I don’t like the Donald. I don’t like the Whoopi. I don’t like that Karen Finney from the other video on the same subject that I’m not linking because you’re not clicking anyway.

Whoopis Brain COMPLETELY Break While Justifying Pardoning Hunter!

But mostly I just hate the brain-rotted group-think that tries to justify anything and everything, so long as that justification is in the name of protecting or enriching someone who is a member of the same cult.

Sometimes, as in this example, the rot is obvious, big, and dramatic.

Much more often, it’s far more subtle–to the point where the cultists can even think that it has nothing to do with politics or culture or even the big picture regarding anything.

Twenty-six percent of Americans will look you in the eye and tell you in all apparent sincerity that the economy is doing just great.

From the point of view of their cult and their class, maybe it really seems so.

If they are not among the ten percent of Americans who own 88% of all the stocks, then they’re close enough to still have a reasonable hope of someday getting there.

For the other 80-90% of us (and for 95% of the eight billion humans on the planet), this way of life and this System generally and overwhelmingly fucking suck.

It’s been months running into years now that I’ve been at making essentially just that one point, and trying to get “you” to see it.

But outside of a fan or two, and for all practical purposes, I know now that there really is no you.

I’m trying to decide in these solstice days how I feel about that, and in what ways how I feel will or should change what I do in this practice of self-anointed Art.

Rolling toward the deepest darkness, and into the brave new year.

the spiral shell curving inward upon itself
the spire of straight grass church rising up
the spirit breathing life into space dust
the secret is revealed: what was not, now is

each and all these pieces can only transpire
within the sainted uaire, a private room
where we work out the way to grant immunity
to our selves for no one else can take Place.

Playing guitar on the back porch, I sit in my car
Why do you sing so sad?

It’s so lonely in this parkland
Please come with me, to the bright lights downtown

The sun is down in the corn field
The evening is dark, and you sing so sad

I got two weeks in back pay–there’s gas in
my car and your folks say I must go

Playing guitar on the back porch, I leave in my car
Why do you sing so sad?

The Four Parts of This And Every Weekend
October 4, 2015

I’ve lived my life wrong.

I could tell you that it was because I had to, and that might well be true. But precise justifying of that sort is not what interests me here at the far end of rectitude.

I choose rather to begin again, walking uprightly even if my knuckles drag.

–The First Spill

***

Time for a new book.

***

spir- has many completely different derivations and meanings in English.

The spir- in spiral comes from the Greek speira “a winding, a coil, a twist, a wreath”
from PIE *sperieh-, from a base *sper- turn/twist/wind
(some interesting parallels there with ‘vertere (v.)’)
(“The Latin verb “vertere,” meaning ‘to turn,’ turns into several common and not-so-common words in English, such as ‘reverse’.”)

In the directly opposite sense, the spir- in spire, as a noun, descends straight up from
Old English spir “a sprout or shoot of a plant, spike, blade, tapering stalk of grass,”
from PIE *spei- “sharp point”
and thus, spire as a verb:
“to send up shoots, germinate, sprout,” as grain or seed”
“to extend to a height (in the manner of a spire), to rise aloft”

The Latin spir- means “breathe.”
Thus the blowhole of a whale is called its spiracle, the aperture through which she breathes.

When you have an in-spiration, an idea is breathed into (or perhaps within) your mind.

If you hold onto it, tight but not too tightly, the fleeting idea may tran-spire
… it may breathe-across from not being, into Being–that which we allege to be Reality.

That transpiring might need a con-spir-acy to help reify it–a breathing-together, while hatching a plot …

… or, you know, while breathing a belief in something together, such as the goodness of the American national experiment and Defending it with military force, the goodness (or badness) of the institutions of slavery or genocide or fascism (whatever that means), and alternative theories about who killed which president when. Or: lizard people, or: how and why Building Seven of the World Trade Center fell.

***

Further down the evolutionary etymological ladder there is
Espíritu Santo
From espíritu (“spirit”) + santo (“holy” or saint[ed]).
see also “the Holy Ghost”

***

And this is the ghostly connection that makes
that which
is sanctified.
Thus:

sanctuary (n.)
early 14c., seintuarie, sentwary, etc.,
“consecrated place, building set apart for holy worship; holy or sacred object,”
from Anglo-French sentuarie,
Old French saintuaire “sacred relic, holy thing; reliquary, sanctuary,”
from Late Latin sanctuarium “a sacred place, shrine”

(So sanctuary is a refuge–and also to provide refuge–and thus, earlier or later, a holy place …)

(Likewise: So a saintuaire is simultaneously a relic, and a container that holds a relic–which in this case also means: a house. Whether it moves
or whether it doesn’t.)

a sanctuary also simply means “one’s private room;”

and in Medieval Latin: “a church, a cemetery; a right of asylum“,(and also–to provide asylum, to give sanctuary) fr. Latin sanctus “holy” (see saint (n.).

Since the time of Constantine and by medieval Church law, fugitives or debtors enjoyed immunity from arrest and ordinary operations of the law in certain churches (and even in certain secular districts, biblically, and in London); hence its use by mid-14c. of churches or other holy places with a view to their inviolability.

The transferred sense of “immunity from punishment by virtue of having taken refuge in a church or similar building” is by early 15c., also of the right to such.
(Exceptions were made in England in cases of treason and sacrilege.)

The general (non-ecclesiastical) sense of “place of refuge or protection” is attested from 1560s;

as: “land set aside for wild plants or animals to breed and live”
it is recorded by 1879
in reference to the American bison.

***

“Do you have a name for the new Book yet?”

No, not yet. The math hasn’t been done.

This was only determining what the different parts of the equation are.

One of them is buffalo.

We were both budding teachers, even though we were still students, or something like that.

I didn’t say it, but I wondered if it was going to be a problem.

She took my face into her hands and kissed me and said:

“You can be my principal”.

“by modern reckoning
the last month of the calendar,
the month of the winter solstice,”

late Old English, from Old French decembre, from Latin December, from decem “ten”
(PIE root *dekm- “ten”); thus the tenth month of the old Roman calendar
which began with March.

***

Decembrist, in Russian history in reference to the insurrection against Nicholas I in December 1825.

In the midst of the confusing transition into Nicholas’ reign, the Northern Society, a secret society of liberal revolutionaries, nobles, and military officials, organized a conspiracy to replace the Russian Empire’s autocratic regime with a constitutional monarchy.

On December 26th, Northern Society members led a force of approximately 3,000 troops into Senate Square to prevent the loyalty-swearing ceremony and to rally additional soldiers and officers to their cause. This group of rebels, although disorganized due to indecision and dissension among its leaders, confronted troops loyal to Nicholas outside the Senate building in the presence of a large civilian crowd.

A standoff ensued, during which Nicholas’ envoy, Mikhail Pence, was assassinated.

The loyalists eventually opened fire with heavy artillery, scattering the rebels.

In the aftermath of the coup attempt, many of the rebels were sentenced to hanging, imprisonment, or exile to Siberia.

So there came that day, and on that day I was really and truly both twenty, and twelve.

On that day, I cried tears of rage. They fell hot and they fell fast. I couldn’t stop them.

She gazed upon the dewy droplets and laughed, precisely because it was so ridiculous that a grown man should weep over something so trivial and so foolish. Over a father or over another father.

But I was not grown.

Neither was I a man.

I was twelve even though I was twenty, and so I cried the ridiculous tears.

It was all explicable, in those terms, and I see that now, and I don’t really blame her.

Not for the laugh at all events と in any event と at any rate と anyway and so apology for it is neither here

nor there

I don’t know what to do with it; I don’t know what good sorry could do, for you or me or any of us.

Three more years it took me after the sobbing to only begin all over at the beginning to figure it all out for myself. I was seen by the blessed dwarf and his blessed nursewife whose name was Marie.

Two more years more, and then a graduation I haven’t finished paying off four decades later.

By then, the other shard of shattered family had a fully formed (reformed) new identity and belief structure and respectable name to latch onto firmly, and plane tickets, for Portland, for the Alps, for Iceland and Greece.

By then, I had … well I had what they used to call a walk-up apartment, and a downy beard to match. I had a radio show and the exact right kind of dirty magazines under the futon mattress which laid just as dirty, on the floor of the walk-up apartment, and I upon it, and them.

I had a walk upon the floodwall, which I still possess, but I was young and pretty, and so I had a harbor too, since vanished into the northering depths of the Columbia. Roll on.

With the salmon. They sleeps, them gig harbors, with the fishes, just like Luca Brazzi.

I had a gig and got another.

I became the bibliographic instruction specialist and then the webmaster and then the professor (and how could a granddaughter have never known that, about her uncle?–it’s a wonder to me). Then and then and then in a bad forced deal in a compound driveway, I traded that for becoming the anarchist.

I voted the right way for the first and last time in my life and I think I was trying to save something, something familial, by doing it. But four years later I was up to my old new tricks again and something about them prestidigitations surprised even me and

I started finally to awaken

To the truth of the twelve and the twenty …

Reeeeegrets?

I’ve had a few.

But then again

Chief among them not listening to Pat Boone when I had the chance.

It’s a solace, knowing that even if I had listened all those eons ago, I wouldn’t have had what it took, to understand.

I feel like I have it now.

I feel like I’m right about it.

That being right all the time has never done you (or me or any of us) any good.

That I don’t know much about much really, except that in the words of the philosopher-king Rumsfeld, there are both, and ever, known unknowns and the unknown kind also and always

In our godly America where men slept on newspapers back when those were still a thing (back in Pat’s day).

And later, futons too.

Travel, so … Broadening. Educational, you know.

Two years ago, was it?–a trip to Silver to live for a while, and the first films were born.

A year and a half ago, coming back from a cross-continental, Anaprim twinkled into tentative being somewhere near the Anvil Rock Road out between the Willows and Seligman.

Upon thanksgiving-time just past, it’s significantly more nebulous.

It’s not you I’m writing this post for, if indeed it is a post at all. It’s different now.

Things have gradually and then suddenly changed.

I traveled to the past, to the singular moment when I was thirteen and nineteen at the same time.

The instant of Schism.

