bad” migratory food booth. Harvested an inventory from recycling bins that lasted months. Got a lot done, compared to nothing. Did a few gigs playing body padding and a metronome with “The Undertones.” A band that didn’t leave a mark.
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The rest of the restless moved on to fight the good fight. The hard core paranoiacs wandered lost in their personal Gobi’s. I ran into Not ThoseSocks in another chapter in time. He had lost his mind in a laundromat. Became a blue collar ambulance driver for working class stiffs. Buries the fat ones at the mortuary in wine or beer barrel caskets. Or rotgut, on demand.
Gaza Isn’t Starving, It Is Being Starved
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Malnutrition-related deaths in Gaza are beginning to climb, with the health ministry reporting 18 in a single 24-hour period. Doctors report that people are “collapsing” in the street, and Gaza journalist Nahed Hajjaj is warning the world not to be surprised if the remaining reporters in the enclave are soon silenced by starvation.
Unless something drastically changes, things can be expected to get much worse very rapidly.
Meanwhile Israeli forces are setting new records with their massacres of starving civilians seeking aid, with 85 killed in a single day on Sunday.
If this isn’t evil, then nothing is evil. If Israel isn’t evil, then nothing is.
So what’s the plan here? Do we just sit and watch Israel starve Gaza to death with the support of our own governments?
And then what? We just go along with our lives, knowing that that happened? That this is what we are as a society? That our civilization is comfortable allowing something like that to happen? And that our rulers could do the same thing to another inconvenient population at any time?
We’re just meant to be cool with that? And go on living like it’s normal?
I’m genuinely curious. How exactly is everyone planning to go about living their lives after that point? How does that work, exactly?
I’m asking because I don’t know. I mean, I know what my own government and its allies should do, but I don’t know what we as ordinary members of the public are supposed to do.
You’ll see western pundits and politicians asking “How do we get a ceasefire in Gaza?” or “How do we end hunger in Gaza?” as though it’s some kind of ineffable mystery, which is kind of like a man strangling a child to death while saying “The child is being strangled, but HOW do we stop the child strangulation from occurring?”
It’s not some mystery how to get a ceasefire in Gaza; the empire is the fire. It simply needs to cease firing. Israel’s holocaust in Gaza is made possible only by the support of its western backers, primarily the United States. Numerous Israeli military insidershave acknowledged that none of this would be possible without US support. If the United States and its western allies ceased backing Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, a ceasefire would have to occur.
Likewise, it is not a mystery how to get food into Gaza. You just drive the food on in and give it to people. They’ve got roads and gates right there. The only reason people in Gaza are starving is because western governments (including my own Australia) conspired to pretend to believe that UNRWA is a terrorist organization to justify cutting off critical aid, while doing nothing to pressure Israel into allowing aid to flow freely.
And now Israel and the US empire are monopolizing the delivery of “aid” through the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose facilities now see civilians massacred every day for the crime of attempting to obtain food.
The organizations, funding and delivery systems to feed Gaza are all 100 percent fully available (at no cost to Israel, by the way). They’re just not being allowed to provide aid because the goal is to remove all Palestinians from Gaza via death or displacement. The people of Gaza are starving because the west is helping Israel starve Gaza. It really is that simple.
This isn’t some kind of unfortunate famine caused by a drought or natural disaster. It is a deliberately manufactured starvation campaign, implemented with genocidal intent.
To paraphrase Utah Phillips, Gaza isn’t starving, it is being starved. And the people who are starving it have names and addresses.
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