In The Matrix (“an example of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction”) one of the central moments is when Neo is offered a choice between the blue pill (go back to sleep inside the matrix) and the red one (awaken in the real world).

The blue pill is a kind of ice cream favored by the PMC-adjacent and by various Pelosis.

The red pill means you are woke, not in the sense of the word most common today (quite the opposite), but as in the phrase, “Wake up sheeple”.

In either case you have to be very careful about using these terms, 25 years on from the movie, because to throw them around routinely might inadvertently out you, as an incel like me.

But wait. There’s more.

I’ve heard people I really respect for their brains call themselves black-pilled. This means something in the neighborhood of fatalistic or nihilistic, or at least deeply pessimistic.

One of the coolest anarchist cats around, Michael Malice, wrote a book about the necessity of remaining white-pilled, or presenting as more or less optimistic even when you don’t quite see any reason to be so.

It turns out there are all kind of alternatives now.

I like the one about being iron-pilled, which means that you forget all about thinking of any kind and just focus on getting your body really cut and jacked.

But the reason I’m writing this at all is about a new flavor that just gained a cultural foothold in the last few days, and that is

“coconut-pilled“.

Calling yourself that means that you choose to identify with and support Kamala Harris, but perhaps a tiny bit ironically, because the latest nominal nominee once used the image of a coconut tree in yet another unfortunate moment in an unfortunate speech–so basically it’s the kind of thing she’s most famous for among both people who like her and people who don’t.

Weird babbling that goes nowhere and has a tendency to loop in on itself, often accompanied by strange inappropriate laughter.

All of this information I’ve just provided you with is from sources I’ve been reading, so no originality thus far.

But I do have a simple fresh contribution to inject into the discussion.

It is this.

Back when I grew up, where I was growing up, “coconut” had–and in some matrices probably still does–a different connotation in vulgar and sometimes even hateful slang.

To call someone a coconut was to say that in your estimation, while they may be brown on the outside, their insides were pure white

“Marrón por fuera blanco por dentro”.

A sort of Tex-Mex version of ‘Oreo’.

In some way that sick people might find funny, it’s really quite perfect for the Kam, but forget that.

Let’s just say that calling yourself (a) pastilla de coco might not sound quite the same to every ear, and that not everyone who hears might get how edgy and cool and pragmatic you intend to be by embracing that identity.

You can thank me at your leisure.

No rush.

Obviously.

Leftovers

Morning Joe Spills The Tea On How Dems Forced Biden Out

Amazon Disappears Journalist’s Book About Kamala Harris

I have a lot more to say on the subject of various pills, whether zero-pilling is a thing, and involuntary celibacy, but it’s going behind the passwall and so you know what to do if you know what to do.

The things I observe and believe and say only mechanically deepen your fear, and you are not alone in that.

All they do is make a desperate escape into indulgent frozen desserts and pretend holidays seem more appealing, even more necessary, and so that is the path you choose–you flee my chronic intonations; they’re not helping, and at last even I can plainly observe how that works.

I don’t know what I’m doing.

I do at last know by this point that I’m not doing it for you.

As for why I am doing it anyway, I neither know nor think that I know.

I stand beneath the moon by the crossing gate, waiting solo, waiting on the double E.

I murmur about my own exquisitely delicate alienation but you don’t hear it

because I’ve alienated you.

Every day there is a new blank page.

(Being worthy of dignity and respect and love is not the same as deserving them.)

Every day is that very same new blank page reflected in the liquid eye of the metaphor horse.

The last 100-degree day, theoretically.

I’m celebrating it as a kind of holiday and a kind of birthday, but the festivities and the rationale for that will live behind the passing-word. If you were inclined to investigate–participate–you would already know what to do about that and if wishes were buffalo I could fly through primitivist life as a bison hunter.

Let’s leave all that behind in the fictional realm where it belongs and houseclean together instead joyfully.

***

Riley is refusing to vote this time, but also refusing adamantly to go to your pointedly fake meow march. (I mean you and I know that it isn’t your march, belonging instead to that Andy Borowitz guy, and that the fakery is intended to be amusing this time on top of being a comforting lie, but he’s only a cat and doesn’t keep up on things like we superior mammals do [insert gentle onefingered teammate chest tap here, yeah for sure].)

***

That’s sort of it, except that a couple of perennial blossoms have re-emerged as candidates for discrete identity shards, not quite big ones like anarchy or belles lettres but larger than little sprats like raggedy-man or šrdnn.

There’s a reason you know well who Bill Gates is, and Steve Jobs was, but have at best barely heard of Richard Stallman, and the reason is because that’s what they want you to know well. (part2) (part3)

Based on that insight I am choosing to identify with F/LOSS and especially GNU, which is a recursive acronym that stands for GNU’s Not Unix. In a former life I was a professor of it.

The other is a cyberpunk aesthetics and the reason for that is the subject of yesterday’s post–no need to rehash again today.

Your author tells himself and you that he is a brave autarkeian artist

baaaa …

Is it true?

Unrelated …

Michael Moorcock was right a long time ago, except that it’s not just fantasy, high or low.

It’s most of mass culture, quite possibly including your favorite movie, song, and TV show, that is ultimately designed to function as a lullaby, and so most of what we end up ingesting, laughing or crying by turns, is a lie that comforts.

Which might be fine to a point.

But past that point, the toxicity of the lies becomes more corrosive than any amount of comfort we take from them can justify.

Out there they become the blinding matrix.

Six hours of sleep is not unprecedented, but nailing it from 7 pm to one in the morning pretty much is, in the context of these summer months in the year of our broken lord. I’ve been trying to get back there for weeks. Now for once and finally I have, and I am filled with the good intention of turning that small success back into a habit next to the others.

I do not question and fully acknowledge your entitlement to Congratulate Me.

***

For that and for this.

No one ever voted for her and they’re not going to start now, though you of course may well prove an exception to the rule, you forward-thinking pro-democracy anti-fascist rebel you.

I’ve been monitoring the endless texts but so virtuously saying nothing, and using my otherwise useless shadowbanned twitter account to dump off excesses of steam when I finally and absolutely cannot stand it for even one more second.

My unbroken diligence here at the spill makes me feel unequivocally proud.

As for what I’ve filmed, I’ve selectively posted what also makes me proud, and I’ve shitbinned the rest ruthlessly.

I do not question and fully acknowledge your entitlement to go right ahead passing on the roasted magic beans of light and reading nothing, watching nothing … saying nothing …

Feeling.

In response I exhort myself to persevere in fierce spite of the resulting pindrop void, to even try to teach myself to craft a facsimile of a comfortable home for myself within its confines of cathedral silence.

That ambition defines me at four in the morning of the 23rd day of July.

so please
believe in me

when i say
smoke glass stained

bright image going
down down down down

… never did

give nothin

to the argent man. It’s harder to work out what doing it anyway should feel like now that the clouds are beginning to turn the hackneyed tide of bloody battle. I continue to drink the provided specific sugarpoison and it continues to try to do its job, which is to paralyze:
see para- + lyein “loosen, untie” (from PIE root *leu-, to loosen, divide,

Cut Apart). Can you still hear me babe?

*leu- forms all or part of: absolute; absolution; analysis; catalysis; dissolve; electrolyte; forlorn; loess; lysergic; resolute; resolve; soluble; and

Solve.

Catalytic is ‘a change caused by an agent which itself remains unchanged’, so although it sounds like the opposite of analysis it is instead exactly the same but just a little more specific; a white steamboat chugging through the muddy upriver.

The definition of Armageddon is you are about to be left behind as the train heads on towards that metaphorical dying cornfield of some private iowa or idaho; we are not back in the trees ever after.

Look out mama, here’s a white boat full of chemical sound and deflecting fury, neither solving nor signifying nothing. Daddy’s loess in my hand feels reassuring and his last advice rings in my ear: red means run, son, numbers add up to nothing.

Only a fool would say that and the first shot is hitting the dock
now.

A call from an unlisted number.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/56-seconds-5-am-108538339

***

The Final Phase of The War

***

“There’s no getting out of it.”

What roles and functions are served by things like:

major guiding beliefs and self-identifications, as in
–belletrist (as opposed to litterateur/auteur)
–anarchist (green/primal/paleo/whatever, and ‘rewilding’ too)
–hérétique (to grasp upon a heresy is literally a taking/choosing enabled by oneself)

and

minor crystalline images, like
–tears in rain
–šrdnn
–raggaðr

and

things in between like the synthesis of the word and image “Anaprim”

?

The playing hypothesis is that they are ultimately all only organizational tools.

***

I had a whole pile of links collected to throw at you about Mr. Hillbilly Elegy.

But I threw them away instead, last night, in my moment of slashing sorrow, and replaced them with two words.

“Yup. Alrighty.”

In the Algopoison video I preached a sermon about being simultaneously at peak happiness and more filled with the deep sadness of this world than ever before. (I have no clue how anyone else in the whole world feels about that or really if anyone felt anything, about that.)

Was it a rationalization for depression? Possibly. But I still think it’s closer to truth than to blindness or self-delusion.

In the slashing fit, likewise, I told myself a similar story about living profoundly alone in most every way now, without quite tipping over into feeling lonely as a result.

Bullshit? Again, possibly. Probably true though, I maintain, based on my felt sense of things and doing my best to be authentically honest. (Parenthesis: I’m honestly happy too, that you’re playfully happy, loves. But I can’t even pretend to care about ice cream or any other consumerist sugarpoison, and nothing you playfully say will change my heart about that, alas.)

Solitude/Alienation is on the ascendant for me in this moment as a ‘major guiding belief/self-identification’.

I think that’s as close as I can come to the hot summer truth of my being in late July.

In the parkinsonian word of Joe Biden … anyway …

I was taking a break from working all that out and I came across the best link yet, to share with you on the subject of JD.

Dr. Gilbert Doctorow: Is JD Vance Going to Transform US Foreign Policy?

I am warily daring to hope so.

Unlike good Dr. Doctorow, I am not going to become a ‘supporter’ of the new VP, at least not in the way I passionately and even financially supported The Bern before he took the last train to Shitlib Seniorville. (I won’t vote R, either, or D …).

But I agree with the learned analysis here.

And I do plan to be just a little bit hopeful, and to keep monitoring the condition of that hope religiously, because that’s another bit of self-identification, which is to say another organizational tool I habitually use and routinely abuse.

That is “who I am”.

Who I choose to be, or … something like that.

Clearly, peachybeaches, I am not getting THROUGH to you
so
from the top, Kenosha

Genesis. In the beginning … I run
to
you.

Exodus. Break away: just when it seems so clear, that it’s
Over–You sing a song celebrating what you are and the word you use for what you are is ‘callous’. You don’t know the words to the one about it’s the same with your estranged one, and so the noctilucent red sea cannot help but wash over the chariot and the blessing of the monsoon cannot help but become a killer flash flood.

I used to love you so much I was sure it would kill me
and I want you the way you were.

At the end, only the crying crystal of the evanescent omnipresent sky
crimson ochre and leviticously deuteronomous
(on other planets, it rains sulfuric acid, but that doesn’t change the libidinal thrust of the gospel).

And at the tailfeather of the bleeding end pure Revelation
“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain”.

But
in mean-time, since there is no story in the rain,
angle a wing with me and circle
descending back to some moment where neither of us is dead yet.

Blood coursing through the night air

I know who I am

I know who you are or who you were just an hour ago

(static interference on the radio tonight)

I know what I know.

It’s not your Maslovian plateau moment, it’s something else.

It’s this moment where you realize that there are a lot of selves inside you and one of them is about to be left behind
as the train heads on towards that metaphorical dying cornfield of some private Iowa.

Which is to say, because it all converges: the identical tears in same storymelting rain.

What else is left for one more class but to pause with a sigh?

Rejeté, my lambs.

A while after the sun sets the professor will send out an email. It will go about like this.

Mulch of vair, blossom claire, dearly beloved and all the rest of you too,

Apologies for the abrupt ending today. I should not be allowed to touch anything, and then they put me in jail til you were 23.

Moving on.

For next time, I want you to review the first minute of this one.

I (as the one who teaches because I can’t do) have 49 subs. JD has fortynine thousand.

I’m at peace with that right now it seems as should be.

See you Monday if not before.

I’m not afraid to speak plainly and truthfully to you, although I am intermittently anxious about extending myself the same courtesy. Thus did

the powers that be leave me here
to do all the thinking
t/here, on the screen

a man with a dream, or what used to look like one;
like anyone who ever had
a heart. I never seen you looking so bad, my V1. You tell me that your superfinemind has come undone.

Slow, easy
unhand that gun begone
set it down on the skycryin’ table
Do it for me or the sake of old times. (alternative euro-breathy femvox interp) yeah i’m fine rather than the usual superfine is all ennit kathleen
can you still hear me babe

***

Well i’ve been out walking, and that’s mostly a lie, these days. Sheltering in stead home from the powder and the finger.

