keith’s new self

These days it seems like everyone is like “OMG - I wish someone would break down the stages of human communal life using some kind of teleological framework.” And so I’m like WTF? and do it in Blenz while I wait for chemo. Succinctly:

Prokaryote - living with parents
Life begins in someone else’s house. Either you grew up in a tidy house, where you couldn’t wait to escape the tyranny and rules, or you grew up in a messy house, where you couldn’t wait to escape the chaos and disorder. Either way, the transition out of this phase is marked by the disappearance of direct parental influence on your behavior. You somehow manage to graduate high school and hit the road. You soon find yourself in…

Eukaryote - college social dorm
In this phase, personal responsibility is known only by its complete absence. In this institutional Gomorra all needs your are provided for, allowing you to focus entirely on reckless libertine experimentation. After the first week, all indoor environments smell like stale beer, pizza, and puke. The common rooms all have a patina of compressed mouldering beer and cheese that the strongest industrial solvents cannot remove. Someone tries to use your building’s communal vacuum to clean up their own vomit, after which all vacuuming ceases. There seems to be an unspoken, ongoing contest of who can throw the biggest piece of furniture through a dorm building window. You build furniture out of stolen beer kegs and milk crates, which become little islands in the sea of filth that is your bedroom. You learn to have sex very quietly in order to not wake your roommate, sleeping only feet away in the same room. Those that survive this phase move on to…

Invertebrate - college mature housing
The names for this phase differ, but the concept is always that the least stable Eukaryotes have all dropped out or been expelled, so the better-adjusted two-thirds of the bell curve can get serious about their studies. This phase is marked by the introduction of non-hierachical communal living, which is constantly confused and provoked by your roommates’ shifting liberal arts education - the internal dynamics can be reduced to the sum of the forces of the topics being studied (read: fanatically adhered-to) that week. Nietzsche, Deleuze and bell hooks argue over who should clean the toilet. Your more uptight roommates distribute multi-page self-indulgent manifestos decrying the leaving of empty tuna cans in the sink. Your house has no toilet paper for two weeks, and no one does anything about it. The next few years are a haze of libertinism and cramming, with the scale and scope of the libertinism diminishing year after year, along with your idealism. You don’t buy drugs yourself anymore, but you’re happy to indulge if anyone’s got any. You apathetically slouch into…

Vertebrate - post-post-secondary shared accommodations
This phase is similar to Invertebrate, except that you no longer live on campus, and your mattress is now on the floor. People have begun to group themselves based on the beliefs and desires that have congealed out of the undifferentiated collegiate soup of hedonism and utopian ideology. Most conflicts arise from the programmed tendencies of the Prokaryote phase and play themselves out over and over again. Three possible configurations emerge:

• Perfect tidiness - anal-retentive, light-sleeping busy bodies group together in oases of perfect order. Chore lists are made and followed. Dust is banished from the kingdom. Three different kinds of Febreeze in the cupboard.
• Perfect messiness - a garbage pile with walls, calling this place a health hazard is an insult to germs, which are tidier than this. That half-eaten pot of macaroni-and-cheese has been on the stove for three years, and will still be there when the building is condemned and demolished.
• Imbalance - most of humanity exists here, playing out the human drama. Inevitably you have the tidy folks, who assume alternating roles of jerk or victim, fighting the untidy folks, who would rather suffer the endless complaints and tirades of their tidy roommates than wash a cup or turn the music down.

Mammal - intentional community
“We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Those that transcend the Vertebrate phase may achieve a communal lifestyle that is tenuous balance of relaxed mindful self-awareness and self-responsibility. This is obviously quite rare. Housemates overcome their programmed selfish behaviors, allowing for genuine community and sharing. This phase is marked by an in-between level of cleanliness that is neither totally sloppy nor maniacally clean, pooling and sharing of resources, Mac laptops, the sound of bubbling water, and feng shui.

Human - total spiritual oneness
Seeing that the manifest and spiritual realms are not-two, the %0.000001 of the population who achieve this state stop the wheel of death-and-rebirth and sit on a thousand-petal lotus while being perfectly ordinary. You take out the garbage, and the garbage is taken out. “The Bachelor” is on. You tape it. You hear the toc toc of bamboo wind chimes on the porch. Leaves fall, one by one.

Thus concludes my analysis. I hope you have enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Having solved this problem, I hope we can all move on.

posted: 5:45 pm