"It's not what you do, it's how well you walk through the fire." - Charles Bukowski

I want to be famous. More than that, I plan to be famous, at least in part because I can see no other way that I'm going to be able to be wealthy enough to pay off my college loans. There's also another side to it: I deserve to be famous, in part because I'm a pull-myself-up-by-my-own-bootstraps sort of person, and also because I live in a celebrity culture of such shallowness that Madame Bovary looks deep. I have been raised (not by my parents, but by my society) to expect that I can and should be famous, apparently just for being me. I adore the thought of fan mail and adulation - I'd even take a stalker or two, just to show them how scary of a motherfucker I can be.

And then I think about what Bukowski said (conveniently quoted two paragraphs up) and I think to myself that being famous probably isn't likely to lead to walking through the fire well. Because I know that I'm not particularly dedicated to a lot of things. I've got a friend working for the Refugee Council - great, he's dedicated to helping people. I, on the other hand, have a sort of vague notion that "Refugees...bad...should not have any refugees...make world safe." I don't persevere, unless I'm directly benefitting from my actions in some way. Do not suspect altruism.

Take the rants, for example (do, and I kill you for copyright violation). While I firmly believe each and every thing that I have written and posted, although that informatiom may change, I believed it at the time. Yet, considering that I could just as easily take the opinions out and have a perfectly good - if uninteresting - page, it's obvious that I'm using my beliefs to generate a whole backlog of controversy for when the FBI finally gets the right to examine webpages and prosecute based on content - then I can be famous as one of the new generation of cyber radicals, or some such shit. I want to be known across the length and breadth of the land as Razor.

So I think you can see that I'm not walking through the fire well. I'm walking towards the fire, but I'm doing it for myself, with the view that the eventual step into the flames will catapult me to international reknown and the FBI"s most wanted list. In the grand tradition of post modernism, however, I'm going to say "Yeah, I may suck, but so do the rest of you lousy fuckers."

Consider it this way: Fire is a fundamentally beautiful thing, in large part because it's bloody dangerous. Consequently, we fear it. Do we step up to challenges? No. I'm not advocating that we all join Greenpeace to save the bloody whales, but I am saying (as usual, I know) that if you're going to do something, do it with some style. I say this because I've been forced to confront the fact that some of my decisions lately have violated some of my own precepts (those laid out here and here, in particular). I've taken over the bar at St. Cross, and this means, basically, that I get the fun task of running the fairly-real risk of getting kicked out of Oxford (and possibly arrested) because I'm violating the law on a regular basis.

I'm not going to get into why, other than to say that the rules around the bar that currently exist (and that I'm fighting tooth and nail) will create a bar that I don't want to be at, much less that the other students want to be at. So I'm wondering if it's really worth it to me to risk my academic safety on at least two nights a week to do this. And the sad reality is that, because of these rules, I don't particularly want to be manager, or at least that I won't be able to be the manager all year next year, because of the stress.

And the reason I'm still going to do it? Two, actually. Firstly, no one else wants the job right now, in large part because it is currently shit-detail, which means if I don't do it, we likely won't have a bar. Secondly, money.

I'm thinking that selling my soul for money is not walking through the fire very well. In fact, it's the crappiest reason I can think of for doing anything. I like material objects reasonably well (they're not the be-all and end-all, but they're nice) and I also would like to be able to pay my own way next year without resorting to borrowing from my parents. So, I need a job. Yet I have accepted a job for very poor reasons. Not walking well, at all.

And the reason that the rest of you are lousy fuckers too is because you do the same thing. There was a meeting to discuss the issues around security that led directly to this risk I'm running that no one attended. No one, that is, except myself and one other person. We argued the decision until we were blue in the face. We spent the two weeks previously trying to get people to come to the meeting.

No one did.

Now, of course, they're all complaining about the changes (which are shite). However, if I'm not walking well, the people who want things to stay the same but aren't willing to do more than complain afterwards aren't walking at all. And one of the reasons I'm giving serious thought to whether I can do this job is because of the lack of support I've got.

Partly, that's because I'm trying to isolate myself as much as possible - if I go down, I don't want to bring anyone with me. But partly that's because everyone else just wants things to work out well and don't want to fight for them. I realise this isn't exactly on the scale of justice that my friend at the Refugee Council is working on, but still - it's absolute shit to me, in any circumstance, to refuse to take the responsibility for making a change (or at least making noise) and then expecting the ever-popular and ever-undefined "Someone Else" to do it for you.

What does this all have to do with being famous? Not much. I just put that in as a way of addressing the idea of walking vs. putting your neck on the line. It does have a lot to do with Bukowski's comment, though.

When I was at Evergreen, our graduation speaker (elected on the basis of seventy votes out of a graduating class of at least 500) was Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted killer on Death Row. (Yes, I believe it was an illegitimate conviction.) The outcry over that one was unbelievable. Somehow, everyone thought that there was some reason their votes (that they hadn't been interested enough to register beforehand) should count now.

They didn't want to, or couldn't be bothered to, or whatever, register their opinion beforehand. And that, to me, is what walking through the fire well is.

It is taking the responsibility for your own actions. It is making sure that you participate in such things. A whole lot of people who live in a democracy have no idea how precious their voice is...until it's been run over by everyone else's voice. The world is invariably shaped by the people who live in it; if you don't make noise, you won't be heard. Someone else will be shaping the world.

And you know what? I don't want to hear about it. If you can't be arsed to put yourself on the spot, to put your money where your mouth is, you can keep it shut. Don't come crying to me that you don't like the situation going on - on whatever level, personal, federal, whatever - because if you didn't participate in the process, you don't get an opinion later.

I salute the people who've got the balls to do it. And particularly I salute the people who've got the balls to follow what they believe is right.

And I want to, in this forum, which is not as public as I'd wish, but hopefully private enough that we won't all be having a conversation with the St. Cross administration tomorrow, thank the people who've decided to walk through the fire well with me. I want to thank them for their support, and for their courage in following me. It feels a lot better to me to have some company on the walk. And I know it seems like a small thing, the workings of a college bar, just one of many in this town and not a very important thing in the grand scheme of things, but this, to me, is emblematic of courage in larger things. A person who will stand up for what they believe is right will do so on all things, not just some of them.

I salute that, and I thank those people making the trip with me. Because that's what Bukowski meant. Whatever you do, do it well. Walk through the fire well. If you can't do it well, don't do it. And always, always, be heard. Be noisy. It's the only way you can shape the world.

Running the risk for the rest of you,

Channon