Truth is I don’t care anymore (how you run around) don’t care anymore
about who is good and right and who was bad and wrong.

This isn’t depression I am though deathly sick on the subject
on more levels than I can even count, including the political and the emotional and the spiritual and

The people on the street have all seen better times, you know, and it is no different right here. (Look out Mama there’s a white boat comin’ down the river)

But I am grateful to you even so for being the only one willing to engage with what I said in some way deeper than a god-damnable emoticon and
It don’t look like they’re here to deliver the mail

***

The shit continues to pile high against your guy and your dames, agencies, framing, but when I say I’m sick of it I also mean that I am sick of straining to prove myself any better. Have you forgotten so soon that I neither know nor think that I know?

That something knocked us both out the trees, my loves?

I only despair at times that you go on and on so frivolously
celebrating that very something and thinking that somehow if you’re pert and sassy and rich and blue enough, if you wave their flag hard enough, that you’ll soon be sitting right back on the best branch and pissing from the heights onto his fake orange head.

You simply won’t. Not ever.

The piss will only end up in your very own hair because

We are not back in the trees and we never again will be.

So: I am dressed now in mourning black for that fact and the others …

So: sometimes your facile hiphooraying at the funeral over another stupid counterproductive feces log of lawfare or saving a democracy that’s been moldering in the ground for years flies in the face of reality and really gets on what’s left of my last nerve.

I shouldn’t let it. I shouldn’t let you.

I know that very well, rationally, and somehow knowing it always ends up making the whole situation just a little bit worse for me.

The vairtere is one cracked flawed angel and sometimes the only thing that lets him go on when the demon is at the door is in the cool of the morning it won’t be there no more.

As any major dude
Would tell you.

Then you love a little wild one, and she brings you
only sorrow …

What else were you expecting, dear belletrist fool?

Peace and healing? An end to political violence? Forgiveness of your student loans? An end to possessions and property?

Did you come to the conclusion that it was your birthright to feel loved?

Did you swear and kick and beg us for these lovely things?

How quaint.

How very nearly
amüsant

Twelve years on from hearing Albert King I was sleeping on a couch in the Middletowns of Ohio.

The Senator named Vance was there too. He was a six year old victim of that other kind of violence they call domestic.

Maybe you don’t like it, but I guess I’m learning.

These fragments are my trying
to write another essay about the learning
if only to give life in the pouring sky some opaque purpose here at the end.

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

躺平

I heard it was you
Talkin’ ’bout a world
Where all is free
It just couldn’t be

And only a fool would say that

—Walter Becker and Donald Fagen

On a rainy Chicago night fortythree years ago …

No. Scratch it. Turn that heartbeat over again once more–I’ve written and erased the middle of this post at least three times already and now it’s four.

In the autumn of 1971, John Lennon released “Imagine”, advising us all to imagine no possessions, while sitting on a great big pile of them. That’s an easy thing to do.

No need for greed or hunger, JL? I wonder what your wife had to say about that, because we all know by now that the game of greed is both imperial and zero-sum–it’s deep in our blood, both yours and mine, like little chunks of microplastic.

A year later Steely Dan put out a debut record called Can’t Buy A Thrill, which included the song I quoted above.

It was written as a direct response to Lennon’s imaginary prescription, and even way back then they saw more clearly than that poor fuddled and assassinated martyr ever did.

And so at last we come back around to the crying of the sky.

I don’t like it but I guess I’m a-learning.

I saw my baby one morning and she was …

No.

You need to learn just when to quit, hermano, and

Solamente un tonto lo mencionara …

Double helix in the sky tonight
Throw out the hardware
Let’s do it right

Aja
When all my dime dancing is through

I run to you

Break away.

Just when it seems so clear that it’s over now, you drink that big black cow, and then just

get outta here.

(So outrageous)

You want him dead, you wish he’d died, you say, because he is just such a threat to the beautiful democracy you love sooo much.

(I seem to recall you recommending the same solution for the Putin once too.)

Meanwhile, your favorite news channel had on a Thoughtful Security Expert today, who said that incidents like this attempt to kill him are also … a threat to democracy.

I sense stresses and tensions–nay, real and ripe contradictions–inside your worldview.

***

Do you think it’s a coincidence that the shooter showed up in a Blackrock commercial a couple of years ago when he was still in high school?

Of course it is.

Anything else would just be another one of those lame conspiracy theories like JFK.

+++

Or maybe there’s a third way of looking at it.

Maybe this society is stuffed to the gills at every level with such ugliness and contradiction that such coincidences are inevitable.

That even so gloriously civilized a thing as teaching or taking an AP Economics class has been corrupted and perverted into something unrelentingly dark, into itself a threat against Democracy and everything else good and right and free.

***

Joe and Kammy and little Petey B. have no answers to addressing this rot. They are products of it, and themselves stuffed to the gills with it. Wave no flags at me, demon spawns. I know all too well who you are deep down and all too well why.

The same is true of Trump of course, and of one of the front-runners for his VP slot, one Marco Rubio.

But the other frontrunner, quite surprisingly, might offer a kind of partial and tentative alternative.

I say this in spite of the fact that he is rabidly Christian, an avowedly family-values kind of guy, and a vituperative critic of the “childless left”, of which I myself am a card-carrying member.

He is also the author of a book called Hillbilly Elegy, an autobiography, which was made into a film directed by Ron Howard, starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.

The book tries to create a portrait of the rot as it appears among the hillbillies of Kentucky, and contrasts it to the rot as it is practiced in the clean suburban streets of Middletown, Ohio.

That’s the town that the author, and congressman, and other VP hopeful JD Vance grew up in.

***

Why in the fuck would I of all people be the slightest bit tempted by a prescription of fundamentalism and conservatism? Isn’t that insane?

Yeah. I feel you, darlin’.

But maybe just not quite as insane as your homicidal fantasies and your gutted, hollow stance of embracing and cheering for the dark side on every concern they try to shove down our throats, be it Ukraine or Gaza or Syria or Taiwan or Yemen or Iraq and Afghanistan before them (let’s throw in the cadillac welfare queens and the crazy homeless rejects besides).

Like Candace Owens and a whole lot of other people, Vance holds views that I almost reflexively reject, about the importance of christian and family values and the basic goodness of average people trying to cope with a malicious world that is broken on purpose for the gain of evil elites.

But he’s also done with the rot of empire and the forever war that fuels it and keeps it so very shiny, for now, while they can still suck enough tax money out of you to keep the bullshit facade up for another month, or election cycle, hoarsely quavering about communism or autocracy or orange fascism or whatever is supposed to be the bogeyman lately, the thing we must all fear, and unite against.

Those things are not the real enemy.

Christian conservatives like JD Vance, gross as it sounds coming out of my mouth, are also not the real enemy.

That’s not quite the same as considering people like him or Candace Owens allies.

But sometimes, in dire times like these, the enemy of my enemy can start looking like a viably convenient compatriot.

Or at least an blessed relief and alternative to the constant yapping and propping of those so blind they consistently and doggedly refuse to see, preferring instead to just keep foaming at the mouth like dogs both rabid and blue.

(I’m sorry. Excuse me, but you have something in your hair and it’s fucking disgusting.)

***

If I should twist and mutate into a reactionary as a result of all this and a text thread too, I’m going to be blaming you personally in a paroxysm of bad faith and some profound contradiction myself.

Fair warning, honey lambs.

Just like Biden-as-the-nominee, you brought this shit down on your own heads.

Something knocked me out the
trees now I’m on my knees

Wheels keep turning
… Something’s burning
Don’t like it but I guess
… I’m learning

Throw your pearls before the swine,
make the monkey blind

Too much at stake
Ground beneath me, shake
and the news is breaking
Shock, shock, shock

I neither know nor think that I know.

So I have no prescription to offer you.

When I write them it is for myself, where their uselessness can’t hurt anybody else.

The good old days are merely mythic all the way back to the myth of hunting and gathering.

When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise

although he was thought wise by many, and more wise still by himself

and I went and tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise

and the consequence was that he hated me,

and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me.

So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away:

Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good

I am better off than he is—for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows.

I neither know nor think that I know.

In this latter particular, then, I seem to be slightly more wise than him.

Then I went to another, who had still higher philosophical pretensions

and my conclusion was exactly the same.

I made another enemy of him

and of many others besides him.

—The Apology of Socrates

I crafted a strategy to sleep from early evening to early morning but my body decided to do the exact opposite, and I woke at the hottest part of the day at three in the PM. It was good sleep and I feel quite fine in the flesh, in spite of the traces of psychological frustration involved in best-laid plans going awry.

Just before crashing down I watched a video about the intersection between late-stage civilization/capitalism, greed, sickness and health, and grain.

I believe he’s on to something. We already knew it, didn’t we? But the glow of a bias confirmation feels good in much the same way that a good long sleep does.

The tortilla problem remains, unchanged.

Wildlife in Southern Nevada copes with record-breaking heat wave

Heatwave in Las Vegas leaves low-income apartment dwellers without AC

The civilized capitalist way of life does make it harder on the sheep and the cougars.

As for the poor and the rich, they are unequipped to live here in the first place, much less under the added harsh stress of the conditions both they and their society’s entire modus vivendi have created and continue to create every day.

I continue to have no prescriptions.

I remain very sure that the answer is not called “8 News Now”.

Progressives Shill For Biden as Centrists Push for His Exit

As the ClooneyBama power center tries to figure out how to pry the old man out, the BernieAOC ‘progressives’ paradoxically try to salvage what’s left of the ultimate yellow dog.

Why?

The alleged progs will fail, like they fail at every other thing, but … why is everything upside down and inside out?

***

Another Friday, and something like halfway through the brutal part of the day’s heat.

Another July week and maybe halfway through the worst of the summer, meaning it has been over 100 degrees with zero rain, will be again today, and tomorrow, and that the monsoon-resume is only a glimmer on the horizon, out at the very end of the ten-day forecast from here.

I’ve been collecting as much dark cool air as I can, all night every night, but that’s not enough to keep the AC from coming on at the other end of the day. It’s set to 83. I am grateful for its continued stoic service.

I’ve been keeping things, including myself, as clean as I can in the midst of fighting off the sewer problems with boiling water and sulfuric acid. The battle is going poorly but I remain optimistic about eventually winning the war.

My Auntie, the former coolest girl and current fundie Xtain, is scheduled to die unforgiven in some Civilized hospice hellhole.

It makes me ever more determined to feed myself to the coyotes when the time comes, in one last upraised middle finger to the forces of time and entropy.

George Clooney Calls on Biden To DROP OUT

What this tells us is that it is no longer a matter of If. It’s a matter of when, and how.

George isn’t just the handsome guy, nor just a fine actor. He is precisely one of the elites, culturally and politically as well as economically. These are the people who actually decide, in what passes for democracy these days.

Good luck with all of it my dears.

Everybody from Trump to the pundits blue and red are declaring it will be Kamala, and it certainly seems like it.

The best thing that can be said about such a plan is that it makes more constitutional sense than importing one of the other random saviors.

The worst thing that can be said, in her own words, from a long year ago.

Somebody in the BreakingPoints comment section said they wouldn’t trust her to manage a Kohl’s.

I had to smile and in fact I came dangerously close to laughing.

***

Meanwhile in the nonfiction world …

San Francisco can now enforce laws relating to homeless sweeps following court rulings

America. Fuck yeah.

In a phrase used repeatedly by the White House press secretary and the National Security Advisor, Joe Biden will seek to dispel persistent rumors of his own mental decline by hosting a

“Big Boy Press Conference”

Are you fucking kidding me?

No, sadly, you are not. Gaslighting is not the same as kidding.

The smart money is saying that his candidacy is already over and that shit like this is part of a pivot to whatever the Party Elders in smoke-filled rooms are going to try to foist upon us as “democracy” next.

The only rational response to it all is not to rally behind Gavin or Gretchen or Kamala or whatever other hair job they tell us we must vote for to “save” that democracy.

The only rational response is to eyeroll in disbelief and write in the name of Aaron Bushnell.

Selling made easier
We’re rolling out new ways to help you sell digital products to anyone.

…

Include attachments
Attach PDFs, templates, transcripts, and other files to streamable video and audio products. You can add a downloadable worksheet to video tutorial, include a transcript with your podcast episode, and so much more.

Patreon keeps getting better as YT keeps getting worse.

I think this is something I can use. I hope there’s variable pricing and I can make things dirt cheap or even free to people who are already full members. We’ll see.