Plus you’ll get all this, too.
A small, friendly group of 24–28 people — half the size of most tour groups
Full-time services of a professional Rick Steves guide and local experts who will make the fascinating history, art, and culture of Europe come alive for you

Steves. Yes. Not for the right reasons at all. For twisted and perhaps even vengeful ones.

I might have to get a job again after all dammit.

I hope not. But I know which very specific one to apply for anyway, if worse comes to worst.

Maybe there are entrepreneurial mushrooms to be leveraged instead.

I know nothing. I am always right, and it never does me a fucking bit of good, and I know nothing.

Except that it’s not a Spill anymore. To spill is accidental. This, now, is a-purpose.

The word to replace spillage is brewing itself like a hot cup of pourover decaf.

En el nombre del Padre, y del Hijo, y del Espíritu Santo.

Fathers. Mine, and yours.

The Son.

The madre, de dios.

Even in splendid isolation, too, he was never an only child. There were sisters before there were brothers, around the corner, halfway around the world.

A father is a whole belief system, unto itself, and passes its selves down intentionally.

Unto the seventh generation.

Not all religions are good ones.

Seven generations ago.

Devonshire.

I may still see it before I die, and doing it or not doing it are both not important.

Nothing is important, unless we choose to invest in it and see it as being part of our Interests.

There is a small house on a concrete lot in a nowhere town, called Compound.

If I never again move farther from it than five miles down the floodwall to the wash, that’ll be alright.

If I, like those in the other shard of family, swing around the whole other half of the world someday, who do you thinks gonna care?

Wait, what, who do I think?

Liony.

He might.

Though we only just got back and so though it’s late

It’s also too early to tell.

Out in the now, I have a mother who I love and who loves me, and lots of loving brothers and sisters.

But even so …

In the family of my birth, every single one of us is a freak of nature out of a Tom Waits song.

***

In my family smoking is still a thing people do.

In my family, going to college is not a thing people do. It is a major break with family tradition and belief, and in fact an act of profound rebellion, not the defining act of conformity.

In my family, everyone is Homeless.

And even more importantly, exactly the bad kind of homeless that Don’t Really Want To Work.

In my family we are all Welfare Queens, and we all drive ancient but beautiful Cadillacs.

***

Today I give open and honest and grateful thanks, for my Mom and my brothers and sisters.

It can still be true that in my family, I am the only one left alive.

It can still be just so, that it is down to my one sole self, singing this soliloquy

and a chorus of ghosts.

In my family
we stay up far too late

we drink far too much
and

say all the things that are,
arguably,

Better Left Unsaid.

Deepen.

Everything is on the table for re-evaluation now in the winter moment.

From Anne to Zevon.

And with that, in the name of phasing and juggling well, I’m going to put the Spill on a non-daily hiatus for a few days and go pay some bills, of both the economic and social sort, and think about what a Spill is for, in 2025 and beyond.

The reason why the thanksgiving has always been my favorite holy day changes over time.

Today I would say: It properly marks the start of the month-long holiday, of WinterSolstice, the days of cold and deepest darkness in which we try to birth what we will become.

Sometimes the light’s all shinin’ on me

Other times i can barely see …

A day spent deep in the weeds, roasting in the name of StakeGen, to the tune of a few hundred dollars, gross not net.

Which brought up a lot of questions. First and foremost

“I agree. Now is the time, and it’s blissful. Could you provide some specifics, though, on the ‘anything
everything you do, anything’
that is going to inevitably turn out Great, according to An?

Answer 1: No, because what you wanna do must be born of the present moment, not pre-planned.

Answer 2: Yes, and I already have, at great depth, at least quietly to myself, in ritual.
What I wanna do is:
–anarchic Sanctuary rooted and mobile both
–Generate a stake in a way that I don’t hate and nominally makes the world ‘a better place’
–Run a clean Free/Libre/Open Source digital desktop that serves the Interests of all these things
–Art, in the form of what I call belletrism and ‘radio’ and ‘film’

Juggling it all and moving through each Phase [of the day] Well is complicated and more than enough to base a life on, in spite of what any given normie, of any generation and not just the greatest one, thinks about that fact.

The ultimate point of all of that sardonic
We Care booshiwa
was simply to remind m’damn Self over and over
until its driven deep enough into my thick skull:

Do whatever the hell you wanna do
now is the time
where you can do anything
everything you do, anything

I can go anywhere tonight
cause I’m with Anne.

we made a world but it sucked

So the bodyDoctor diagnosed. Then he prescribed … and everything changed.

Now these 40 years later, the brilliant headDoctor has likewise brilliantly diagnosed.

Does Dr. Brilliance … have a prescription?

Well he’d goddamn well better
if he wants to go on being thought of as Sage and Eminent, ennit?

That’s what the rules say verbatim, in this sad dumb-ass world of ours.

It hardly matters at all if the anointed Competing Hypothesis works, or is “right”.

The important thing, in this world, is that the Course of Treatment is pronounced in a deep authoritative voice, full of professional confidence, with an airy aura of expert Certainty.

If his brilliance is just one bloviating misconception after another, well, that’s a topic to be dealt with by another theatrical event at some point in the vague handwaving future.

Exactly like all those pundits that were provably wrong about the prescription for Iraq, and are now once more being paid so very well, to be provably wrong about the ones for Ukraine, Iran, the housing crisis, income inequality, inflation, and Joy.

God damn it I got distracted again.

***

For nine years, this Project has been about proving to you that I’m smart and right.

About proving, to you and myself, that I am a Sage and an Artist of the Belletristic sort.

The main way it has attempted to validate those hypotheses is something even simpler …

I’ve worked here every day and written so dutifully, so virtuously, so selflessly, to prove

How Much I Care

by which I mean, of course, A LOT.

That profound Depth of Caring itself, whether I changed your mind or vote or not, is exactly how I proved myself as Right, and as Sage.

And just like any of those other better-paid and Successful pundits, what I demonstrated irrefutably was mostly a steaming load of self-important Bollocks.

I was spilling in my own Interests, namely, to obtain and acquire for my very own–if not your Love, then at least your indulgent approval, and agreement about how very right I was, and am.

Sometimes the cryptogenously blind squirrel actually was right.

But that was and is beside the point. The point was: look at how beautiful I am.

Well it’s a dirty job (it isn’t)
But someone’s gotta do it (no they don’t)
Well it’s a very dirty song (very very)
But someone, errrNope.

not yo daddy’s illuminati

nor mine neitha

***

A scientist reminds us that there can be a very fine line indeed, between following the-Science, and blindly trusting in allegedly objective expertise, or allegedly legitimate authority.

Climate Anxiety, Alarmism and Denial

She is embracing, by the way, of the view that climate change is a real threat. The person interviewing her, Richard Cox, is not.

One of the most fascinating things about the interaction between them is that they are in perfect agreement on one thing:

Whether human-caused climate change is an imminent existential threat in and of itself, or not …

The question, and even the ‘data’ behind it, will be deployed in ways crafted to manipulate our emotions (particularly our trauma-based fears) and thus our very perceptions of the world.

An even greater and urgent question than climate change, therefore, might be: By whom?

Author’s note: This post was originally drafted six or seven weeks ago, and got derailed by the incident where my intentions were (more or less gently) bitchsmacked down in a private text thread.

Enjoy … or not, so as to the desires of your heart.

***

Dreamed again, like … nightly military raids … This time I was eighteen.

I dreamed again. This time the keyboardist was God Himself, and me, I was God too, and a criminal painter and the breath of life who Never left her hollow. I know, crazy, right?

I rolled over and felt the old man prostate groan with piss. Let it out and saith unto him: Let The Day Begin.

So I got up and had a surreal sugarpoison cream soda to settle me down and for a minute I almost felt Well again, like I could care again

about the Welfare: of all you boys and girls.

Then like a damn fool, instead of stepping outside to look at the moon I opened up the laptop than runs Linux instead of the right proper OSX and watched another video. I know.

It was that fucking Roseanne, straight out of nightmares, claiming she has proof that Hollywood is full to the brim with babyeating vampires. I wish I was but I am not lying.

YOU’RE NOT HELPING YOU MAGA BITCH

At least, not my sanity, but maybe it will turn out that you actually are helping, to save the babies from the necrophilic likes of Leo and Kevin and well I got my doubts about Taylor, like the skunk that ate the cat food, like the slaves on dope. Why don’t you tell me: who’s on the phone?

It’s so hard to tell. Maybe I really have gone full clear around the bend this time.

Around, It’s kinda pretty here the leaves, the stream, the mad perfect autumn weather Get Away
From That Fridge NOW. Sorry. I don’t … want to work. I just wanna bang. On the drum allday.

But why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lions in the cage, how they growl; they toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you, that Bezos in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Waking hallucinations aside. I have some advice for you, from here on the far shores of an imprecisely stilted and inflamed consciousness.

As far as art goes, whether we’re talking landscape portraiture or divine piano, look, do whatever the hell you wanna do. Now is the time where you can do anything, everything you do, anything, still gonna turn out

Great.
i mean you
got the world
at your feet an-if it’s a dirty song well someone’s gotta sing it it may as well be you, of all people.

Day of judgement, god is calling,
on their knees the war pigs crawling.
Begging mercy for their sins,
Satan, laughing, spreads his wings.

A girl a boy can dream, you know, Again.

.,.

Listen, you shut your mouth, how can you say?
we care a lot, about Anne-tranny or not and I still I just
don’t know what this all means to me

something could change

“Captain Smith, where would you like these deck chairs?”
–apocryphally ascribed to a junior lieutenant on the Titanic

I have some rearranging in mind this morning.

Partly this is based on the fact that although I’ve tried my best, I just can’t seem to stop with the posting on politics here, and it’s starting to annoy even me.

At the same time, I have this substack that’s been lying idle, because although it’s generally a decent platform, the Spill is better for writing, and Patreon (/YT) is better for video.

So I’m going to try splitting off the overtly political screeds and dumping them over there.

Leaving this place to focus on the pursuit of the more purely belletristic.

As originally intended.

Testing …

testing.

https://vairtere.substack.com/p/hair-of-the-conditioning

It’s a very interesting discussion, but this one line hit me especially hard:

“Childhood and adolescence are thus lived within an elaborate system of conditional love.”

I really have no idea to what extent or in what ways this is true up and down the class structure.