I’ve been going through a boatload of new (to me) free and open source software. Mostly things that combine some aspects of a file manager and (markdown, html) editor. The screenshot from yesterday is of the pick of the litter, for me and for now. It’s called Zettlr. I don’t like that it is completely non-extensible. But it does everything I need it to, which couldn’t quite be said about the other dozen I tried.

Today’s screenshot is about a completely different kind of software called Blanket, which I found mentioned in a video about the LXDE desktop environment.

It does exactly what you think it does.

And speaking of the water of love, that’s a blessing.

Am I doing it right?

There is no one else here to decide.

God damn you Knopfler you’re not being consistent.

she don’t know what it means
but the music make her want to be the story

v.

It’s no use saying that you don’t know nothing
It’s still gonna get you if you don’t do something
Sitting on a fence, well that’s a dangerous course
You could even catch a bullet from the peace-keeping force

Of course it’s my own fault for expecting a facile consistency from an authentic poet, especially as I contradict my own self every other sentence yeah.

Or maybe the inconsistency is pure illusion too, and can be resolved by simply choosing to believe that skating-away, presumably in the direction of the road that goes to helloutta, is technically doing something.

I withdraw and even renounce the damning okay? I like you and I want you to like me back even though we’ve never met and never will. (I address that to Mark specifically but to each one of the eight billion generally, by every move I make and every line I utter.)

With that out of the way we can move on from Genesis to Exodus.

High and dry in the long hot day
Lost and lonely, in every way
Flats all around me, sky up above
Yes I need a little water of love

I believe I have a-taken enough
Yes I need a little water of love
Send me a little …

Water of love deep in the ground
But there ain’t no water here to be found
Some day baby when the river runs free
It’s gonna carry that water of love to me

If I choose to have faith in anything it’s that last part.

In the meantime, let’s watch another annoying, hard to listen to, and spot-on folksinger of sorts tell some lyrics I really needed to hear right now. The song is called

Simple, Non-Commercial, Open Source Notes

I dl’ed and installed QownNotes alongside Joplin and Ghostwriter and Zettlr all over again–god knows we’ve been down this broken road before–but somewhere between the Q and the Z it may precipitate monsoonally in this one limited way, if neither my patience nor my faith stumbles clumsily like a washed-up nominee.

Enough.

could it be my fault

I feel like any progress made slowly and painstakingly in the last nine or ten months was just all pissed away in a moment, or …

That the notion of progress itself was, here, and maybe is, anywhere, mostly made from illusions.

Could it be that beginning again by stripping oneself of illusion is the only sensible way to go?

Saint Jackson long ago disagreed, exhorting us to let our illusions last until they Shatter.

I am always telling you
That I am telling you the truth–
Is Skatingaway illusory?

I am nevernot
crafting a narrative, nevernot intoning
to myself a story
sometimes out loud where you can hear.

Sometimes they are more like “Things From The Grocery” or “First Steps In Fixing Up A Truck”
and other times they are more like “The Cat’s Name is Leftpaw Meadows” or Aztec Strategery.

The important parts are whether or not they contain illusions (and if so what kind), and whether they lend themselves to essaying:

essay (n.)
1590s, “trial, attempt, endeavor”
(also “short, discursive literary composition” as in Bacon and Montaigne)

from French essai, from Late Latin exagium “a weighing, a weight,”
from Latin exigere “drive out; require, exact; examine, try, test,”
from PIE root *ag- “to drive, draw out or forth, move”)

Whether they contain weight and whether it’s the measurable kind or some other.

***

They want to have a war
to keep their factories

They want to have a war
to keep us on our knees

They want to have a war
to stop us losing to Chinese

They want to have a war
to stop industrial disease

They’re pointing out their enemy
to keep you deaf and blind

They want to sap your energy

incarcerate
your mind

Yet it’s no use saying that you don’t know nothing
It’s still gonna get you if you don’t do something
Sitting on a fence, well that’s a dangerous course
You could even catch a bullet from the peace-keeping force

Mother Mary your children are slaughtered
Some of you mothers ought to lock up your daughters

Who’s protecting the innocents?
Heap big trouble in the land of plenty

Tell me how we’re gonna do what’s best, you guess
once upon a time in the west

***

The insurgency began
and you missed it

I looked for it
and I found it

So begin again like MartinLuther Zen
The mythology begins the begin

Answer me a question I can’t itemize
I can’t think clear

Look to me for reason, it’s not there
Can’t even rhyme

in the begin
(she don’t know what it means)

He don’t know what he’s doing

(doing it)

you know she used to have to wait around

she used to be the lonely one

but now that she can

skate Around Town she’s the

Only

O-only One

see now she’s

(making movies
on location,
she don’t know what it means

what it was)

I’m declining the opportunity to shit all over the patriotic text thread.

Congratulate me.

But praise Yah, I do have this space all to myself (in ironically more than one way, heh), and so …

Re: “Everyone’s in the Spirit!”
and
Re: “This deserves to be ‘passed on'”

My only possible response is to quote back what a lady named Buffy already said long ago.

I prefer her take with all my heart to that of any Major, any CDR, any bad bad orange utan.

“It’s about individual responsibility
For this world we’re livin’ in”

Yes my dear. Yes it is.

breathe vair, and skateaway

So free George so veryff …

Tree people watched twenty percent of it four more straggled in for ten.

So now vair close your mouth and begin again.

Liberté is nothing left to lose and that equals égalité of a kind.

Fraternité with the differently broken one who cashiers at the station of gas I reckon.

Thirteen stars, the extra for the New California Republic, and Havasu too in blue.

***

On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep: here the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes (but who are you to call me haughty)
What is that? which the breeze, o’er the towering steep, as it fitfully blows half conceals, half discloses? (your grandfather’s grandfather was a minuteman)
And what janky beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Omaha to be spit out?

I never did learn its name but the acquaintance, yeah yeah, that much was made.

***

Beginning again, from the top or otherwise, can start in many places, and is starting in a carefully chosen few.

The driveway up to the front door knob is one of them. The wallet is another, and I could say Art or the Work is a third, which is naturally true, but …

Since I’m not scribbling in physical notebooks anymore, but rather here, and since making films is inevitably rooted in technology too, and since (in my case) most any other medium I have got or might get serious about is the same …

The drive way in this case is a hard drive.

The first thing you lay down on a hard drive is an operating system.

This is the one I will choose.

antiX Linux: Proudly anti-fascist “antiX Magic”

Birdy in the hand for life’s rich demand:
The insurgency began and you missed it

I looked for it and I found it
Miles Standish proud, congratulate me

Let’s begin again like Martin Luther Zen
The mythology begins the begin

Answer me a question I can’t itemize
I can’t think clear, you look to me for reason

No you don’t.

It’s not there.

I can’t even fucking rhyme

here in the begin

Yes, of grain. Which is certainly part of the problem. But not the part I want to expand upon.

When I came here twenty years ago, the cost of putting a roof over one’s head was a third of what it is now. My apartment was $575 and now the same space in the same place is $1700, and it’s not just here. It’s everywhere.

I say I’m not smart about money and that’s fact. But early on I accidentally did one thing right. Instead of pissing away six hundred a month to the shithead landlord, I started pissing it away into a mortgage.

Where the rent has tripled, the mortgage has stayed the same. In fact I even have a little equity, on top of the fact that the ‘property’ is now worth twice as much, were I to flip it, which amounts to a modest amount of … more equity.

In the short term I’m trapped here by those facts, but I’m very, very lucky compared to most. Seventeen hundred is more than I make in a month by itself, and out beyond, all the other essentials like food and electric and gas cost two or three times as much besides.

So I have a way to live. It’s not all that cozy or pretty, but it is at least a mostly viable way, and I do what I can to make it better in small cheap ways every day.

When the drain clogs, and I start scheming about how to fix it myself, you look on and call me brave.

Bravery has fuck-all to do with it, dear.

Calling a plumber would mean going deeper in debt to pay one. Deeper into enslavement. So I watch plumbing videos, and try to figure shit out, instead.

You say: But wouldn’t you rather have a new truck?

The answer is no in any case. Again I find myself saying: just watch the god damned video and you will know the answer.

But either way, and despite your bias toward shiny new things, your question sucks, because a new truck is not an option in the real world. They cost fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars now, as much as this whole house did all those years ago, and it doesn’t effing matter, now does it, what I would rather have.

I don’t get druthers in your dear decent Joe’s America; See?

And you would not either, except you married up that one time, and I didn’t.

God bless Tricare I guess, and all the rest of the fringe benefits that come with …

I was about to digress, but I caught myself this time.

***

So.

Today I was sitting in the grocery store parking lot in that lovely rattletrap old pickup, eating a guilty pleasure meal of questionable meatloaf with my hands, and watching the many wasted people hovering in the nearby shade of a broken motel, or giving each other grief of various sorts, and bumming change and cigarettes from shoppers.

I started thinking.

For quite some time now it’s been dawning on me that there are a number of pretty good things about this little nowhere town, things I never noticed before.

At the very same time, every place in the territory of this society, even this place, is steadily getting worse and worse.

Generally speaking, the cost of living is more than what they humorously call a living wage, and very often a lot more.

Our vaunted freedoms are eroded at an accelerating pace by this fact and many others.

If you can even scratch together the $1700 a month in the first place, you’ll keep hoping and keep looking, because paying the minimum doesn’t get you adequate space in a ‘safe’ neighborhood–everyone else in that poorer one is just as stressed and desperate as you are.

Thus every place is getting worse in terms of mental health too.

Thus every place is eventually getting worse in terms of physical health, for the same reasons and lots of other reasons besides, mostly having to do with the profit motive. Your gut, your very blood, is crammed with microplastics even if you do your best to eat well.

I have to wonder who you think is responsible for all this.

I have to wonder why none of this seems to scare the shit out of you, but the clown prince named Donald Trump, oh yeah he definitely does and it’s etched in the barking strain dwelling underneath your otherwise mellifluous voice.

I have to wonder who it is, who wants to foster twisted paradoxes like that in the deepest chambers of your beating heart.

And what interesting things you will do, if any things, when it finally dawns on you who they really and actually were and are.

I sing the perceptible amber waves my doves

of being happier than I ever have been in my life.

Amber barely visible waves

of the deep sadness

of this world,

yours and mine,

our one our only world.

They’re both feeble and disintegrating masks for the Oligo-.

And by now, remaining blind to that obvious fact–choosing to cover your eyes and marinate in the discomfiting cognitive dissonance–is nothing but willful stupidity.

Sorry for the blunt darlings.

There’s no time left to waste in saying it nice over and over and over until we all burn.

Brutal Signs of a Collapsing Empire | Richard D. Wolff

True or False?: “I am a Uto-Aztekan.”

False.

Uto-Aztekan doesn’t refer to people, but rather to a cluster of languages, many of them extinct, and almost all of them with no more than a few thousand speakers left in the modern world. Although … not only does the remaining single largest by far have a million, but their own radio station in central Mexico. Yes, you can listen online, even though there is no real reason to do it.

In news that is completely unrelated except by the blood of the strangeness of my life, I have two choice bits of right-wing propaganda for you from Rumble today, neither of which involves Candace Owens. I was lured in by the catchy titles. By the … engagement.

Unmasking How the Two-Party System ENSLAVES All of Us

I Regret to Inform You the Debate Was Worse Than You Imagined

On the enslavement side, I listened to the first ten minutes straight, and there were some good points in it (“We are as sick as our secrets”). Then they drag Jesus into it, and my tolerance for that is very limited, so my engagement was broken.

For the worse-than video, I jumped toward the end looking for hot takes about the debates. Hot ones on that subject didn’t really end up existing. But then unexpectedly right at the end, there was a pretty toasty one, about engagement itself.

The guy said he’d just put up a different video on YouTube that was a bait and switch. It was about the same right-wing cold takes, he said, but since he was very well aware that his bread and butter tropes were pure algo poison, he had hidden them in what purported to be a videogame review.

He’s saying so right out in the open on Rumble.

I did find that much compelling and fresh. I don’t think it works though.

YT, as I learned from my own Yellowstone video, has algo AI that really is listening to what you say, and really is judging you for it, and handing out sentences of shadowban and other means of hiding one’s objectionable content from the masses of eyeballs.

“Objectionable” not to those faceless eyeballs. Objectionable to the same people at the top, the “public-private partnership” discussed in the first ten minutes of the first video.

Objectionable to the Enslavers.

Who are very good at their jobs.

The Daily Spill is Hard To Read™, in large part because it is, so far at least, a forum beyond the reach of the evil bots and the people who build them for the very specific purpose of keeping our brains in clear-glass cages we rarely even catch in glimpses.

So I can spew truths, like about the existence of the cages themselves, here.

To pretty much no one, it’s true, but that’s okay with me, for the short term.

The point of belletrism generally, and maybe vairterean anarcho-belletrism especially, is to exist and to speak such truth, between the rivers in the uncharted places out beyond the pretty colored lines of the dead and dying lying tongues of Anderson Cooper and Sean Hannity, NPR and Reuters.

Like this.

The point of Anaprim is to play at beating the capitalists at their own game, without having to join them. To play a video game about beatings.

As for making videos, the purpose of that is very much in flux right now, which helps explain why I haven’t posted one for a week.

I have some ideas.

I am for the moment lying down flat with them in perverse carnal knowledge, and that gomorrah fornication is what my lost-soul life is all about as June becomes July and we get so very ready to celebrate our Independence, whatever the fuck that could possibly mean anymore.

躺平

At the end of this hour-long interview with her, JD says to Candace Owens: “I used to think you were a crazy right-winger“.

Maybe that won’t strike you the same way it struck me. Maybe you are of the opinion that Dore himself is a crazy right-winger, anti-vaxxer, whatever.

Maybe you think I am, and maybe–probably–you won’t watch this at all.

The odds are good that you’re not … reading this at all.

Earlier in the hour, Owens does say: “I’m a Christian first. I’m an American first.”

That of course is permissible for her to believe, but seeing myself as neither of those things makes it difficult for me to take her seriously.

Difficult.

But not impossible.

Do what thou wilt with it all. Slowly I am learning very late in life that it’s not up to me.

***

Elsewhere.

Fallout 1 Analysis | A Masterclass in Thematic Consistency

Why is this important?

It’s not.

To you.

Here is how we as a genetic collective, not as individuals, see things.

The eldest son took the most damage from the Broken Father archetype, both in real time and over the long haul, and so his views of the father are ungrateful, skewed, heretical, and thus in our opinion wrong.

The eldest daughter (of the later mating) took the most damage from the Broken Mother archetype, and so her views of the mother are twisted, spiteful, also heretical, and thus in our opinion also wrong.

Much more could be said, particularly about the fey youngest daughter and about god help us the next generation, but …

This much is plenty big and bitter enough to swallow for a start, and so we leave it there.

So say we all.

Deep sweet complicated dreams, partly because I was genuinely ready to sleep at a good time on a cool night, and partly because I was watching this as I drifted off.

I won’t bore you. Suffice it to say that my stepfather was played by Steve Martin; that a lot of the action took place at a truck stop far nicer than any I’ve ever seen in real life; and that I got a giant hug from a tiny girl because I did something kind for her.

Sometimes dream life is just about imagining a possible and better real one.

I like it when that happens.

I binged and then subbed this guy, which only happens very rarely.

The following videos were important parts of why it did.

Enjoy.

Who put the RF in TERF?

On The Nature of Esoteric Cults (yes, including ‘Rosicrucianism’)

and especially:

Monetization will ruin the internet (again)

Watching Russell Brand’s take resulted in having another thought.

They cancelled the party primaries.

They did away with debate conventions like the live audience, and again refused to invite any third-party candidates, in an effort to rig the outcome to every extent possible.

Now that it has blown up in their faces anyway, they’re talking about ripping old Joe out of his slot and replacing him with someone the party bosses think would have some better chance against the orange peril.

Does any of that sound like Democracy to you?

That thing that we were supposed to be saving, by voting blue in the first place?

It is in fact closer to martial law than to the will of the people–just like in their puppet state over there on the Russian border, where elections were cancelled and where no constitutional leader exists any more. But no one seems to notice.

The master debaters didn’t, for all intents and purposes, even talk about that endless war or any of the others that threaten to bloom this year (if not next month).

No, we got “abortion”. And the golf scores of doddering white men.

But, my darlings, things are even worse than all that sounds.

33% of the electorate, according to a CNN poll, say that Biden won the debate.

One third of the demos, even now, simply refuses to believe the testimony of their own lying eyes.

So saving democracy from the oligarchy, even it were still a remote possibility, wouldn’t actually solve anything, because The People in general have lost the ability to think critically and impartially and rationally.

About anything.

You and I are blessed with front-row seats for this glorious theatrical pageant on the compelling subject of how empires end.

Not in fire, not in ice. Not with a bang, but neither with a whimper.

With nothing but a vacant stare, accompanied by a soundtrack of burning brown children someplace far, far away.

Dems in panic mode after the debate

I’m passing along the Washington Post version because it’s the heart of the beast speaking from the center of the lair.

But all you have to do is insert “Biden panic” in the search and you will be given the CNN and MSNBC flavors of the same thing.

The part I don’t understand is how these bright tuned-in people could not know that it would come to this, months or years ago. The man has been crumbling before our eyes in slow motion for at least this long.

I’m not going to make fun of that poor lost old war criminal.

I’m just watching with interest to see what the young war criminals will try to do about it.

Unlike this addled pious buffoon, and many of you I’m sure, I am very happy for Julian, and I will be happier still if he can ever resume the practice of his essential journalism.

M. Mercouris points out the many ways in which this has still been a gross miscarriage of justice, (to turn pastor mike’s phrase on its pointy head), including the saddling of this now nominally free man with half a million in debt for a plane ride accompanied by a ridiculous number of useless cops.

Silver clouds and dark linings; aye, same as it ever was.

He is alive and he is not actively persecuted and imprisoned.

That is as good a start as any of us can reasonably hope for in these end times.

***

The very best analysis I’ve heard on the broader questions raised here, all the more impressive because it was taped before the release was even confirmed. Good job, Matt.

Scientist Issues Warning About Current Wuhan Lab Work: ‘Would Set Back Civilization About 250 Years’

Pretty clear by now that Covid came from the lab being funded by Fauci and other defense establishment goons to do gain-of-function research.

Pretty clear that nothing valuable to average non-billionaire humans like you and me was learned from any of it.

Pretty clear that the next pandemic will come from the same essential sources, probably sooner rather than later.

Pretty clear that The Vax was virtually worthless, and maybe a ‘cure’ worse than the disease.

What will I do next time?

Never mind that.

What will you do next time?

It’s been a year now since I got serious about dropping my carb intake, about a ketogenic way of eating, about intermittent fasting and going for a walk every day.

I don’t own a scale for weighing myself, so I can’t give you numbers about that.

But as of today and post-vacation, I am officially back to a 37-inch gut, down from 46 when I started, and I’m proud of that.

My goal starting out was 35 inches, and I still think I’ll make it there eventually, but I’m no longer laser-focused about erasing those last two.

Instead I just want to work on feeling good.

I’m very intrigued by this video about a kind of ‘fasting’ that doesn’t ban all food, and performing that ritual monthly or seasonally for five days at a time, while maintaining the habit of eating very well all the time, without the militant rigor of the past year.

So while I remain philosophically opposed to eating grains, I’m going to eat as many tortillas as my body wants, so long as they are organic and of the very highest quality available.

It’s the same with legumes and particularly beans. I’ll be having more of them, carbs and all, provided I have access to the best of the best.

The majority of my eating will still be about salad greens and avocado and cheese and olive oil at mid-day, and grass-fed animal protein for the early evening (grass-fed at a bare minimum, and beginning to source even better, all the way to actual organic).

The little fish will be a factor too, and so will the berries of black and blue and rasp. I don’t think either of those will ever quite be staples, but they both resonate with me as food in a way I can’t really explain rationally.

Extending the walks will matter. I think maybe some light weight training will too.

There isn’t a concrete measurable goal for the second year with all this.

I just want to be well and to expand the boundaries of what that word means, in a world that is continuing to grow darker and more impoverished and ugly, until the rising waters of this societal unwellness can’t be held back any longer and rush in to swallow up everything in a night of final sleep without end.

Fighting Back The Tears Instead

Worker PLEADS For CLASS SOLIDARITY in POWERFUL Viral Video

Some families decided to enjoy a Sunday afternoon at the beach in Sevastopol this past weekend.

That decision cost many of them their limbs, and some their lives.

“Controversial” cluster munitions were used and there are at least two children dead already.

We already know it was an act of state-sponsored terrorism.

I leave it to you to decide which state and which leaders you think are guilty of the crime, or whether it will remain a baffling mystery in the eyes of those who will not see, like that Nord Stream pipeline thing still officially remains.

One Large Step Closer To Open World War

The Retaliation Spiral

Tensions Escalate to Most Dangerous Level Yet

Decide for yourself as well, please, what the next stage in the slow suicide of the nominally civilized species will look like.

It might matter to you very personally and in ways that which pinhead you vote for in the fall never will.

An uncharacteristically dumb take from DueDissidence, on an equally dumb protest action.

Stonehenge DEFACED by Climate Activists in BIZARRE ‘Protest’ Stunt

It’s not a ‘natural’ monument, Keaton, it’s the other kind of monument, and your claim that it is just demonstrates that you don’t have any idea what Nature is, like the wide majority of people that don’t have YouTube shows.

It’s not any more a part of ‘the environment’ in the sense you mean, than an oil refinery or a Taco Bell is. It’s just an older less ugly version of precisely the same thing.

It’s a symbol of the dawn of civilization and sedentism, totally crafted by humans who were not hunter-gatherers, of radically displaced natural materials, for gods only know what reasons.

The screeching reaction of UK government hacks are predictably even more wrong.

The protest action was merely useless. That horse bolted years ago, and I’d be willing to bet that your carload of Just Stop Oil activists drove up to Stonehenge in a vehicle that was in fact powered … by oil.

Nothing of value was actually lost.

Except our souls, and that happened a very long time ago, before even the invention of cornstarch.

Jeffrey Sachs calls bullshit, literally this time, on the hegemons, the Empire, and their blatant double standards in international relations and the uses of temporal power.

***

The monsoon isn’t really here–at least I haven’t personally gotten rained on yet–but already its blessing is real.

The cloud cover does drop things down ten degrees, which is nice, but it also takes the sting and glare out of the sunshine, which is transformative.

Yesterday I walked at dusk and it was unpleasant, because way too many other people were out and about then trying to work around the heat too.

Today I walked in the middle of the day, when no one else wanted to do it. It was the same ninety degrees or so, the same taste of humidity in the air … but I was alone, and it wasn’t really uncomfortable in any way.

I will keep striving toward a walk at first light, but on days when the extra sleep from four to six-seven in the morning necessarily takes precedence, I can still be a good boy, more or less painlessly, so long as the clouds are thick enough.

***

The video about driving from Missoula to the Pacific is the most popular thing I’ve done in at least three months, and in the end it might pull the highest number of views thus far in 2024 (mainly the competition consists of that one with the Jackrabbit ‘Here It Is’ thumbnail).

That’s been heartening, especially since I have not been enjoying making the films about Seattle proper. I wasn’t shooting enough footage at the right times to make them great, or honestly even all that good.

Tomorrow I will put up the one about Port Angeles the second time around–still thin on raw material, but a good and solidly memorable day where I felt competent and useful, before it all went to hell the first time somewhere in Utah.

I’m dreading the reliving of it and I’ll probably skip a lot in the interests of catching up quickly to the real time of two-weeks-later.

The better place I am now.

The important thing to understand about cults is that no one ever thinks they’re in one.

From the outside, it can seem so obvious that a random scientologist, or the people who drank the proverbial kool-aid at Jonestown are/were in a cult, and utterly blind to that fact, their beliefs cultivated and perpetually reinforced by the cultist leaders, and fellow followers alike.

From the inside the rationales of any given cult though seem not only reasonable, but in fact superior to the weak-tea rationales of the uninitiated and the lost; better for explaining reality, and better at representing a blueprint for a truly better way to live.

Most cultists therefore quite naturally practice some form of proselytizing or recruiting, consciously or not–they don’t want us to join for some evil purpose, no!–they just want to help us to see the light, and to join in the consensus trance for our own moral and practical good.

Most of what I say and do here is aimed at simple (and maybe obsessive) deprogramming from the biggest and most common Western cult of them all.

You might prefer to think of it as enlightened neo-liberalism, or capitalism, or democracy that must be spread to the darker corners of the globe for the salvation of poor heathens suffering under inferior forms of belief.

Autocracy, communism, benighted somali anarchies, dictatorship, and all the little hitlers out there, don’t you know, in the sunless pockets of the horrible Jungle, in the Heart of Darkness. We come in peace, offering the blessings of the Garden, of freedom, liberty, justice for all, and if we have to offer them on the end of a bayonet or a sanctions regime sometimes, well, that’s just a small necessary evil part of doing the noble missionary work of All Things Bright and Beautiful.

Ninety times, since the nominal end of the last good war, the Empire has practiced coups, overthrows, and regime change in the name of these Things. That just counts the more obvious and overt projects.

It doesn’t include, for example, everything the Good Empire has done to try to get rid of the putin, over there in the old new enemy place. It doesn’t include many things that are just routine and reflexive jerks of muscle memory on the part of the war machine by now. It doesn’t include most of the Benign Presence of the christian soldiers with guns in 800+ military bases all over the human globe. It doesn’t include the aching for war with the Chinese now burning in the breasts of cultists great and small.