But I have experienced certain ways, and the essential truth of it, all through life–in the distant past of my youth, in the prime of life, and in the senescence of my mortal existence now too, daily as I spill.

It makes me wonder how much of the inequality and insanity and ultimately broken spirituality we live within, as a culture and a society, can be attributed to this single complex factor.

Even if that factor itself is an inevitable product of humanity’s choice to embrace agriculture, sedentism, and what we blithely foist upon each other as “Civilization”.

David Brooks Admits College System Rigs Society For Elites
–via DueDissidence, again

Wednesday was a day lost in the weeds. I went to bed early and I woke up thinking about my mother.

I flipped this machine back on and started hearing the first things about the escalation. An ICBM hitting Dnipro is all I know as I begin to wake and write, of a Thursday predicted to turn into a beautiful weekend, almost a brief Indian summer.

Fuck you Joe.

I’m going to need that coffee.

***

Russia obliterates city with intercontinental ballistic missile

An old fool admitting to wringing his hands in despair.

Reckon there’s a lot of that going around.

***

Trump is live but apparently I have to go to Indian State TV to hear it.

His notes are convoluted and rambly, but he does say the globalists not the Russians are the enemy, and he has never been more right in his life.

It’s listed as live, but I don’t know what it is really. AI maybe. The big media are ignoring the story.

The coffee is made. I’m going into chambers to listen to the sound of nothing for a while. More later. Maybe.

***

Some hours later, my kitchen and I are very clean, the laundry is started, I am ready to head out on the Walk, and there are details emerging.

The main thing I’m struck by is that the Western Hegemon is very lucky to have sage rulers as enemies.

Iran has been showing remarkable restraint for months. China lives that way. And now even Russia, their favorite of all the bogeyman, has shot a retaliatory ICBM, with hypersonic MIRVs, at an allied city, but …

… not only did these MIRVs NOT carry a nuclear payload, but might have carried no significant explosive payload at all.

It was a warning shot, about what might have been, and about what still might be, if the senile Eagle persists in its manifest insanity.

America is very clearly the aggressor here. They shot the ATACMS into Russia, and tried to pretend their puppet Ukraine did it, because Biden wanted to fuck over the start of Trump’s second administration–to force him to start in a hole, and leave him teetering on the brink of world war even before he takes office.

The retaliation, apparently, only amounted to a bit of demonstrative theater.

If nothing changes, Biden and his handlers should be indicted for treason against the nation’s own security. He put all of us, Americans, Russians, Uzbeks and Brazilians, at mortal risk of nuclear fire, for stupid and selfish reasons, and he needs to be impeached yesterday, in spite of the fact that it would mean the red button would be placed into the hands of a witless tool that just lost an election by telling suffering people to dance around in a frenzy of Joy and vote for more of this same anti-human brain-dead shit.

Until something that dramatic happens, humanity itself continues to remain imperiled.

***

Final note.

I had a nice long hike. But before I left I caught the top of the hour NPR news on the pickup radio.

They had nothing at all to say, about an ICBM impacting Dnipro.

The top story was about Gaetz withdrawing from consideration for AG.

The last one was some feel-good drivel about a prison barbershop.

Either intercontinental missiles are just too trivial to mention these days, or someone at the network mothership got a phone call shushing them for some lame-ass politically motivated reason.

I didn’t vote for him and I never will. But I wish godspeed to the cranky orange narcissist.

May he change shit just enough and just in time to save your ass and mine.

Candid Post-Election Takes From NYC Trump Voters

All the things the corporate media never says or lets you hear. I usually emphasize the flyover, but this is from down the street, over there on the eastern, urban coast.

Fresh off a seven-year screamfest about fascism, white supremacy, and literal-Hitler, the sleaziest duopoly duo in media run down to Mar-a-Lago, bend their knees, and get down to serious slurping.

You’re right, Glenn.

Even though it’s wrong, it’s too irresistibly delicious to resist laughing, just this once.

Yep yep; those black people in Flint and Jackson suffered, and so it goes. A bunch of Trump voters in East Palestine, well whatever. Decades of malnutrition, poison water, and no sanitation on the Rez? Whatcha gonna do, right?

Welcome to the evolving new reality in liberal white Asheville. Winter is coming and that’s more than a metaphor.

Hurricane Victims Get Infuriating Run-Around From Aid Agencies

Gosh, the administration has no money left over for Carolinians?

Because they spent and continue to spend it all in fucking Ukraine and Syria and schemes to topple the duly elected government of Venezuela?

I wish I could still feel surprise at any of it.

And while we’re on that subject …

“If Trump is this bad, and people still prefer him over us, what are we doing wrong?“

Apparently you’re not a regular reader of the Spill, Ms. Wu.

Which is fair, because I’ve only watched the first few seconds, of your little video linked here, and quoted above. (But I will.)

I just want to say:

Thank fucking Christ there are people in the world like you, who are willing to ask that question, and especially in that way, out loud.

It lights a small path of hope.

The deafening failure to inquire thusly, over on my intimate side of the world, has shocked and dismayed me, and I think I can admit that now.

Centrist Admits Failure of Neoliberalism

Dear Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT),

You could not be more right, about your nine points of utter failure regarding your party actually giving a shit about We The People and our hopes and dreams.

Kudos for your perspicacity.

Even if it proves (as it will) to be far too little, and far too late.

Love,

Citizens of the Heartland/Flyover
In Order To Form a More Perfect Union

West Losing Narrative Control After 500 Years Of Global Genocide | Prof. Aghogho Akpome

(Thank you, Pascal. The key is: this ain’t just about “Africa”.

It’s very much about Pine Ridge and Flint and Cuzco and Dien Bien Phu and dear Paris too.)

Some deeply interesting thoughts in this video, which help me to understand why I can never seem to let go of ‘politics’.

–“The Genocide” is nothing new at all. The current situation in Gaza is especially horrifying because it’s happening now, in a time when we can theoretically do something about it (and don’t)–but the same was true for our ancestors back in the day, living through the Little Big Horn or the Benin Massacre of the 1890s.

–Such genocides, happening in a context of colonialism, are not the exception but the Rule, as in “the international rules-based Order”.

We cluck and clutch about shitholes and thank our lucky stars that we were born ‘here’ instead of in one. But we never seem to get around to thinking about how the shitholes got to be shitholes, and how that shitification process has been so very central to the establishment and maintenance of our clean white Free way of life far away from what ‘we’ve’ done to the ‘other parts’ of the world. (Meaning at various times, Namibia or the so-called Dakota Territories.)

–Then and now, we all are involved in constructing and psychologically propping up Narratives which justify and try to explain away what ‘we’ do in the world, and how we can still see ourselves as the Good People in spite of atrocity being so necessary to building ourselves up into a so-called superpower.

–Then and now, ‘they’ are always savages, and we are always liberators bringing the Light of Civilization to lands without morality. When you hear the evil ones nattering about how there are no Palestinians, or about how none of them are human, but only animals, you are only hearing the updated version of ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’.

–It’s always a jungle out there, and it always needs to be made into a garden, by ‘pioneers’ and ‘settlers‘ and visionary tycoons who look at a waste of space and think: “ahhhh yes, someday this will be a productive banana (or coffee) plantation”. Someday western mining or ranching will make this place Productive, just as God intended.

–That Welfare Queen that you can’t help yapping about periodically, with her Cadillac and her fingernails and her processed hair? It is so very easy to forget that your grandmother enslaved her grandmother, that she is likely a product of a Grandpa Master literally raping a Grandma slave because in his beady eyes she was nothing but property.

… and so …

You are cordially and magnanimously invited to shut your trap about laziness and food stamps sucking up your precious tax dollars at a fraction of how those tax dollars are always spent, killing people and turning them into pieces of ground meat or empire machine, all over the globe, for the whole length of your life and the lives of your well-adjusted, healthy, happy children.

***

I don’t want to be a Settler.

I don’t want to live my life according to these fucked-up narratives of colonialism, or the underlying ones about what constitutes civility and Civilization, and,

thus, to the utmost of my limited abilities …

I just won’t.

And at the same time that I struggle to divorce myself from those stories, and make my personal way to the promised land of Helloutta the way …

I cannot remain blithely silent about what seem to me to be Self-Evident truths about the deeply ugly nature at the heart of Leading and Following alike in this culture and society.

I cannot use my own leisure to merely and only live life as a drowning of my sorrows in the drug of Celebration, without reflecting on the mechanisms by which you and I and grandma and grandpa stole that leisure from those hearts of darkness in the first place.

I’m not going to be celebrating the Pilgrims or the Founding Fathers, over this year’s turkey bird.

That failure might make me look a little sullen, but underneath the apparently morose gazes I’ll be fiercely trying to just figure out how to chart and embrace a really and truly better Way of Life

than this one
you choose every day
to embrace instead. No,

I ain’t gonna work
for Maggie’s pa no more
He puts his cigar
out in your face

just for kicks
His bedroom window
It is made out of bricks
and the National Guard

stands around his door
Ain’t gonna work
for Maggie’s pa
no more No

Ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s ma no more
She talks to all the servants
about man and God and Law
Everybody say

She’s the brains behind pa.
She’s sixty-eight
but she says she’s twenty-four
I ain’t gonna work for
Maggie’s
ma
no
more

Good Old Evil Joe.

On his way out the lame duck door …

Against the advice of his own Pentagon …

Despite the clear warning weeks ago from Vlad that it would be considered an act of war …

Just authorized long-range missile attacks on the Russian homeland.

Oh by the way, the Ukrainians can’t fire these ATACMS on their own. American service personnel have to point them, regardless of which grunt of a private gets the honor of pushing the red button.

And this has been common knowledge for years.

Expect retaliation to be inbound as soon as they’re in the air.

Why Modern Life Feels Empty

the via contemplativa
is to linger slowly
bringing scent back to time, thus
liberating us from the compulsion of labor

Within it, we don’t Use time
we inhabit it
and transition meaningfully through
phases, rituals, solitude

Dr. Gilbert explains for us the difference between:

–Neoconservatives, like George Bush and Victoria Nuland,
and
–Neoliberals, like Barack Obama and Elon Musk.