The logic of our Cult is inexorable.

You have felt its breath in your ear, whispering silkily, since you were a tiny child in a new school with your hand held over your heart.

Pledging allegiance, once more with feeling …

To the flag; to the Republic for which it stands.

You didn’t think of it at a bestial machine with no conscience, because thinking of it in that quite legitimate way would greatly displease the leaders who run this nearly ubiquitous cult.

You thought of it as the crowning achievement of the progress of Civilization.

Maybe you still do.

To some wavering ever less certain degree, but

There’s a warning sign on the road ahead

Liberal Ideological Extremism Is Driving The Collective West Into Global Suicide

I don’t feel like Satan but I am to them.

I’m only just trying in my own half-seeing way to update this moldy rotting syllabus so it has a chance of reflecting a new reality that the great L. Ron and his henchmen Joe and Donald would prefer you were never exposed to even once.

Guess which one of these videos contained harsh criticism of the modern media and mild implied criticism of YouTube itself?

Yes. The one in the middle with all the views stripped away from it.

All things being equal, a Yellowstone video with an erupting geyser in the thumbnail should have done at least as well as the more random road trip videos posted the day before and the day after.

But things are not equal.

Things are rigged

… via algorithmic fuckery, against any opinion, any content, that might get in the way of corporate profits. It’s the same on all the behemoth platforms, including X. Shadowbanning and suppression are built seamlessly into their systems.

The thoughts I shared in the Limitations of the YouTube Platform before the trip are the same and just a little more intense after it.

The intensity is sharpening the strategies I will use in the future. For example, I’m not going to post on YT itself anything further that directly or indirectly challenges Google’s business model and ethos of capitalist and democratic exceptionalism. I will instead contingently engage in … self-censorship of some crafty sort, by editing out any such heresy for the YT versions of my work, and only alluding to the fact that uncensored versions of it can be found at my Patreon site (my alt-choice for the time being), and/or here at the Spill.

If Patreon falters I’ll engage in further tactical retreat to Substack or Rumble or Odysee or beyond, but so far they’ve been even more generous and cool than they initially committed to being.

May it go on being so.

You can help by becoming a member at Patreon dot com slash vairtere (there is a completely free version of membership that gets you 99.9% of everything for zero dollars, cents, or commitment of any sort), and watching my full vids routinely from there.

As always, thank you for the spirit of your support, for the time you invest, and for the attention you pay whether or not you pay literally. Being read, heard, and seen is a large part of what makes this worthwhile to me, and as for money I am ever more inclined to trust that the lord will provide so long as his prophet remains faithful to The Truth and not the oh so very profitable lies.

I stuck to that plan. By evening it was all done, and things clouded up on schedule.

The wind hit with full force and the earliest blasts were full of stinging grit. I got a bit of footage, even though I’ve just been editing these days, from the trip stock. You’ll see it in a week or two.

With the various crises addressed and the flow of the house improving exponentially, I have the goal of returning to a daily walk in the morning before the heat, as soon as eight hours from this minute. All the other pieces are roughly back in place. I not only had salad for lunch but tacos for dinner today, and I hydrated like a swamp thing. The walking aches to start itself anew, and I will do my best to accommodate.

A gift for you:

Litha

An odd little day.

The heat dome still has us in its grip. Ruidoso is still burning. But the nights at 5000 feet are still relatively cool. Tomorrow everything environmental starts to change again for the Solstice.

I woke up real early and got to work on cleaning up coffee orders for Anaprim. While that was happening, I was getting back in touch with a cousin I haven’t seen or talked to in something like 43 years.

In touch in the digital way. I did see her, and hear her, mainly because she has a small YouTube channel with a few posts on it from three and four years ago in the heart of the covidian days. We subscribed to each other.

Those things occupied me all morning. Then I realized I was a few days behind on my water bill, and that is a thing that never ever happens. So I started looking for my debit card to go pull out money and run down to pay it in person. The card wasn’t anywhere.

I stopped freaking out after a while and made a real salad for the first time in almost three weeks. I felt good about that being my response.

Then I looked some more, and when I still didn’t find it I went online and put a block on it, not reporting it lost quite yet, and I went to the store because otherwise there would be no cream for coffee in the morning. I spent carefully at the store, because it seems I will be low on ready cash until they can ship me a new card, and I looked at the moon and made a plan about it.

Tomorrow on the holy day, as the pre-monsoonal wind kicks up and tries to bring us clouds for the first time in quite a while, I’m going to go over the entire premises one more time, unpacking my bags completely from the trip and putting my whole living machine back into some kind of order, from the truck to the dishes.

In the afternoon, when I don’t find the card anyway, probably, I will report it lost and get a new one on the way. I will have another salad and I won’t forget the avocado this time. Then I’ll take a check down to pay that bill to the city, secure in the knowledge that they don’t even care about five days late, unlike most everyone else, and I will resolve to never let it happen again, as a matter of pride.

Later in the week maybe I can get some real work done in a calm clean temporarily poor space.

There’s plenty in the fridge.

There are still many days worth of video to keep on editing.

There are habits to rebuild and habits to delete.

The sage tells himself that he is reasonably sagacious, and that’ll have to do for now.

Chas Freeman casually tosses out this Chinese expression at about the 50-minute mark here.

I am indebted to him for that.

The Westernized version of the phrase is rendered as “tang ping”.

I looked at a lot of sources to try and understand what it meant. I liked this discussion of it best.

But I already have my own translation for the concept, namely, ‘getting the hell out of the way’.

Coincidentally, I was wondering the other day: what exactly have we been jeeringly advised to get out of the Way Of?

All we can say for sure is that it is whatever the better people are choosing to Lead, or get behind. It might be a kind of army, or a moral crusade, or an economic project.

I think it means all three and then some. I think “the way” that is referred to in the original formulation of the proverb is essentially the unipolar hegemony, the ‘rules-based order’, and the whole bleeding capitalist Anglo-American or Atlanticist Imperium. “Our” way. The american-Way, as alluded to by the motto of Superman.

In some sources the idea of lying flat is connected to the idea of doing so while enduring a beating at the hands of this Way, and that resonates for me as well.

Having endured many kinds of beatings, both consensually and non-consensually, literal and metaphorical, I think lying flat is the next best thing to avoiding it by getting out of the Way of it (and in some cases, for reasons I will leave vague, actually a superior response for certain purposes).

I will close on the subject for the moment by quoting at length from the Wikipedia page.

***

Those who choose to “lie flat” may lower their professional commitment and economic ambitions, simplify their goals, while still being fiscally productive for their own essential needs, and prioritize psychological health over economic materialism.

The phrase “quiet quitting”, meaning doing only what one’s job demands and nothing more, which became popular in the United States in 2022, was thought to be inspired by the tang ping movement. Another newer related phrase is bai lan (Chinese: 摆烂; pinyin: bǎi làn; lit. ‘let it rot‘), which means “to actively embrace a deteriorating situation, rather than trying to turn it around”. Basically, it refers to a voluntary retreat from pursuing certain goals because individuals realize they are simply too difficult to achieve.

Origin

The term first appeared around February 2020 (the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic) on the Chinese Internet. The movement began in April 2021 with a post by Luo Huazhong (username “Kind-Hearted Traveler”) on the internet forum Baidu Tieba, in which he discussed his reasons for living a low-key, minimalist lifestyle. In 2016, 26-year-old Luo quit his factory job because it made him feel empty. He then cycled 2,100 km (1,300 mi) from Sichuan to Tibet, and now back in his home town Jiande in eastern Zhejiang Province, spends his time reading philosophy, and gets by doing a few odd jobs and taking US$60 a month from his savings. He only eats two meals a day.

Luo’s post, entitled with “Lying Flat is Justice”, illustrates:

I can just sleep in my barrel enjoying a sunbath like Diogenes, or live in a cave like Heraclitus and think about ‘Logos’. Since there has never really been a trend of thought that exalts human subjectivity in this land, I can create it for myself. Lying flat is my wise movement, only by lying down can humans become the measure of all things.

Luo’s post and story quickly gained a following on social media, being discussed and soon becoming a buzzword on Sina Weibo and Douban. The idea was praised by many and inspired numerous memes, and has been described as a sort of spiritual movement.

***

I’m not quite willing yet to alter the phrase into something like “Lead, Follow, or Embrace Letting It Rot” … but this moment of dialectic experience, I concede, does have me considering it.

Please stay tuned for the latest exciting developments.

The whole point of bringing the fridge and the powerbank and all that kit was to have at least a freshly crafted salad every day, and maybe some hot-cooked meat every other night.

None of that happened even once.

We were still moving far too fast even on the best days, like the one in today’s video, and by the end of everything any hope of living gently and right was utterly curbstomped by other and worse priorities and habitual ways of being.

In the midst of that particular penultimate beating (metaphorical, and arguably consensual) I said out loud:

“Never again, never ever again, not for any reason whatsoever; Never.”

I meant it.

But you and I both know that I’ve said it and meant it before.

Just exactly like I said: No More Goddamn Cats.

Just exactly like I said a lot of shit about large things and small.

I don’t know whose fault that is really, but in the spirit of 躺平 I will accept at least my share of the blame, and then some.

Then I will continue trying against all rationality to make Better Choices.

Like these pictured here to bring us back up from the very bottom pondslime of despair, and lift spirits in spite of it all. Amen to the homebrew of Ana. Blessings upon the pumpkinseed.

The precise color of the gloves by the way was less purple and more magenta.

I don’t know what that means either, but it was a vivid thing.

Okay then.

***

I am more or less considering myself caught up as a viewer and consumer of videos. I didn’t watch much of what got posted in the two weeks, but I skimmed every usual channel, and picked and chose without a plan as I started unpacking.

The two videos I enjoyed most both came from Due Dissidence.

I’m posting the first without comment.

HYSTERICAL Zionist CONFRONTS Jewish Pro-Palestine Protesters

The other was much less frivolous. The title is a great question.

Can Societies Flourish WITHOUT Exploitation?

That question is considered by a panel of the two hosts and two friends of the show.

Jose Vega starts off the discussion with a mic-drop moment in which he considers the political philosophy of Aristotle versus that of Plato and Socrates. Please consider giving that much a glance, not for me, but for yourself.

After that, to me personally, it got much less satisfying and resonant, because all four panelists essentially agreed that there is a way for civilized societies to grow beyond the need for internal and external exploitation. Call it innovation, or techno-progress, or invention or creativity–they all roughly aligned around the concept that we all will be saved, someday and somehow, by just figuring out how to science our way past all the existential problems.

And thus emerge into Star Trek style techno-utopia at last.

I on the other hand doubt that, deeply and viscerally.

It would have been so much better, IMHO, if there had been an anprim or at least a solipsist around for balance. John Zerzan, for instance.

But that ain’t how it works, in the land of the algorithm, and anyway … a for-real primitivist probably wouldn’t be watching this much online media in the first place, much less bothering to go on shows and preach the Bad News.

For myself I stand in the uneasy middle halfway between that kind of purism and just being a regular guy. That might be my choice, in the land of liberty, or it just might be where I am compelled to stand, by my nature and the nature of the society I marinate in, and marinate myself in.

I offer no answers, much less prescriptions.

For now I exist and remain committed to description of that existence, of those magenta gloves, of this dirty tierra, of all the philosophical nuances that attract my monkey mind, regardless of being heard or ignored, celebrated or reviled–not because I am a “belletrist” or a Goethe or an anarchist or a Thoreau, but simply because

I don’t know any other way to live.

Serbia’s President Vučić on the gloomy present.”Three or Four Months Away From a Big Global Escalation” “The train has left the station and no one can stop it.”

There is no more certain evidence of the failure of our democracy than to just note that we won’t even have the opportunity to vote for anyone with half this much acumen, heart, or human feeling.

God help us all.

I should have known this with more precision a long time ago.

The fat blue line on this map, particularly at the right, is the Rio Puerco.

The Little Colorado is the thin blue line, entering the channel just east of town.

And thereby, according to the official mappers, turning that whole channel into the Little Colorado River Basin, rather than being called the Puerco, which to me would make more intuitive sense.

The Puerco proper was the site of the greatest radioactive spill in history that you never heard of, just the other side of Gallup, some eighty-plus miles upstream.

That better image is from a Department of the Interior report on the Church Rock disaster and other man-made sources of uranium and radon poisoning.

The report suggests, in language that seems almost desperate to persuade at times, that the spill never really reached as far as Holbrook in dangerous quantities. That part is believable and marginally reassuring.

But places further upstream, like Sanders and Houck and Lupton and Manuelito, were brutally impacted.