In the practical world this is a distinction without a difference, for the simple reason that they are all war pigs, and (given the opportunity) war criminals. They all support for profoundly selfish reasons the pernicious process of endless war, money laundering, ‘spreading democracy’, and wealth transferring and concentrating upwards.

Taken together, in other words, all the hallmarks of modern colonial empire, and, locally, of the Duopoly through which it breathes.

Trump is not a neocon or a neolib, and perhaps that’s why he can rightly claim to have started “no new major wars” in his first term.

That doesn’t mean he won’t turn into a war pig, though, over the alleged threat of big bad scary China, or on behalf of our evil little friends in Jerusalem. It does make him less likely to beat a dead horse in Ukraine, which … is good, of course, but that war is in its bitter final stages anyway.

“We” are gonna lose it, just like Vietnam and Afghanistan, and just like pretty much every war, if you think about it carefully, since the Big One in the 1940s. (Yes, Sodom Hussein died. No, that doesn’t equal a “win”.)

The thing is, winning wars isn’t what matters to these people we call our Rulers.

Just having wars is plenty good enough, for the purposes that matter most to them, which consist mainly of the right pockets being lined lavishly while you and I remain enslaved on the home front, or, failing that, being sent Over There to die for the cause of Capitalist Oligarchy.

I mean, uh, Freedom. Liberty. Justice for all.

All the good stuff.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

***

Brief snippet on Gaza. You still care deeply about that boring shit, right?

American Lies Kill Babies, Women, Old People … (and alas, these are specifically DemParty deceptions)

***

Brief snippet on how things are in the process of literally (politically) inverting within the Empire:

***

Friday: 4.6 miles in 84 minutes equals 3.25 mph, into, I might add, fierce gusts of headwind on the way out, 40-50 miles an hour, briefly halting my progress completely at the height of the worst.

The wind quit at dusk and I fed the strays and re-opened the red umbrella.

There are no more remarkable weather events for the weekend and until the night after trash day, when it is scheduled to drop down all the way to sixteen degrees Fahrenheit.

Over the next four days I have to keep building my tolerance for the cold over longer distances.

Among other things. I have such a beautiful List.

Late this afternoon we made it up to 73 degrees, and for a brief moment I realized that I had nothing against Kindness–though I believe I do have something against Days marked off specially, For anything, regardless of how noble or right.

In the dry land of iconoclasm and heresy, no single day unto itself deserves to be called holy.

Each is only a day more or less, sufficient (or not) unto itself.

From sunset to sunrise, it will plunge, is plunging at the time of this writing, by 35 degrees into a chill dawn, and there will be no more sign of temperatures above 70 for months to come.

Past tomorrow in fact there is nothing in the long-range forecast above even 60. But by noon the winter wind arrives in gale force, for six short hours, just enough to blow in a cold mass of air that will feel, for a time, permanent.

My being shifts in tune with the tilting of heavenly bodies and branches unclothed, even naked.

I listen to them rattle against each other in the breeze. They intone thus:

“10 percent of the people own 88 percent of all the stocks.”

I nod. I murmur. Yes. I very much want those ten percent to consider celebrating Kindness Day, even though I know in my heart and very bones that they would only laugh, at the absurdity of the notion.

I grow serious and on a moonless evening some weeks from now

I may yet still find myself sober.

The Kam lost because We The People were sick of having the War Machine and the plutocrats continue to murder and pillage the world in our names, sending us the bill for it, and enforcing the ungodly System by the mechanism of a bought and paid-for Duopoly.

Any slim hope that the offered (nominally populist) alternative would make things even a little better on that central score is now fading fast.

The Trump Administration: From “No War Hawks” to ALL War Hawks

***

I don’t plan to quit resisting, in the ways I do and have.

But I am willing to acknowledge that Resistance may be, if not Futile in every sense, at least hopeless, in the practical one, for the foreseeable future and very probably for the rest of my natural life.

We stare into the abyss of the ultimate Game Over screen.

The will of the citizenry, the example of Christ, World Kindness Day or Ice Cream Month–none of these things is going to change that, nor, alas, get me to celebrate.

I don’t feel it likely that I will reboot that particular game and try once more to win at it, whatever that even means.

I do feel it likely that I will continue to walk multiple miles on most every day.

That one of those days, perhaps, my sanctuary will begin to resemble something that could be called Organized.

That I will begin to understand that Carne Asada just means “Roasted Meat”

and start to understand my self

as a roaster.

If my socks don’t match
But I have half a reason for it, from time to time
(I mean besides not paying attention)
Then any laughter created in others thereby

even if it is intended to ridicule or humiliate

Has No Power

over my mind.

***

Along the same lines, there have been, over the last few years of relative freedom, plenty of days where I did not take a shower. (Sometimes weeks in fact.)

What I learned from that experience is that I don’t ever have to take a shower.

But … that … more days than not …

I want to.

This lesson has amazingly wide applicability
because
There are in fact very very few things
That I have to do.

Piss and grunt. Drink water even if it’s not from the creek. Occasionally, Eat. Feed cats.

(I don’t have to pet them, but I want to, quite often.)

Even something like cleaning a litterbox or getting the trash out are optional, on any given day.

On most trash days I do both. Usually. There isn’t any steep downside to not doing it.

Maybe I want to do it. I’m not sure, but maybe.

I don’t Have to have a job, and more days than not, I don’t want one either. (Although I have an application on my desk, strangely enough.)

I don’t Have to be anywhere on time ever for anything–except every six months for the dentist.

I don’t have a daily driver of a relationship to meet the usual kind of obligations within. No kids.

Splendid Isolation works out real well for me, most days and for most purposes.

***

Also, let’s say that I do want to take a shower, most days, especially cold ones, mainly because it’s warming (or on hot ones because it’s cooling), or I feel gross.

And I go right ahead, and it feels good.

Still … I don’t have to use any soap.

I do need, or want, a clean washcloth, and a clean towel.

The shampoo, the face soap, the body wash, the ‘product’ … all really and truly completely optional.

I’m planning to start showering every day (the experiment has already started), and I’m going to use soap if I want to, and not use it if I’m not feeling it.

And yes, I do have half a reason for bothering to tell you these things.

And a full reason for telling you just the half of it

for now.

An interview with author Thomas Frank, about the aftermath of the election and related topics.

Thomas Frank on 2024 Trump Landslide, Democrats’ Working Class Collapse, and More

It is not required viewing for this class, if as an alternative you read his latest opinion piece in your copy of the New York Times instead.

***

Related: hope that the populist wave will change anything important is already starting to be gutted.

The Swamp rises – The Grayzone live

Yale Psychiatrist: Cut Ties With Trump Voters During The Holidays

If I were a smarter person I would just let that sink in and speak for itself.

But since I’m reckless, foolish, and possibly mentally ill to boot, I will continue briefly, just to warn you that although technically I’m not a Trump voter, I may be more than close enough to imperil your Health and Sanity, if we happen to eat out of the same bowl of stuffing, in the eyes of a decorated Ivy League shrink. To wit:

1) I’m quite ambivalent about Trump’s win, but I’m very glad Kamala lost.

2) I did vote for the wrong Jill, and according to Orthodoxy that’s more or less the same thing.

3) Most importantly, I’m not in the cult, hate the cult, have made a whole volunteer career late in life trying to de-program the unfortunate from the cult. I’m what they used to call an evil slave.

4) The cult’s purpose is the enrichment of its members, and not only have I failed to retain my membership, but I’m not even rich, which may be the gravest sin of all in a hegemony of Capital.

So, should you decide to thoughtfully follow the Yale science and reconsider any invitations or anything, I just want you to know …

I would totally understand.

I can eat in the Camper Van.

Down by the River.

Somehow I am only now realizing that Azure deliveries can cover a majority of what I need to stock under this new and very healthy way of eating, and at damn good prices too.

If you live in a more typical kind of place and can run down to Natural Grocers on a whim, this probably isn’t as big a deal to you as it is to me.

But it’s 90 miles one way to get a lot of this stuff here.

I’m ordering things this time that might or might not work out (Will the avocados be in an edible state upon arrival?) and happy to share whether they do, next week, if you care to know.

This share-link might conceivably result in a modest finder’s free for me someday, if and when you spend enough via some rules too mundane to bother documenting.

I think I’ve finally got a handle on this one.

The two main things are …

The red: A regular can of organic tomatoes, crushed, diced, whatever you like …
(Perfectionists will fire-roast maybe ten romas.)

The green: A jar of ready-made green chili or tomatillo (the local Hatch brand is 505)
(Perfectionists will fire-roast maybe ten tomatillos)

If you want an all-red or all-green salsa, adjust accordingly. This mix is mainly reddish.

Bring the heat …

Twenty de-stemmed and crushed dried arbol chilis
plus 4 shishitos and/or two jalapenos and/or two habaneros

Tastes will vary widely. These are my proportions–it comes out respectably hot but not quite nuclear. The arbol is the essential part for flavor and that slow burn.

Accessories …

one onion chopped fine
4 garlic cloves chopped rough
salt (one tsp. seems like plenty for this batch)
oregano or cumin or black pepper to taste
cilantro if you like it (I used cil-sprouts)

Just mix it all up in a bowl. Or, the blender if you love doing dishes, or, again, are into traditionalist perfection like the Senorita I used for my primary source.

Way better, somewhat cheaper, and almost as fast as the ready-mix in the ‘Hispanic’ section of your grocery. IMHO.

Enjoy.

For those who have no idea what’s going on in the thread …

When I was 24/25 and finally back in college for good, I happened by a booth full of guys who were recruiting officer candidates for the Army Reserve.

The offer they made me was: go to basic training over the summer, and at the end of it they would have the option to reject my candidacy–or–I would have the option to sign up for real for a four-year hitch of one weekend a month and two weeks a year as a real paid lieutenant Reservist.

It sounded like recruiter lies to me, so I checked with my friendly local Colonel. To the surprise of us both (I think), he confirmed that the deal was real and legit.

So, long story short, I went to Fort Knox, Kentucky for the summer, got paid for it, and completed real basic training in the real Army. I figured that if nothing else, it would be an experience worth writing about (even then, writing was my primary goal, and journalism was the mechanism by which I thought I could compromise with my society successfully).

At the end of it, I was rated 20th overall of the 39 cadets in my group–exactly in the middle, the very definition of average, and they commenced to recruit me pretty hard.

I said no for three reasons.

Number one, they could not 100% guarantee me that I would be placed in my chosen specialty of Military Intelligence, and I did not want to sign up and then be told that I was just going to be a grunt or some other kind of cannon fodder, dead in some Middle East ditch.

Number two, the $388 a month they were offering was not quite enough, even in the mid-eighties, to live on without having any other kind of job at all. Seriously, if it had even been a hundred dollars more, I would probably have signed on the dotted line.

And finally: I had, and have, a clinical-grade Problem With Authority, and eight weeks under a pair of beady-eyed drill sergeants had only served to make that crystal clear to the dimmest understanding.

I did write the story.

It was never published.

It’s nothing but a memory and a contributor to the stacks and stacks of boxes that I am attempting to rid myself of, these days, four decades later.

So. You’re welcome.

For my ‘service’.

Happy Real Veteran’s Day to all.

Except David Petraeus and that dimwit John Kirby.

[Parenthetically, ahem]

The theoretical worst has happened. What now, loves?

There are amazing people out there one or two steps ahead of you and me.

Kshama Sawant Urges Permanent Split From Democrats After Trump Win

Left Wing Labor Policies Win Big In Red States – w/ Kshama Sawant

Fragment 2024/04/07

i’ve called you propagandized too much.

***

15 August 24

I.G.Y.

Standing tough under stars and stripes we can tell. This dream’s in sight–you’ve got to admit it–at this point in time that it’s clear. The future looks bright …

On that train all graphite and glitter, undersea by rail, 90 minutes from New York to Paris,
well by ’76 we’ll be A-OK.

In the real 1976 I worked all summer so I could afford a car.

It was not a jet car, and it still isn’t.

It was not a bullet train.

spandex jackets “One For Everyone” is communist utopia

***

They broke everything a long time before that, just as they will again. In the year my father was born, clear through to the year my mother was born, we all lived through the what they called The Depression.

gave us SS New Deal because they were facing down a real revolution if they didn’t.

FDR, banned.

Anti-communism, McCarthy.

For a bright shining moment near the end of Eisenhower, IGY.
But he warned us.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry.
…
We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

We should take nothing for granted.

Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

The murders, starting with JFK.

in the comments section of the various IGY videos they
sing of hope and feeling good
That’s not what this song is about.

Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream’s in sight
You’ve got to admit it
At this point in time that it’s clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well by seventy-six we’ll be A.O.K.

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

Get your ticket to that wheel in space
While there’s time
The fix is in
You’ll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky
You know we’ve got to win
Here at home we’ll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There’ll be spandex jackets one for everyone

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
(More leisure for artists everywhere)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

***

29 August 24

Imagine

(Old Black Joe
he’s still picking cotton for your ribbons and bows)

Imagine being a mafia guy who wants to take a leave of absence from The Family

and so turns in through the proper channels
all the required paperwork to initiate the process
correctly, like a mensch I think they call it.

Today, the Daily Spill

is that paperwork.

***

Picking up where we left off two weeks ago at Luke Eleven verse eight.

I tell you, even though he will not get up
and give you the bread because of friendship,
yet because of your shameless audacity
he will surely get up and give you as much as you need.

I don’t know what to make of this menudo, O Lord.

If the bread here is, what … real dialogue? … honest conversation?
Connection, relationship, storg-e with some actual meat on its bones?

Then this doesn’t seem to be true
not even a little bit; sure

We’ve got funnel cakes from the state fair
We’ve got a whole month set aside for celebrating one frozen dessert.
We’ve got styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer, stories aplenty about how none of it was your fault, and a baby’s arm clutching a MacIntosh or maybe just its stock price.

And yes, we’ve even got lemon berry electrolyte cat picture, you bet we do.

But we got no soul bread wholesome and true enough to be worthy of the Name.

I’m losing faith in You Prince of Peace,
bleeding it out just a little faster than I ever did before.

Ahead my gaze twists further on out the high lonesome road to Hairésis
I expect it’ll take a while, so
I forward my regrets.

***

29 September 24

“You’re more of a man than your father ever was.”

Thanks for that. You’re right.

But …

… becoming more of a man than him was not hard. So it didn’t mean that much to me when I realized it was true, or later when (sorry) you said it was true, either.

When you can honestly feel and say that I am a better man, or more of a man, than, say, Colonel Sanders … well now, that would be, in theory will be, a whole new ball game.

Personally I won’t really be satisfied until … not only is that one true too, but …
until even that doesn’t mean much, or at least feels like …

it was not all that hard to get even to that point,
in the end.

You know?

Because then and finally, I can forget the past and start to learn about what being the man I can be
will be.

***

Okay. Let’s call it there. There are two left but they need to be made one, and made real. Thanks for putting up with the laundry.

26 May 22: The Good Kind of Class Traitor
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=jjz-a4D20z4

***

30 June 22

We the People of the United States in Order to form a more perfect Union
–establish Justice
–insure domestic Tranquility
–provide for the common defence
–promote the general Welfare and
–secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity
do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

It sure sounds good.

I have some ideas, about why for instance there are cabinet-level positions for Justice and Defense, but none for Liberty, and god damn if I’d even been ambitious, my ambition would have been to be the Secretary of Tranquility.

The Book of Revelations in the New Testament lists the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as:

• White Rider (Pestilence), or Plague
• Red Rider (War)
• Black Rider (Famine)
• Pale Rider (Death), who is clearly the officer in charge

***

7 July 22: Revolution In The Air

Kim Iversen: MASSIVE Farmer Protest Rises Up Against AGENDA 2030 Climate Regulations

“Protesting farmers and their children sit in their tractors at a blockade outside a distribution center for supermarket chain Aldi in the town of Drachten, northern Netherlands, Monday, July 4, 2022. Dutch farmers angry at government plans to slash emissions used tractors and trucks Monday to blockade supermarket distribution centers, the latest actions in a summer of discontent in the country’s lucrative agricultural sector”.

Once upon a time there was The Sixties. And then Occupy Wallstreet. In the freshly modern era, France had its YellowVest movement, and then the Canadian truckers of all people jammed the streets of Ottawa.

The backlash in Canada was truly Orwellian. People’s bank accounts being illegally seized. Their employers and insurance companies contacted by spooks and their coverage, their jobs, revoked without due process or recourse … Trudeau the nice pretty liberal, taking a long first step toward totalitarian control.

The American truck convoy saw all that and it broke their will to fight before they were within five hundred miles of DC.

Now the small farmer protest in the Netherlands is ramping up sharply

Yet in the face of this climate emergency,there is nascar and formula one racing and espn arranging leagues to fly cross country, instead of close to home. The rich build mansions, have yachts, and fly private jets. It’s hard to take this seriously when our leaders do not change their lives, but expect us to starve.

Alexander Mercouris, commenting on the fall of Boris Johnson’s government in the UK, and Biden’s plunging poll numbers:

“The event that has turned what was already a difficult inflation crisis, that we already had at the start of this year. into an all-encompassing crisis is the economic war of attrition that the West blundered into against Russia when they announced all those sanctions back in February.
They didn’t expect that the Russian economy would absorb the blow. They didn’t anticipate that they would find themselves in that war of attrition. That’s what they have. They’re not prepared for it … They’ve done enormous damage to themselves”.

Elsewhere this morning I heard someone identify the sanctions as the mechanism behind a ‘circular firing squad’ throughout the West, and this seems perfectly apt to me. Germany decides to boycott Russian oil, and now they’re looking–not at a great win for ‘democracy’–but just at a winter without heat, even for those willing or able to pay hyperinflated prices for it.

***

14 January 23

Later, one night in Portland, my first real girlfriend called the cops on me because she thought I was losing the thread.

When they got there I was sitting quietly in the big chair, reading Walden.

They asked her if I was hitting her and she said no, I wasn’t like that. They ended up baffled about why she called them at all, and finally in frustration the cop who drew the short straw told me that if I was any kind of man I would just leave on my own.

I laughed and I suggested I might, if maybe there was an extra bed for me at his house. Offi-cer.

They seethed and left and she seethed and left too.

I put down Thoreau and I went to bed.

For the next few days I got real high with the downstairs neighbor lady every morning, on her supply. She at least was impressed with my genius, and my smooth turning of a stoned phrase. Thank you, Dora.

Then I packed my single bag and found that studio walkup in the pre-gentrified Northwest of the naked rose city.

A few weeks later, girlfriend called to say that she might have chlamydia and her doctor told her she was morally bound to inform all her partners, which consisted of … me.

I went and got checked and I found out some unexpected things.

First, that I was free of any infectious disease.

Second, that the dumb frustrated cop had been accidentally right about one thing.

I wasn’t any kind of man, not of the kind known to common medical science.

There was not then, nor had there ever been, a single droplet of testosterone in my mortal shitkicker’s blood.

I was a chromosomal mutant. I was XXY. All that on top of the stupid religious cult, and the willfully indigent father, and the big bruises on the face of my mother and eventually on me too, and the hitchhiking adventures in starvation and the lost scholarship and the graveyard job at the convenience store and the girlfriend who loved me so much that she called the bacon raining down on my scrambled head.

I had every fucking right to be mental. Certifiably and forgivably, as batshit as Syd Barrett or John Bolton.

But somehow I wasn’t.

Not very, anyway. And some of the other stuff was treatable.

A year after that I was 24, and a reasonable simulacrum of a functioning adult. I grew a first downy beard just to prove the fictive truth of my apparent masculinity, to the whole world, to myself.

And so, everything began all over again, like if a Temple chose to migrate under a double full moon.

***

30 July 23

the hunter gatherer’s guide to the 21st century

Kim (Iverson?)

Bret Odysee
https://odysee.com/@BretWeinstein:f?view=content

The Rise and Fall of Eric Weinstein (feat. Joe Rogan)

***

14 August 2023: About A Cat

It took her three days to decide to come home this time.

She made the choice finally from hunger, and so she still doesn’t know if it was the right one–her doubts run deep.

So deep I can feel them as if they were my own, although naturally correlation does not always equal causation, and a simile is not a smile.

***

19 August 2023

The Truck is designed as an instrument for movement of itself, and me and some tools along for the ride with it.