There seems to have been a massive effort to play it down and to placate the Dine’ in particular, as that tribe was hit hardest. The report feels very like a part of that placating, to my ear.

In the grand scheme, the important part is that Navajo elders and children and people in general drank viciously radioactive water for some time after the corporation and its embankment failed.

If that part doesn’t move you, be advised that their cows drank it too, and that it is roughly likely that you ate pieces of their tainted flesh once upon a time.

This land we love is damaged and ruined for proper human habitation in a thousand ways, and most of these ways we will never even personally hear of.

Our bodies know anyway.

Fuck capitalism, and weep for the bad joke of democracy long since passed.

There is nothing good about any of it. You can warble all you like about liberty, but there is no real liberty when you don’t have the freedom to drink from the river without ingesting a serious cancer risk or hurting yourself in any of those other thousand ways.

The white man’s way is the way of death, for the native people sure, but even for his own children besides.

And he will tell you with a straight face that none of it matters, so long as his truck is new and shiny and his ranch house holds every creature comfort ever devised by the satan he actually worships.

That is the noble America I see, gazing out over the murdered pretty lands.

I worked hard and slow all day and went to bed at the perfect time.

I only slept for two hours, but it was a deep sleep and I was given this vision.

I was once more young and almost handsome in my way. On a college campus I think.

Or do I let it, and her, go?

Which thing would be more right?

Just a quick one for the reader that asked me the other day who I thought would win.

Glenn knows a hell of a lot more about it than I do.

Biden’s Approval Ratings Reach Record Low After Trump Verdict

On a surprisingly related note … No wait. I’ll save that for last; an afterthought …

Start instead with the movie called the Dallas Buyer’s Club, for which Matthew McConaughey won a Best Actor Oscar a decade ago.

I saw it. I liked it well enough even though it made me sad and angry.

Someone reminded me the other day that the unsung villain of the piece was a then-faceless bureaucrat who we now know today as Anthony Fauci.

I’m not saying you can’t be an LGBT ally or whatever, and yet still be a big Dr. Fauci fan.

But I will say that if you think you are both, you have to be absolutely swimming in a soup of cognitive dissonance.

Which is also fine, because almost everyone, especially the people still struggling to appear in any way normal, is doing the dog paddle next to you in the same fetid stinking imperial broth of lies.

On the radio today, the very NPR itself, I heard a story that said that 82% of Americans describe themselves as at least vaccine-hesitant now, after that god damned fiesta of crap for profit. That includes all the shitty rednecks you so loved poking fun at a little while back, but it also includes me and a whole lot of other people who still prefer to think for themselves, at least as a hobby.

It includes all those nurses and firefighters they fired in New York and elsewhere, for refusing their little jab too.

If you still prefer to take little mouthfuls of that popular normal bathwater soup once in a while, great. I am not qualified to be your nutrition coach, not even metaphorically.

I would only ask that you ease up a little on claiming that Bobby Jr. is a fucking antivaxxer and kook, or whispering with concern that the broken old coot in the pitiful Ozma t-shirt might be one too.

I would only ask that you remember that you are now a part of the mere 18% of We The People who routinely and reflexively swallow most of what they tell you, as Real, as Right, as the foundational basis of your increasingly brittle and doomed orthodoxy.

This isn’t just about the Vax.

It’s about the whole medical profession, and pretty much every other profession still extant within the small puma cage of late-stage capitalism.

It’s about Ukraine, and Russia.

It’s about the Israelis and the Palestinians.

The Chinese and the Taiwanese, and the wetbacks and the jihadis, both handcrafted products of the very Empire that now insists you hate them all.

***

Now the afterthought.

If you might be interested in a brief history of what this Democracy is really about, since it first came together as a full Imperium in the late 1940s, Jeffrey Sachs has you covered in the first 20 minutes, here.

If not … well, I might be forced to concede that there could be better ways to spend your time, or for me to spend mine for that matter.

It’s like I told her the other night through the tears sliding down my face gently without even a single sob.

I’m almost always right, baby.

Only it never has, and it never will do me one fucking bit of good.

C’est la guerre. Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi!

So what I did today, and about all I did, was I rambled on down to Flag and I picked up mah pickup. My analog security system did not initially allow me to jump easily into the driver’s seat. I had to go in through the passenger side, lean over and put the key in, then crank and pray.

She started instantly after the two weeks with not a touch on the gas pedal, even though she’s three hundred and five thousand miles old.

Next, I thought about whether she was in fact a she.

Prolly. I mean … it’s a ship, and ships are supposed to get called she, yeah?

I don’t really know for sure yet though.

These things take time.

But if it does turn out more male than female, I will love him with devotion just the same, for that one fast start and for so many other things besides.

I don’t care if that’s queer either, god damm it.

***

Driving that unlovable rental 6000 miles taught me a lot, about people.

There’s a very high percentage of worthless idiots out there, to judge by driving style, and also to judge by the customer service received or not received, en route.

I did my best the whole way to be philosophical and chill about it, and mostly I was successful in that attempt.

Today on my way back though, on my home turf, I was not entirely successful.

I grabbed my big town organic groceries and started back home happily enough.

Coming up out of town I encountered one of those dreaded types that loves to camp the left lane regardless of the situation.

Which I was still calm about, until I had passed the maroon on the right twice, given it enough gas to tip the speedometer to a hundred, and still … here he comes again, up on my ass but in left lane, driving just fast enough again to make it impossible to pass a truck on the right in front of me. So I braked, and I got in behind him yet once more.

I was annoyed by now, but still doing really well.

Then.

Without signalling, the truck swung over in front of him and damn near chopped the nose of his SUV off, very very close. So he slammed on the brakes, and I did the same, safe and legal.

I let him speed up and go away as I considered what to do.

Gingerly, I started to pass the truck.

I pulled up level with his window and paced him for a minute.

Then I leaned over with my fingers held an inch apart and I just stayed like that, speeds matched, until I was absolutely certain that he had to be seeing those fingers and wondering what the hell.

Then I turned one of the fingers up in the universal gesture of opprobrium.

As I blasted all the way past he let go with his stupid air horn. So I know that all of my message got through.

“You missed him by that much, dude. Fuck you, you stupid fucking fuck.”

After that I needed a little break, so I got off at the next exit, half-hoping he would be enraged enough to follow me. But he didn’t.

***

The exit I used is about 30 miles east of Prettytown.

The sign just says “Two Guns”, with the arrow.

Mainly it leads to a gutted and abandoned gas station covered in multiple layers of nice graffiti.

But being who I am, I have come to know a lot about this place. In the middle of the last century, it was a complex roadside attraction with a kind of zoo at the center. They for sure had a mountain lion, because you can still read that on one of the decaying cages. I shudder to think of that cat in such a tiny concrete prison cell.

Somewhere in the bowels of the Internet there’s a document that tells the early history of the place. I read it once. The collapse of the enterprise was due to a love triangle that resulted among the owners and at least one other person who worked there.

The crude .pdf also tells about an outnumbered bunch of Navajos who took refuge in a cave at the canyon nearby, and how the larger group of Apaches burned them out of it, way before there was a Route 66.

If I remember right the canyon is called Diablo.

Go do your digging and tell me if I do, please.

I’ve visited the remains several times over the years, and almost always I was the only one there.

Today that was very different.

I didn’t go very far into the scraggly network of dirt roads around Two Guns today. But even a casual glance showed a half dozen cars parked in scattered locations around the site.

Parked hard, as if people were living in them. I feel pretty sure that some of them were semi-permanent residents.

This is America in 2024.

What once was only wasteland for curious eccentrics like me is now a budding Bidenville.

I don’t blame Old Joe personal-like, any more than I blame the Commander for who he was and what he believed and preached as gospel all those years ago.

But the jury is in, and the flagwaving democracy greatest-country bullshit is just another lie in a long series of lies like so many caskets at Arlington, like so many cars parked out in Mad Max land in the hundred degree heat, each one full of bags that say Walmart on them.

If you think I’m the one bullshitting now, you go ask the ghost of Tom Joad.

Tell him I sent you, and tell him I said hey, old son.

Home again. Finally and for real, except for dropping off the rental tomorrow 90 miles away and a day late, and recovering the Lariat.

24 hours ago exactly I was 700 miles from here having Peking Duck with a loyal reader, and the subject of the Commander and his philosophy came up.

I said that I no longer had anything personal against the man, and that to the extent that my brothers and sisters feel that he did their lives good, I am actually grateful to him for that.

She said: You should say that More.

So I am.

I could hedge and qualify but that’s not necessary. It’s true. You have a pretty good sense of the nuances in what I feel, or if you don’t, I for one have always been more than willing to share.

On that prickly subject or any other, any time.

A quick hello from the top of Capital Hill, Seattle. The car needs to be dropped off and the pickup picked up on Friday. So one way or another, I’ll be back here on the regular come the weekend … I’ve missed you greatly and I have ten long days of footage for posting at the Patreon, once some vague form of editing can be completed.

I learned pretty early into this process that eating really well meant cooking at home.

Cooking well–smartly, efficiently, creatively–means generating a lot of dishes, even though I try with focused intention to do mostly one-pan or one-bowl meals.

Just now I was wishing for a dishwasher, for maybe the first time ever.

But I caught myself.

I don’t need another fucking large appliance from the Depot. The truth is I would love to have fewer of them. That’s what’s right.

However …

I could use a real pretty sink.

I could use a real pretty sink to turn the chore of dishwashing into a minor art of its own.

Yeah?

Me and Michelle Shocked, baby.

Me and all these god damn cats and Michelle OutAroundTheBend Shocked.

It’s 8:30 at night and I am home.

It feels like there is so very much to do before I can even get started on the

9 hr 37 min
585.6 mile

or

9hr 22 min
688 mile

first leg of the Grand Trip.

Including a good night’s sleep I pray.

We shall see.

So my question for you, dear reader, is simple.

Is this a Good Thing?

I think the way you answer says everything about the way you ultimately view this hypermodern emergent world.

***

I’m writing this a day+ early, because moving into Friday the 31st my life is going to get a lot more expensive and complicated for two weeks or so.

There will doubtless be a lot of good visual footage gathered, if not posted, during that time. As for my assiduous attention to the project here in print, it will doubtless suffer.

I will see you for honest and true on the far side of the maelstrom; inshallah.

As it says, I reposted that sweet little purple paisley tidbit just now.

Then I got to thinking, about the artists, the people who see it all with such clarity.

That clarity is just the first step on a rare and twisted journey.

Michelle Shocked saw it perfectly. But what she saw made her a full mental case, of no use to anyone, not even herself.

Prince saw, and it made him run for the sanctuary of a goofy little cult, knocking on people’s doors and making them flutter even if they had no interest in the good news of the Watchtower Society he was attempting to dump on their steps.

Even T.S. Eliot said fuck it and reversed course into a posing, urbane Anglicanism.

So first you must see.

And then you must learn to live with what you’ve seen, without flinching away, lest all the value of your insight be lost, devolving into a mere cautionary tale.

It feels to me like the people who can pull that off are very few in number; rare birds.

***

Sometimes I wonder if my ‘anarchism’ is just another flavor of cope.

I don’t think it matters much if it is, or if it isn’t.

cuz She can’t take you any way you don’t already know how to go.

Don’t you even think about letting me down, honey, but it’s okay even if you do, because.

I’m already metaphysically standing

On the Sardinian ground.

Biden’s WhiteHouse spokesmonkey, right now today:

“We can’t condemn Israel for this. It would be hypocritical. We do murderous Rafahs ourselves routinely; that’s just the way empire works, so man up you god-damned snowflakes.” (source)

And so of course the babykiller bombs will keep flowing unchecked.

What can a mere citizen even say anymore?

(I’m supposed to be packing right now but of course I have the headphones on listening in, and jesus motherfucking christ)

“Forage fish, also called prey fish or bait fish, are small pelagic fish that feed on plankton and other tiny organisms … They include particularly fishes of the order Clupeiformes”

• herrings
• sardines
• shad
• hilsa
• menhaden
• anchovies
• and sprats

Thus saith the Wiki. Digging deeper, the page on sardines says:

“Although they are not true sardines, sprats are sometimes marketed as sardines. For example, the european sprat, Sprattus sprattus, is sometimes marketed as the ‘brisling sardine’.”

Conversely, the page on sprats says:

“Sprats are sometimes passed off as other fish; products sold as having been prepared from anchovies and others sold as sardines sometimes are prepared from sprats, as the authentic ones once were less accessible. They are known for their smooth flavor and are easy to mistake for baby sardines”.

And indeed, some of the sardine tins I’ve been opening lately list the main ingredient as being sprats.

Who cares? I do, for a variety of intertwining reasons.