The Bed is designed to remain perfectly still in a single secure place forever and ever and foster restful sleep.

The laptop is one of the tools and a musical instrument for playing data.

Water/jugs. Pantry. Chuck box. Stove. Fridge.

***

7 October 2023: “Quarrel”

from Old French querele “matter, concern, business; dispute, controversy”
…
directly from Latin querella “complaint, accusation; lamentation”

***

That’s it, until the present year. There are about ten of those left to go, and I will probably finish this little project off with one of them, actually fleshed out in living color and full glory.

But not today.

12 September 2021

Report: Since 9/11 U.S. Has Spent $21 Trillion On Militarization, Surveillance, & Repression

***

May of 21: The Other Kind Guy
(I’m attempting to create my “Identity”)

Anarchist

Poet (prose mostly. A belletrist, if you want to be precious about it.)

Firequester (A gearhead, if you want to be prosaic about it. I’m interested in tools that make life more efficient and free, like water pumps and FLOSS computer programs.)

Vitals

Age: You and I can both guess that the time left to me is shorter than the long strange trip it’s already been. Don’t ask me how old I am. Ask me what I’ve done lately to make my inevitable death into my trusted Advisor.

Race: is an utter fiction. Even Neanderthals could interbreed with homo sapients. Where’s your aryanish or humanish exceptionalism now?

Gender: Maybe not quite as fictional, but pretty close.

You know there’s more.

Lurlinist. Doggerlandian.

***

June of 21

Better than average NPR fare, The World with Mark O’Wirman, or more likely Marco Werman. I swelter and burrito and listen.

He markets himself, the show today, by saying Hey:

‘We know environmental stories can be a major depressing drag.

That’s why we’re committed to solutions-based reporting!’

I think I see the problem.

Real solutions-based reporting wouldn’t be about how billionaire Elon is going to save us.

Or what our friends at Texaco are doing about the pressing climate issue of the day.

Real solutions-based reporting would address human greed, and the better-lives-for-our-children problem.

It would probably look something like what Marianne Williamson does, or Russell Brand.

(Note from the future: Well that didn’t age very well … )

Short of diving off the spiritual or existential deep end, you’re just something slightly less aggravating to listen to while auto dining in the 102 degree heat.

I know it makes you a living, Marco.

It’s not active evil, and good on you for that.

But ask yourself.

I will be too.

***

June of 21

https://old.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/

On my good guy list you’ll find The Grayzone, Chomsky, Hedges, Greenwald, Status Coup, Rational National, TheAnalysis.com, Consortium News, Jimmy Dore, Richard Wolff, Nader, Briahna Joy Gray, Matt Taibi, Cornel West, Marianne Williamson, WOTB, and maybe, i.e. hopefully, Breaking Points with Krystal and Sagaar. The jury is still out on the last two but I’m hopeful now that they’ve freed themselves from The Hill. There may be a few others worth adding to the list but that’s a good start.

We on the left should never let the current ruckus reduce us to People Magazine status. We need to remain focused on “our” issues. The issue is not the shallow, juvenile sniping by TYT; it’s that TYT is and always will be dead wrong about what’s really happening in Syria. They are dead wrong about Russiagate. They are dead wrong about US empire. That’s where our focus needs to remain.

So let’s weed out the propagandists who are seeking our support. Let’s help their ratings sink to almost nothing. And then let’s start developing a tangible plan to build a network that gives us all a voice on the national stage.

***

5 September 21: The Avocado of Anticapitalism

One sanctified gifting I did bring back, unbox, and place in a position of honor was a brand new luscious cast-iron piece of cookware. A pan.

It claimed to be “pre-seasoned” but that was obvious marketing bullshit. To properly season cast iron is, relatively speaking, a long hard row to hoe.

I researched the latest in best practices for the job.

It turns out that you want to season your pretty new pan with an oil that has a very high smoking point, even up to 500 degrees.

Practically, that means avocado oil is the best of the best … okay, so I need some, maybe even a big bottle, to not just season, but to stand in for olive oil sometimes when actually cooking at higher heat.

82% of Avocado Oil is FAKE – I am so HEATED (UC Davis Reveals Truth)

***

10 October 2021

Took a day off from the usual suspects and watched most of this channel instead, going back a couple of years.

Caspian Report

It was instructive in one major way.

Even I have a nostalgia for the good old days, when you could sit down and watch something on history or culture or geopolitics without it seeming to make reference to a political dimension. Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, they were just reporting the facts, right?

It was a lie then and it’s a lie now.

***

2 December 21

As you may know, I have a lot invested in the idea that the dawn of Civilization is roughly contemporary with the Fall from Grace.

Sketched crudely, the idea is that humans once existed in small groups dependent on hunting and gathering, and that the migratory way of life that necessitates impeded the formation of authoritarian structures like kings and priests and vastly unequal allocations of resources.

***

That’s all of theoretical value that was left half-written and unposted from ’21.

Let the cleanup begin.

There were drafts older than this, but this was the earliest one of substance, originally dated 12 February, 2021.

***

spiritually sick

WashPo Blames Capitol Protest On Economic Despair

Was ECONOMIC ANXIETY A Factor In Capitol Riots? New Study Says Yes

Communism, Capitalism and Bigotry

The ‘Insurrection’ of the Broke

Sitting at 2000 posts exactly, on this latter-day vairtere version of the spill. This is #2001.

To celebrate, I walked 6.2 miles today.

To celebrate, I’m going to start telling you about the produce of the Ritual now.

But …

before I do that, I’m going to get things cleaned up a little, by dumping a lot of draft posts, and footage, half-finished dross, from the last 2+ months of Splendid Isolation.

Quantity will improve. Quality may suffer.

Be advised.

Wary.

***

One more thing about politics, my lambs, before I try again to ignore it for a while.

(This isn’t the Ritual stuff, per se.)

I remember very well all the times going back eight years that you cheered madly, anytime anything bad happened to old Donald. I remember the last such time, a few months ago, when he got convicted on random bullshit and you were elated.

I have noted with a certain quiet amusement how preternaturally quiet you’ve been on the subject of that particular oligarch’s landslide victory this week.

And on Friday, when I heard the news that all the rest of the lawfare cases against him were being dropped one by one, almost sheepishly, I thought of you again, imagining what you must be feeling about that.

It raised a question in my mind.

Have you spent any spleen or bile or anguish or angst over this phenomenon of him getting off scot-free, incredibly and at last?

And if so: Why?

No, really. Deep down. What the fuck difference could it make, to your life?

Why would you burn ten times as much energy on wanting to see him punished as you ever spent on war criminals like Mr. Cheney, unarguably guilty of far, far worse crimes?

Why didn’t you go insane when President Obama decided not to prosecute The Dick, or his theoretical boss George, because their crimes, as he said, “happened in the past”.

Like all crimes invariably do.

Why are you going to burn still more angry life force when he keeps his campaign promise to pardon every single one of the January 6th “insurrectionists”?

I have a theory about why.

I think you have a very deep need to believe what you’ve been told, about this being a Nation of Laws and not men.

Even though you know, rationally, that what you’ve been told is a complete and cynical lie.

I think you crave this kind of belief being validated at every turn, because ultimately it is in your Interests to believe them, in spite of knowing they’re horseshit.

“With liberty and justice for all”, we droned as children.

As intelligent adults, we know very well that our fellow citizens get exactly as much liberty as they can jolly well afford.

And as much justice too.

The System, I am grieved but obligated to report once more, is rotten to its core, and it grinds up and spits out living breathing people, like so many appleseeds, so we can pleasure ourselves with iPhones and pretty new trucks and ice cream and flat screen TVs. For .. Success.

You know it, but you don’t want to believe it.

Believing your own lying eyes is … not in your Interests. It’s depressing as hell, not only for the obvious reasons, but also because it means that your entire American Exceptionalist worldview, from the flagwaving to the lyrics of one Francis Albert Sinatra, has to be called to answer–if you choose to quiet your mind and see things clearly.

Donald Trump, whatever his many documentable failings, is your Id talking.

He says the quiet parts out loud. Fuck yes we’re in Syria for the oil. What other reason could there be? (There is no other.)

And in Niger for the precious metals, and in Guatemala for the Chiquita-branded bananas, and on and on, wherever we can jam in another military base by the hundredweight.

He is naked stupid greed, and naked stupid greed lives well inside every one of us, too.

Yeah. Sure. People die every day. What of it? “The poor are with us always.”

” ‘ Democracy’ is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” Har.

“You, child, need to lead. Or follow. Or get the motherfucking fuck out of The Fucking Way.”

Of Progress.

Of Murica.

Of every shiny Buick that ever rolled off the line in poor dead Detroit.

Of Holy Profit, most sacred of all. Sing Hosanna, and Das Kapital.

Do I want to talk about it around the Thanksgiving table?

No I sure don’t.

But I won’t be able to stop myself from thinking about it. Then, or ever.

I’ll shut my trap and be civil for that one day. Unless I’m … provoked beyond good intentions, anyway.

And for now, I’m going to try to do the same here for a while, for reasons mandated by the process of my own belletrism.

I’ll watch my own struggle with Interest.

You can count on me for that much, always.

Ichigo Ichie: The Japanese Art of Appreciating Every Moment

Get in the teaCeremony if you want to Live.

I keep wanting to quit with the theatrics of the political sideshow and get back to real life.

I keep getting sucked back into it by the irresistible stupidity of hot pundit takes.

Russell D. is on fire.

On the dewy-eyed reflections of Van Jones:
“Asshole. This administration has been in power for four fucking years. Why didn’t people help them with their dreams then? Why all of a sudden is Trump’s victory putting them in a worse position than they were yesterday?”

On the continuing murder of Palestinians: “Not a fucking word about that!”

Yep.

On the bright side, Orangeman released a ten point plan for reining in the deep state. Let’s hope he’s deadly serious, and let’s hope they don’t JFK him halfway through the implementation.

Okay.

Maybe that can be it for now.

Please pray for my headbroke propensity for distraction.

Thanks.

 
Pure propaganda. There are no arms to deliver.

What this really is, is another $9 billion to weapons manufacturers (“defense contractors”) right here in the land of the theoretically free.

Money laundering, with your tax dollars, just as it has been all along.

When I call myself a single-issue voter, this is the issue I mean.

“The war machine and wall street”, working together to concentrate wealth in the hands of the lily-white few, at the expense of the many, at home and abroad.

When in a few years from now, the bills run up in exactly this fashion by Empire come due at last, those billions and the tens of billions spent on the misadventure in Ukraine, and the hundreds of billions of run-up debt wasted on just such exercises in killer waste … will be missed.

This country is not going to be able to afford even the interest payments, and the whole shitshow is going to come crashing down.

The perpetrators of the end of Empire will rush to their villas in New Zealand, leaving the rest of us holding the bag.

***

Meanwhile, I listened to a whole batch of NYT podcasts, to learn how the Dem establishment is reacting.

I didn’t make it through a single one of them.

These bright comfortable overeducated beneficiaries of the System do not have the first clue about the reality of life in this other America, and I found it unbelievably frustrating to listen to their dumb-ass pontification.

When Hillary lost the talking class was screechy and full of blame. It was Jill Stein’s fault, it was the fault of those stupid people who never went to college–whatever.

This time, just by the numbers, they know it’s their own goddamn fault.

And the rationalizing contortions they put themselves through trying to unburden themselves of that blame make my stomach lurch.

Trump’s Landslide Win EXPLAINED

Compared to 2020, his numbers with black voters went up 5 percent, and among ‘Latinos’ it was 13%.

Why? Because those people are disproportionately on the wrong side of income inequality, and therefore suffering, and they didn’t feel that their suffering mattered at all to the Joe Bidens and Kammy-Kams of the world.

It’s the same with young voters of any race, as dramatically demonstrated by charts in the video.

They too are on the short end of the stick and being shafted with it.

You can probably afford to base your vote on “abortion”.

But millions of your fellow citizens couldn’t even afford to base it on claims of “white supremacy”.

And so he won them, in a landslide.

Thanks for laying it all out so cleanly, Glenn.

This wasn’t about gender or race or age or whether you went to college. All you need to know:

“They only call it class warfare when we fight back.”

***

Another angle on the thing, from the perspective of big, habitual, and self-interested Lying.

Bloated rich overeducated Obama shill goes on MSNBC to tell us that he doesn’t get it, but blames it on “darkness” in the American soul anyway, because it can’t be that people are suffering.

God help us all, and especially him.

Media (and serious alt-media) Responds To News of Trump Victory

Da Boyz got it exactly right.

Tempting though they may be, we stand united in declining to lick up the delicious lib-tears rolling down your puffy cheeks.

You can mope a while if you like. It’s understandable.

But very soon it will be high time to stop screaming at each other trying to score points, and start making common cause for a legitimately better society and planet, not this fake blue mockery of “better” that actual democracy just broke in half and threw away.

The Resistance has been waiting to welcome you all along.

It’s impossible to say, of course, whether doing the only moral thing would have also changed the outcome.

But I can say that if she’d have stalled the genocide by refusing to perpetrate it with bombs paid for with my tax dollars, I personally, as something in the vicinity of a single-issue voter, would have had to strongly consider holding my nose and giving her my vote.

In the real world, I voted for the only candidate willing to even use the word ‘genocide’.

And, by the way, for anyone railing against men and the gender divide the day after …

That candidate also happened to be a woman.

I think I mentioned once or twice that the heartland is seriously pissed off.

But I admit it: I wasn’t expecting to see it demonstrated so vividly–up in the popular vote by +5 million!?

Very nearly heartening, that.

It’s still the duopoly and not much will change. But maybe the Empire finally stops pissing away billions on the fiasco in Ukraine.

Maybe Bobby gets something real done about the shit we eat.

Maybe the blue powers start to realize they can’t rig or get rid of primaries, install candidates by fiat, and have that work out for them.

Congratulations on your ‘I Voted’ sticker and all, but maybe by the next time it will start to dawn on you that lever-yanking and bitching on Twitter ain’t gonna cut it any more.

Your countrymen and women are enraged and despairing, and their reasons for that are not all deplorable, in spite of what the pundit millionaires keep trying to pour into your head.

What will you do, to honestly feel their pain, and work with them toward a slightly less horrifying world?

It wasn’t supposed to snow last night, but it did anyway.

Prediction is a flawed art.

So you’re allowed to take it with a grain of salt when I tell you truly:

Someday, a better version of you will be glad that cackling puppet lost.

If she hadn’t, you absolutely would have taken the blue pill with relief, and gone back to sleep.

You’re aching for that sleep right now, and groaning with the pain of its denial.

Yes, instead of getting to feel virtuous and redeemed, you have a whole lot of fucking work to do.

The Resistance has been waiting to welcome you all along.

The Last Real Journalist vs. Ms. Uhyeeaahh Umpty-Ump and the African Queen

Each November shitshow is worse than the last. I deeply wish I didn’t have to go vote later today. But Arizona has a robust ballot initiative process, and I have to go waste my time to try and vote down one that is against tipped workers, and another that is against homeless people.

“Duty as a citizen” I effin’ guess …

Inspired by the Cowboy Junkies, and fortified by a new reformulation of my electrolyte mix, I went for a good long walk into the modestly vicious wind.

After that I jumped in the truck and played in the wicked 4WD mud suction, not for the sake of play itself, but to take roads running parallel to my walk in order to measure it precisely.

Here are the results.

From my front door to the Recreation gate, one way: sixth tenths of a mile

From the rec gate to Leroux Wash bridge: 2.1 miles (with the landmark at tan barn east halfway, and the radio beacon halfway between the tanBarn and the wash)

From the wash bridge to the truck stop would be roughly/almost an additional mile.

In terms of my actual walking for this day (and doubtless many to come), I went out 2.75 miles and then re-traced my steps home–5.5 miles, or 11618 steps, with 8710 kcal burned, in 98 minutes, and thus at a speed of between 3 and 4 mph (an “average” to “brisk” pace).

Under sunny skies there is a choice between the quieter low-road version of the walk, which I did shirtless the other day, and today’s up-on-the-floodwall version. The low-road wasn’t available this afternoon because:

… because flooding …

On the art side, the only other picture I took was this:

The careful lettering on a boxcar canvas spells out:

my specialty is living said a man
who could not earn his bread
because he would not sell his head
–ee cummmings

You know it made me very happy to read that.

Especially in the middle of nowhere

and the middle of living right.

The main thing cardiovascular health costs, then, is an hour and a half every day.

Most people can’t afford that, even if they sell their heads off trying. So I count myself blessed.

I am planning to bump it to two hours with the addition of some weight training (once I get the bench assembled), and a small sliver of yoga (at least until the knife wound in the back of my shoulder blade is healed).

There’s some rude lumpen bookish part of me that resents having to have a fourteen-hour-a-week part-time job to be healthy.

But the fringe benefits are world class.

And maybe I can get some film shot during those working hours too.

Eventually.

Sat at my window watched the world
Wake up this morning
Purple sky slowly turning golden,
Distant elms so orange
You’d swear they’re burning

All this flowing water
Has got my mind wandering.
Do you ever finally reach
A point of knowing
Or do you just wake up one day
And say, I am going?

What will I tell you
When you ask me why I’m crying
Will I point above
At the Red Tail gracefully soaring
Or down below where it’s prey
Is quietly trembling?

Two thousand years ago Jesus is left there hanging.
Purple sky slowly turning golden.
Cowards at his feet loudly laughing.
Loved ones stumbling homeward Their words reeling.
Red Tail above my head quietly soaring.
Waters turn from ice, creak is roaring.
He says, enough of all this shit I am going.

No description has been added to this video.

Thank you for your service, little yellow hose. You never failed. You were just too short for the weird moment, under the current weird conditions. Not your fault.

What did fail, and continues to get worse and worse, is that shutoff valve, seen sitting here between the new long silver hose and the pipe coming out of the wall.

The valve still needs replacing. But now that is not nearly so urgent a matter.

In order to put in a new valve I will need to get the Water, all of it, shut off again, at least for five minutes.

But what I got done on Perfect Sunday, was to take a risk, by swapping out the short yellow hose for the new long silver one, and routing it straight down the sewer hole, so that the broke valve can leak to its heart’s content in the short term.

The risk was in doing it without shutting off the main Water.

It paid off.

I’m sure you’re nowhere near as happy about all that as I am, and quite possibly not even the least bit amused or interested.

But part of the beauty of Spilling is that it makes that artless question about How’m Doin’ completely redundant, and unnecessary. In the unlikely event that you actually want to know the answer to it, all you have to do is click on over here, and read.

Self-evidently, today, I’m a-doin’ amused, interested, and FINE, in the moment.

Or to put way too fine a point on it, I’m

Splendid.

***

Now I know not everyone is blessed with the miracle of their own spillsite.

So my rant does, I must needs admit, leave the next question begging: What if I want to know how you are doing? Do I ever want that?

Yes. Sometimes.

But I don’t always have a good way to get that question answered.

I did try. I invited you here to tell me. That did a tiny bit of good in a few cases.

I did try, to be a good texter. Sometimes I still am, even if it’s not at the thread I consider now to be wrecked by a sugary Joy. I feel like there are still ways to develop, to make that a potentially useful thing, maybe. And when you text me, I respond very dependably.

I won’t do the Zuckerberg platforms, and resisting them is slowly evolving into something even more hard-wired, so that’s not a way. Pretty much the same with Elon’s, most weeks or months. My hate for those modalities is pretty visceral.

An actual phone call is a relatively big ask, especially if you’re counting on me to be the one to Initiate. But I do pick up. And sometimes, fairly rarely, I even am the one to call. The stars have to be quite well-aligned, and the energy levels very high–that is one of many reasons why Amplifying Energy is such a central concern to me right now.

I’m cutting myself a lot of slack in the matter of whether I should be more interested in how you are, and that’s mainly because being mad or judgmental toward myself, about that, seems far worse than useless to me.

This whole matrix of questions and concerns is one small part of a very big life cluster.

Maybe it should be bigger. I doubt that it will be, given how Jesus flang me …

but I am not unwilling to consider the possibilities, or to grow, in ways expected, or not.

It all kinda loops back to that question of Interests eventually, I think, most of the time.

It might be my next book. In the meantime, it preoccupies a lot of me, in this one true place where cometh we not to praise the little yellow hose, but to bury it.