If you go looking for lists of The Best Fish for health (of both human bodies and the planet), you will find that ‘sardines’, anchovy, and herring–forage fish–always rate very highly, often ranking above otherwise fine critters like salmon and mackerel, because they are still relatively abundant, low in mercury, and high in essential Omega-3s and other good things.

And of course they are cheap. They are virtually always ‘wild-caught’ as opposed to farmed (there’s no money in farming them, and thus no point in it either from a capitalist perspective). And they have unmatched shelf life, which appeals to the half-ass prepper in me.

As I’ve begun to sing their praises, I’ve encountered a strong reaction that amounts to “Ewww!”. Okay darling, whatever.

Of course, unprepared and cold out of the tin, they are pretty eww, but so would be any beloved trendy fish at the top of your list.

Thus: I’m preparing them. Warming them. With care and intention.

I’m still in the process of perfecting that intention, that ‘recipe’ if you will.

But what I have so far is not too different from a crab cake, and in my humble opinion, superior to that traditional delicacy.

I think that when I get back, instead of re-joining Butcherbox and stuffing my freezer with cod and salmonburgers alongside the pork butt and fancy beef, I’m going to try simply investing in a case of quality forage fish, and caring for them purposefully at the stove one or two tins at a time, as a staple of the evening meal.

Along with the eggs, and the eventual beans and better tortillas when my waistline can afford carbs again.

Along with the intensively researched lunch salads.

On my way toward a practice of forever eating that is both enjoyable and sustainable, to invoke that broken word in earnest.

Sweet little Nikki Haley, the one that was supposed to save you from the Orange Satan (but fucked it up), is in Israel.

Signing bombs.

Modern American Imperialism Part 2: Building Eager Armies Helping Colonize their own Nations

It would be so easy, if We were just the good guys, full stop.

The process Berletic describes here doesn’t just happen to foreign kids.

With the necessary changes, it happened to you and it happened to me, and the ruling elite will do their best to make sure it happens to the next generation and the next, until the whole massive machinery of empire begins to crumble under its own weight.

Drowning in a tide of taxations and other rents that no one can afford any more.

Why are ‘we’ so unhappy, according to the polling, compared to the rest of the world?

George Monbiot says it’s because we are no longer citizens. Only consumers. On average we have no actionable power of any kind, and this is no longer a society.

The solidarity essential to well-being no longer exists, and pretending that it does, on Memorial Day for example, feels useless and even in some subtle way painful.

On top of which, anything bad that happens to you is solely your fault, and being poor especially.

***

The other one goes like this. You’re out in public somewhere random, and somebody asks pointedly: Can I help you?

But that’s not what they mean. They mean, rather:

What are you doing sniffing around here, pachuco?

It happened to me again yesterday.

This time I said, “I’m looking at the house here”. (It had gone up for sale.)

And when that had no apparent effect, I added with a dismissive smile, “So I guess that would be a No”.

The sour and suspicious old coot went away.

Unhappily.

And I spent the rest of Monday crafting a more perfect answer, for next time.

Did that make me happier?

***

The perfect answer looks like certain forms of salad, and fisherman’s eggs.

Something that we belong to.

And which belongs to us.

First, one on the question of who gets to claim to be the good guys.

Nothing very new there.

Second, on the aspirations of the rest of the world.

That part is where the change is coming hard and fast.

In botany:

“Peristrophe is also derived from Greek: peri meaning ‘around’ and strophos ‘a twisted band or belt’, referring to the bracts that surround and enclose the calyx”.

In literature, specifically Wicked:

” … rumors of strict court action against turncoats and peristrophists …”

Thus:

“One who engages the words of their opponent during an argument in a way that transforms the meaning of the words to support their own viewpoint”.

With elements, to my ear, of sophistry as well.

Brainstorm: Israel/Palestine – Who Started It?

One guy. Five hours. Disjointed. Weirdly brilliant.

I’m pretty sure you don’t want to watch it all.

I did though.

I even subscribed.

***

Somewhere around the three-hour mark, lots of things start to become more clear. In particular, the narrator’s day job as a tenant’s lawyer, and what that has to do with the mass evictions of Palestinians eighty and ninety years ago.

It helped me understand my own history, not as a member of the ‘working class’, but as an actual peasant.

SHOCK EMAILS released by FOIA about Dr. Fauci, other top officials

From the comments section below the video:

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” ― Mark Twain

Ayep.

Two modern doctors take on one old one, on such topics as whether an apple a day is still good for you like it once was.

Confronting Dr. Gundry On Lectins | Inflammation & Leaky Gut

Gundry is not one of my favorites. But …

I still like and trust him more than I do the young hotshots and their scientism.

It feels like all they want is the right story to tell their patient-customers in “a modern clinical setting”.

The right story is constantly changing “in the light of new evidence”.

The ‘right’ story is always years behind the real story. The young guns impatiently state that everyone (now) knows that the cholesterol scare was a blind alley, and that beta blockers don’t help cardiac patients.

Following ‘the science’ is a noble aspiration and all of us do it in our varying ways.

I’m happy with keto and intermittent fasting. But I’m closing in fast on the goals I used them to achieve, and already starting to re-evaluate other strategies.

In particular I’m really interested in the microbiome and the second brain of the gut.

Now that my own gut is less swollen and obviously pathological, I’d like to know what it looks like in a condition of thriving.

Digging in and trying to understand are their own rewards.

Gluten is just one of the potentially damaging lectins.

Nicotinic acid, as in nicotine, is also called Vitamin B3.

The more you know the less you know the more you know.

Modern American Imperialism Part 1: US Political Capture as a Game

Brian Berletic starts a new series about how modern colonialism and empire actually work.

A Review of Falling Down (1993), by the Critical Drinker

***

At first blush it’s just another way to go about getting good food:
https://amosmillerorganicfarm.com/store/

On a deeper level it might be an example of what Grace calls good capitalism.

On the deepest level it’s a story that connects organic living with questions of freedom in modernity, and even anarchic principles.

I heard about Mr. Miller’s legal troubles with the government on the Duran, from Robert Barnes, who is currently representing the farmer.

Mr. Barnes is pretty sure Bill Gates is the Antichrist, and I am pretty sure I agree.

He’s whittling on a piece of wood.

In some weird limited sense I am already living the anarchic life that I often profess as the antidote to it all (and somehow burgers of sardine are involved).

I got a feeling when he stops whittlin’, something’s gonna happen.

The Magdalenian is a culture of the Upper Paleolithic dating from around 17K to 12K years before present, named after the type site of La Madeleine, a rock shelter located in the Vézère valley in what they choose to call today France.

EcoNomy of ‘Subsistence’

‘There’s a key point in this video about why following-the-science in this modern world is not quite as brilliant a stratagem as it would at first glance seem’. (Like drinking from the river; like sleeping outdoors ‘in public’).

‘Don’t hold me to your dumb false standard‘ and especially don’t try to tell me that I should do anything, be anything; because that’s how people are you know, the good people, the ethical people, the normal people. It’s all bullshit my dear.

It’s what they want you to believe about the world, because holding on to dumb beliefs of that kind makes you easier to control and makes you a slave to them and their shit all over again. (Where I wonder would you really have stood on Vietnam, these 60 years ago gone by.)

When the project reaches its waypoint goal, I will ‘weigh the same as I did in college’, roughly speaking, though in-college was for me a state that straggled out over seven years and thousands of miles, not even counting the truck driving school.

***

I don’t know what I’m doing.

I am doing it.

These are the people we are so tremulously counting on
to shepherd this economy back to some semblance of normalcy and health.

“But please Captain Smith, I need to know Right Now what to do with these deck chairs!”

I swear to Christ I don’t fear Trump half as much as I do these sad lost Best And Brightest tools, with their Ivy League MBAs and JDs, with their pretty new haircuts and stylish sweaters.

God in heaven help us all.

https://www.patreon.com/vairtere

The decline of the US empire and what replaces it

In my unique circumstance this qualifies as tempting clickbait of a title.

I suggest revising it to read:

“If your Uncle Hank had grown up in rural Iran on the ugly end of the empire stick instead”.

Destroying US From Within: Dr. Jill Stein

… and her senior policy advisor.

Nima lets them talk and talk. I won’t try and tell you it was any kind of pleasure to listen and listen. But I’m … marginally glad I did.

I care about fewer and fewer things. Those student loan people, they can’t get blood out of a turnip and there’s barely anything to garnish anyway. Health care? Even if you find a way to get it around here, it sucks deeply and feels like a useless waste of time and money.

Maybe too I care less about dying itself.

The wars roll on endlessly, growing ever more horrifying and less justified, and the rich (including the politicians and the talking heads of the mainstream media) get obscenely richer.

Right after talking about how no one can afford rent, she stresses the importance of keeping electric car prices low.

That makes it feel obvious that she lives in the same bubble they all do, far away from the laundromat and the left-hand grocery aisle of overpriced toxic animal parts.

All that said, I do still care about genocide, and Biden and Trump and Kennedy have all made it very clear that they absolutely do not.

This woman is the only one running who will even dare to breathe the fucking word.

***

I won’t be the one starting the revolution, and I wistfully doubt that dear old Dr. Jill will be either.

Nevertheless.

My ear is to the ground, and I am preparing myself to be spiritually ready, should the right opportunity for it arise.

***

(Meanwhile)

The only age group that wants more of Biden is boomers, 65+.

A majority of Americans say major change is desperately necessary, with a solid core in the double digits saying that we have to tear the bitch down and start over. Whatever that means (I mean, I know what I mean, by that, but yeah).

And for some reason they don’t think Joe is the guy for the revolutionary rebuild.

Due Dissidence breaks it down.

]

And verily did they proclaim in unison unto the sage:

‘Keep His holy Name out-yo mafukkin mouth, Caananite’. –Deuteronomy 7, KJV

***

The sage, born of a lesser father, will try, to be considerate of your feelings on the matter.

But you’re not making it easy on him, kid.

INTERVIEW: Professor Jeffrey Sachs on Ukraine’s Failures, Israel’s War in Gaza, China, and More | SYSTEM UPDATE #271

Sachs is always worth watching and so is Glenn.

The Ozempic Craze with “Magic Pill” Author Johann Hari

I first heard about this fatburner medication from the nephew, right about the time I was starting keto. I hated the idea, and now I hate it worse.

But … Johann Hari could not say no to buckets of KFC until he got on it.

So I guess if you’re like him, it might be worth it.

I will continue to demur.

Russell Brand interviewed RFK and it’s a really good listen.

His Zionist views still make zero sense to me and are probably dealbreaking, unless the late polls show him with any kind of fighting chance at the end of October, in my state (because it’s still all about the Electoral College, because that’s the way Power wants it to be).

On everything else he says very unusual and interesting things that I mostly agree with.

At least we’d be down to funding one horrific war, to satisfy his rabbi friend I guess.

My hope is very marginal and I continue to vacillate between the feckless Greens and certain delightful dead people. Like Eugene Debs and Charles Bukowski.

A really brilliant analysis of lyrics in context, from Christofouru:

Blinken, Rockin’ in the Free World

I posted a pic sometime back of elite neocon and rules-based order broker ‘Tony’ Blinken jamming out on guitar in his shitty post-cool way.

Apparently he was at it again, in Kiev, with the guy who is only officially the president of Ukraine for the next four days, more or less.

This time he carefully chose that Neil Young song (separate covidian irony alert) about rocking and the free world.

Sure he did. Of course he did.

Alex Christofouru doesn’t think Blinken was listening very closely to Mr. Young’s lyrics, or what they really and actually mean.

Let me help refresh him, you, and myself.

Colors on the street
Red, white, and blue
People shuffling their feet
People sleeping in their shoes
There’s a warning sign in the road ahead
There’s a lot of people saying we’d be better off dead
Don’t feel like satan, but I am to them
So I try forget them any way I can
…
I see a girl in the night
with a baby in her hands
Under an old street light
near a garbage can
Now she put her kid away, she’s gone to get a hit
She hates her life, and what she’s done with it
That’s one more kid, that’ll never go to school
Never get to fall in love, never get to be cool
…
We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder, a gentler machine gun hand
We got department stores, and toilet paper
Styrofoam garbage for the ozone layer
We got a man of the people, says people for life
Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive

Keep on rocking in the free world
keep on rocking in the free world
keep on rocking in the free world
keep on rocking in the free world

Anthony Blinken and his entire class, economic and political and Dem-partisan, don’t give one grunting shit about any of what that song is about.

He’s just cynically using the chorus, the title, to try and help prop up the propaganda, and the money-laundering operation, that makes him and his friends richer every day, over there fighting The Putin.

He’s gonna lose the war. But the darkness of it is that he doesn’t care about that either.

The point of ‘rocking in the free world’ is just to keep it going as long as possible, in order to wring out of Ukraine every possible drop of blood money before the whole thing collapses like twin towers, as it inevitably will, and sooner rather than later.

The young men of that country, the old men, even some of the women now, are being sacrificed to Moloch for gold, for car elevators, for lifestyles of decadent luxury far away from the killing fields, here in the home. Of. The. Brave.

This fucking clown guitarist/Secretary is one of Moloch’s favored priests for the crafting of this literally demonic ritual, this cheap perversion of good poetry for twisted ends.

Now my darling …

Explain to me all about how I have to vote for these evil motherfuckers come November, because orangeman so so very very bad.

And I in turn will explain to you the meaning of the Jeremiad, Chapter 5 and verse 21.

For some months, I’ve been telling myself that I need a better morning ritual.

A more thoughtful and meditative one that sets up the day properly.

One thing that means is: turning coffeemaking into a kind of far-eastern tea ceremony.

I feel pretty certain about that.

Then going on to live much of the ensuing day the same way.

I feel anxious sometimes for reasons like: There doesn’t seem to be any place in this town to buy a shot glass marked off in milliliter measurements; because in the ceremony the first cup needs to contain exactly 15 ml of keto-rich heavy cream.

So I even check the thrift store, unsuccessfully, and then I fret and write it down on the going-to-the-big-town list.

The anxiety is because I’m not immediately succeeding in living my life without anxiety.

Which is goddamn ridiculous.

Sometimes I am goddamn ridiculous.

***

Sometimes, I am a literal, verifiable and legitimate genius.

Winking with a toothgapped smile of pure honesty, I tell you sincerely that I know it can be very hard for anyone who isn’t me to see it, because I spend so much of my time down in the weeds, overthinking and boiling over noisily … ferociously experimenting in my fortress of solitude like a mad cartoon villain, or anti-hero, or just professor like the kind I once was out there in the world.

Or: spending too much of my libidinal bandwidth in spilling out dregs here, full of pics and links that, while often informative or entertaining, are actually tangential to the serious thrust of my thinking–thinking which only gets represented and symbolized by belletristic words once in a while, here, or elsewhere, or in real life.

Prologue aside, I’m going to tell you a (shaggy, raggedy) story about a very small moment of my genius, a moment that came after a period of many days. A week and more of mornings and afternoons in which I was intermittently manic about a certain small and specific thing.

About ten months ago, I got sick and tired of looking at my big flabby gut and decided to try to do something serious about it. Mainly and in brief, I accepted the Gospel according to the ketogenic low-carb diet, and its divine twin, Intermittent Fasting, eventually to the point of One Meal A Day, almost every day.

In the earliest days of my born-again conversion experience, the results were extremely gratifying and rewarding.

I lost an inch off my gut every month, down to the end of last year, six inches of it gone away for good.

***

That second part was supposed to be a long brilliant post.

It’s been sitting around in draft form for days.

Instead of finishing it, I am writing it down and letting it go.

That is the ceremonial thing to do, in this specific case.

***

Also I just realized that the coffee scale can measure in milliliters, so …

Right now I am fully embracing my inner Ridiculous Genius.

Source

I kinda forgot that roller derby even existed once.

On the other hand those cafeteria vending machines lined up in a row brought on instant flashbacks.

***

The main guy I recognized was the one that went on to play Bob Newhart’s dentist friend Jerry.

I think his name was Bonerz, Peter, which is now funny, that I think of it.

Also, was that gun man Peter Boyle? I think so. Guy must have been born bald.

***

Johnny. The photographer, the journalist, the cinematographer with the party, the documentarian whose platform is film, the Reporter–the Witness.

“… And that ain’t cool”, but nor is he uncool.

He is Medium Cool, not warm and not icy. That’s my interpretation of the title.

Do you have an alternative? I’ll bet you do and I’ll bet it’s better than mine.

You don’t share it though.

That is, maybe, the key difference between us.

Or maybe you share it on some heinous platform like Zuck’s, where I won’t go. Fucdo I know.

***

That nurse bird, she had a nice ass.

***

It was preachy, but in the sense that Martin King was too.

It’s not a great movie, but it’s a good one. It’s real art.

***

It was Dobular that reminded me it existed and that I could see it maybe.

They, DD, did two segments; the second one shorter, on the subject of DNC at Chicago, part two, this year.

***

I was a child when the first one happened and the skulls of the cool were cracked by Mayor Daley’s pigthugs. My parents had fled for the suburbs by then and so I never knew anything about what went down, until ten years later and two thousand miles to the west, when I read Abbie Hoffman and friends, who were there and were later tried in court, for the crime of being there.

I’d like to make up for my absence by going this time, this summer at the other end of life.

I don’t think that will happen, or that it would be anything like how it was, should be, if it did.

***

Watching the movie is a two hour commitment, even if you take the trouble to bust through YT’s age-restriction BS, but you can watch the man who made the film, Haskell Wexler, talk about making it, uninterrupted, in 15 minutes.

It’s a movie, filmed on location and in real time, in and around the 1968 Democratic National Party convention.

In Chicago.

You can watch the whole thing here.

I’m about to do that myself.

So far I’ve only got as far as the opening credits, and already I’m suffused with nostalgia for that place, and that time. I was very near the action.

I was six years old.

Later in the day, I’ll be back to share some thoughts about it.

I continue to think a lot about the amount and ways in which I do go rhetorically ballistic.

For comparison purposes, if you are generally for all these wars
(and generally view countries like Russia, China, Iran to be enemies)
… and … especially if you are a Zionist …

Then I would love to know how you feel about

Lindsay Graham’s latest foray into going (somewhat more literally) ballistic

*

Can you possibly agree with him, even if only on some emotional level?

Do you really think that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified (I know for a fact that some of you do), and–thus–that dropping a few more nukes to clear up our problems, or Israel’s problems, or Ukraine’s, is equally justified?

Comments are open.

I’m sure they’ll be flooded.

Just before the Dawn, they say, it will get down to about 43 degrees.

Over the next few nights it will only drop to just under 50, and then just more than 50 …

The last half of May is the start of the warm season, just as the last half of October is the start of the cold here. After these couple of last cool gasps, we probably won’t see 50 again for five months, anywhere near Horsehead Crossing. Even when the monsoons decide to ride in on a chilly blast and blow wet, that’s still more like 60.

My single meal is concocted over the course of a couple hours lately. In the first hour, from 4 to 5 tonight, a big bowl of salad. In the second, 5-6, I just had four eggs. I’m getting really good at cooking them well all of a sudden.

Usually there will be real meat with the eggs, or a couple of tortillas. This evening there wasn’t. It seemed to be a matter of mood.

I’ve lost seven inches around the middle and I’m aiming to lose four more at least this way. When I get that far, I will have finally vanquished obesity officially and properly. My BMI will tip just over into the ‘normal’ range. I have no idea what I weigh right now, and I don’t particularly care. It’s that gut measure that matters to me; the number and all that it implies about the syndromes of metabolism.

At the start of the journey some expert equated my ideal belly size with 200 pounds even, for a maleish person of my lofty stature. I feel like it will be a little less, but I’m just guessing.

There’s a great big road trip coming up in a little over two weeks and I am already starting to prepare for it. I jumped-started the van today because I think that’s the vehicle that will take me on the first 90 miles, and the last 90 miles, of thousands of them all told.

I don’t want to go anywhere.

But since I am honor-bound to, I’m going to vaya con mi diosa, with calm and purposeful steps.

Is your mind going a mile a minute? Are you full of mental distractions constantly thinking about the past or the future? Do you depend on outside stimulation for your happiness—movies, gaming, shopping, drinking, smoking, or eating? These qualities of the mind are called rajas in Ayurveda. A rajasic mind is never at rest, it is always distracted, looking forward to the next activity, reward, or accomplishment. While rajas can be disguised as being passionate, people with rajasic minds really just long for peace of mind and a deeper, more sustainable experience of contentment.

—lifespa/Douillard

 

A sattvic mind is at peace, easily able to cope with stress, and content without the need of external stimulation.
A rajasic mind is only satisfied when externally stimulated and rewarded, or stressed in the way we can become when challenged.
And a tamasic mind is protective and withdrawn, even burnt out.

In nature, these three forces balance each other. Sattva balances out the stimulating forces of rajas, which create change, and the protective forces of tamas, which when out of balance can create obstruction.

The goal in life and in nature is not to be 100 percent sattvic,
but to bring rajas + tamas into balance with sattva.
(Living a life full of generosity and compassion can lead to longevity, boosted moods, a healthier immune system, and better gut health.)

—lifespa/Douillard, but a different article

 

rajah (n.) also raja,
“king or prince in India,” ruling either independently or as a feudatory.

1550s, from Hindi, from Sanskrit rajan “king,” related to raj “kingdom, kingship,” rajati “he rules,” and cognate with Latin rex, Old Irish rig “king” (from PIE root *reg- “move in a straight line,” with derivatives meaning “to direct in a straight line,” thus “to lead, rule”).

—etymonline

***

Without further comment? Yes … almost.

I am very definitely ruled by rajas; rajasic energy–it very strongly correlates to my mind with ‘vata’ energy as opposed to pitta and kapha. (I can sure see a parallel with kapha and the lethargic nature of tamas; I don’t know if there’s a similar connection between pitta and sattva.)

To live anarchically means to live without rulers, and to me that is the kind of ideal that can be aspired to, but maybe never fully reached–at least not ‘permanently’.

In the meantime, knowing one’s rulers inside and out is obviously gonna be real important. This is true in the societal/political sense, out in the world.

It is even more essential (I think) in the interior, intra-personal, spiritual way.

I study my Raja/s, my ruler, with great care and intensity of late.

(I think I’ll stop numbering these now … It will just upgrade to a kind of episode. Without Further Comment, or at least with not much.)

***

Glenn Greenwald, in a fast 25 minutes, lays out for us what’s really bad about the sudden new wave of censorship laws, particularly in the US and Canada.

***

Chris Cuomo ADMITS He’s Taking Ivermectin

***

Perfect example of … a smart, well put-together patriot who is nevertheless completely fucked up in the moral sense.
(I’m talking about the guy in the clip who speaks briefly at the very beginning of the video)

*

From later in the same footage:

Did it come from a broad?

The Crocus City Hall terrorist attacks took place on March 23.

Victoria Nuland suddenly left her government post at the end of March. The Ukrainian Interior Minister resigned abruptly in that same week.

None of which proves anything at all.

Just mulling.

A really good rant.

See, what I’m doing there is linking it off–mostly without comment, or even context.

That’s not challenging, either to write or to read.

Maybe there’s some hope.

For me.

As a … pundit, or something.

After all.

I had a great, long talk today with one of my most dedicated readers.

Hell for all I know she’s my only reader, heh.

She said some very nice things about the work I do here, and for that I am lifelong grateful.

She also said that reading what I do is real hard. Challenging work to read, just as it is to write.

True that and no doubt.

There are so many changes happening in my life right now and they are almost universally good ones.

I’m in a generous mood and willing to … consider certain alterations.

I know I’ve said in the past that I’m not going to talk about politics. When I said it, in all good faith, I meant it, and I did try. But I failed–you could even said I lied.

Today we start over in honesty.

I am going to write about politics, and related subjects like anarchism, and I’m going to keep doing it, without regard to the costs, fiscal or otherwise. If shit needs saying, I’m gonna be the bitch who says it.

But I will try to be a little more constructive about it.

Maybe I already have been, and no one noticed, not even me.

The main reason that being constructive is a whole ‘nother kind of hard is:

I live these days without hope, and I blame you all for it. You all, in the collective sense, humanity. You just don’t give me any rational reason to hope, you fickle selfish greedy narcissistic bastards.

However.

Living without hope turns out to be … not as bad as it sounds.

I’ve begun to see hope as a kind of drug, and to ask myself if I am not better off without it.

Could it really be kicked? Without dismal consequence? With conceivably even some benefit?

Not enough data to answer that yet, but, on a completely unrelated note …

I am down to two cups of coffee a day, and I had no intention at all of moderating my intake.

I just don’t need as much caffeine as I used to need, and …

I’m only drinking it for enjoyment now.

Maybe I’ve been on a similar path, with the hopium, and the copium. Maybe I’m still on the path, and getting further along it every day, barely noticing.

Tell me what you need to hear.

I won’t promise to provide it, especially if it’s bullshit.

But I’ll listen.

To you.

My audience.

raggedy, adj., from Old Norse raggaðr “shaggy”,
via Norwegian ragget (“shaggy”) and Old English raggig “shaggy, bristly, rough”

also:
“Ragged was used of the devil from c. 1300 in reference to his “shaggy” appearance”.

Conclusion:
Raggedy and Shaggy are the same word
with the possible whimsical difference that
I am a Shaggy Man, with a Raggedy Cat.