There will be no more talk of quitting if you please. I have converted, to antiquited.

If you don’t read here (shame on you), or if you do read here and are just an indiscreet personality with recalcitrant habitual tendencies (pot calls kettle black), the answer you get may well be: No,

“I just don’t feel like one right now.”

I may get up and go outside anyway, and if I do, it might or might not be to Burn.

You are welcome to come with me. Either way.

Because burn or no, sometimes one has to get out

and perform a cleansing re-centering somehow.

I know it’s true for me and probably, especially if I actually like you, it goes for you too.

Whatever the case, I don’t want to talk about it. I just don’t feel like that topic.

Right now.

I hear you’re mad
about Brubeck
I like your eyes I
like him too

42 years between the recording studio and that platform; good god.

Let’s pretend that it’s the real thing.

***

Rain down here on the high plateau, trying to turn into snow on the rez dog peaks all around. Dawn just starting to break. Come on aboard, I promise you, you won’t hurt the horse.

I called it meditation out loud I guess, but in my own notes it’s just Ritual, for dayBegin, the dayBegin, the day … Start.

Phase 1.5, right after coffee. At least, that’s the Plan.

On any given theoretically perfect Sunday.

Norman Finkelstein “lashes out” Harris, Trump, Noam Chomsky, Democratic Party and Republican Party
(“She’s a laughing cow. I don’t know why she’s always laughing. The world’s on fire. She’s just completely detached from reality.”)

I would love to watch you call Norman a self-hating Jew to his face and see you get your ass kicked by an 80-year-old man. (I got your joy. Right here pal.)

Holocaust Survivor Tells Piers Morgan Why He’s Not A Zionist

Gabor Mate’ wouldn’t kick your ass. He’s above all that. A living saint.

I love him and it’s a love that is easier and more natural for me to feel than the one for my own biological brother. That’s a strange thing to say, but it’s my truth in the moment and I’m ever more willing to spill such strangeness.

Maybe your flex is to call people like this or like me anti-semitic, and maybe my flex to that might sound a lot like ‘go fuck yourself’. My soul is closer to Norman’s, and saintliness ain’t in it.

If you want to say ‘anti-Zionist’, I don’t think you’d get much argument. Maybe a little pride.

If you want to say ‘anti-Israeli’, I for one would lean toward agreeing again–in the same sense that I am anti-American, meaning against the policy and face of imperial colonialism without necessarily having anything against the average Mississippian or Yooper.

Anti-Semitism is just as bad as Pro-Zionism or any other racial prejudice.

Whether or not it involves God’s chosen people, and regardless of whether we’re talking the American Gods of Moloch and Mammon, or good old Yahweh from the Torah.

Selah.

***

Errata: The Norman is actually only 70. But he is one deeply informed individual. He is surly AF. And he walks five miles every day. So yeah, kind of a role model for me, on more than one level, and I am damn sure he will be eighty.

It is true, that those who would seek for my nose to abide in Joy in the middle of a genocide won that round.

It is true, that they won because I abandoned the field in the middle of the contretemps.

It is true, that I am still pissed off about the Repurposing, and also at myself for leaving.

But life, pissed or unpissed, continues to unwind, and to provide for us both heartwarming cat pictures, and also chilling moments of First Peoples with no one at all to care for them piled up together drunk in an alley on the wrong side of the November glass.

It is not our job, mine or yours, to fix any of that.

We were put here to do what we can do in each emerging moment, and to remain awake to both the good and the bad alike.

Maybe there’s a way to do those vital things, in Reykjavik and Bratislava just as in Tucson and Tucumcari. I wouldn’t know about those exotic places. I’ve never seen them and I never will.

So the job of knowing, on that score, must fall to you, of a Sunday with winter coming on fast.

I would love to know how that part works out.

But I will not hold my breath waiting to hear.

Awakening from the Dream | The Documentary

“This documentary by the Turkish Harici Studio investigates the state of the USA before the 2024 presidential election.

One nation and many shattered dreams.”

34 minutes. If you’re interested.

For a while I oversimplified eating. One day I ate nothing but homemade meatballs and raw avocado, not counting drinkables like coffee and electrolyte mix.

Yesterday I had to run to Prettytown to deliver the LBK to Sanctuary, and of course I stopped at the grocery places, with a carefully crafted list. I got food of course, but mainly, I got this.

I don’t really want to believe in taking any more supplements. But I’m giving it one more shot because the goal is maximizing energy at the mitochondrial level, which means ramping up the production of ATP.

The creatine, and extra nitrate from beet root, are the most important parts for this experiment.

We’ll see how it goes.

Halloween is dark and spooky and I am totally down with that.

But somehow it makes it still better, to know that it is also Diwali, and a festival of Light too.

Lies, many of them familiar by now, About These “Harmful” Foods

It doesn’t matter if I come at this from a rational or emotional perspective. I’m pretty convinced either way, by both of those approaches, and from personal experimentation as well. (PS: later on in the vid I have some skeptical questions for the good doctor, and I am not alone, but let’s leave the rabbit hole to the rabbits for now).

It’s a little different in another part of the interview:

Cell Phones & Wi-Fi Everywhere Is Killing Us!

Over here I don’t have direct experience. I don’t know enough about The Science to have a rational opinion, and of course I’m not taking any scientist at his word blindly.

But none of that matters–I choose to more or less believe it anyway.

Because I am virulently and irrationally prejudiced against smart phone technology for a lot of reasons, and this fits nicely into my confirmation bias, AND … thus … I’m totally okay with being a dumb barking sheeple on the subject, and having one more excuse to turn the damn thing off either way.

Another way of saying it is: I perceive it to In My Best Interests to listen to this video, mutter ThassRight like a gospel singer in the choir, and act accordingly–true believin’.

Whether or not the phones are literally melting my physical mitochondria and cells (why do you think they call them cellular telephones, huh? Huh?)

Whether or not the lizard people want me to own one.

Whether or not I’m headfucked, or just trying on the fashionable pose of being headfucked, for arcane reasons that have nothing to do with illness …

Or do they?

***

Unrelated. Probably. In my quasi-informed opinion …

This guy really seems to know his shit when it comes to homemade corn tortillas.

And I really enjoyed his cool wry approach to the subject.

Reading back over, it seems like it’s really important to me to have an Official Diagnosis.

But is it really?

Let me tell you a sliver of a story about the time I got one. Not a psychiatric label, but a bodily physical one.

Best I recall, I had been on the earth for 23 years, and

I should have been a man by then, but I wasn’t, so I went to the Endocrinology Man, and he ran this test and that test to validate or invalidate hypotheses and produce a label for my condition.

The label he eventually produced and the treatment he proposed as a result had many consequences, but one of the most important things about the diagnosis was the first word in it, which was:

“Idiopathic” failure of this hormone and that hormone.

Meaning: shit’s broke and we don’t know why, thusly.

The term ‘idiopathic’ derives from Greek ἴδιος idios “one’s own” and πάθος pathos “suffering”, idiopathy means approximately “a disease of its own kind”.

idiopathy (n.)
“primary disease,” 1690s, Modern Latin, from medical Greek idiopatheia, from idios “one’s own” (see idiom) + -patheia, abstract noun formation from pathos “suffering, disease, feeling” (from PIE root *kwent(h)- “to suffer”). Related: idiopathic.

Down to the roots, this Official Medical Scientific Diagnosis literally meant:

One’s Own Particular Suffering.

Not only that, but “Certain medical conditions, when idiopathic … are preferentially described by the synonymous term of

cryptogenic

“!!

“Cryptogenic refers to something of obscure or unknown origin. It is commonly used to refer to:
Cryptogenic disease
Cryptogenic species”

Doing the word math thus renders it as

Ones Own Suffering
Of Hidden Origin

You know what I’m a-thinkin, cadets?

I think that if I ever even did get that thing I want so bad,
an official diagnosis for my mental illness …

It would come back exactly the same.

Along about six/seven weeks ago I concocted a scheme to make this year’s birthday into the one where I turned 18 again, instead of the number running up on 4x of that.

It was unrepentant fiction, but I had my (experimental) reasons for forcing myself to think that way, and they were good ones.

About three/four weeks ago, I concocted another narrative, that I was, this time, just Nuts.

I thought it was fiction. I had my reasons. They were not good.

Among other problems, it seemed to turn out that it wasn’t a fiction at all, but rather a moment of glancing, almost sarcastic acknowledgement, about mental conditions that have been with me the whole time, and worsened in recent years.

It seemed to turn out–it has turned out–that I really am … Troubled, to choose a sweet-tasting modern euphemism, yeah?

It wasn’t a matter of If.

It was a matter of … How.

In other words, What Kind of Nuts–just coco, or more intricately damaged, even Macadamian?

I’ve wondered over time whether I might be bi-polar.

About whether I’m “on the spectrum”, as they say, of autism.

About other things too (paranoid schiz, like daddy?), but those two seemed like reasonable candidates for my project of self-diagnosis.

I don’t think I’m clinically bi-polar. I might be on the Spectrum, but that’s not very satisfying somehow. So what? Who isn’t?

I definitely am not just a Pretend Head Case, though.

I don’t have a name for what I am. Except … maladapted? Chronically batshit?

Nah. The first, while true, is too mild for my condition. The second might be also, but it doesn’t mean a whole lot, beyond being mean.

I’m working on it. By It, I’m referencing the diagnosis, not the Malady. It’s too soon for that.

***

Tangent.

Live ants, treated with a very specific smell associated with dead ants, end up placed by other ants onto the ant corpse pile again and again and again unless and until they can somehow get themselves Clean enough to not automatically fool their stupid fellow citizens.

I think you can see the connection to my life and madness, and also to concepts of what Truth is.

Very similarly:

Top 5 Mind-Blowing Revelations in Joe Rogan’s History

#1 is from Neil Degrasse Tyson. He says that humans see themselves as the most successful and big-brained form of animal life, but that Scientifically, this isn’t true.

The common wisdom among the college-educated is rather that humans have the biggest brains in proportion to their body mass, you see, and that explains everything our obvious superiority.

Except–straight from Neil, baby–that is also buuull shit.

Back at the ant thing, which comes from eminent biologist E.O. Wilson, science has pretty much fuck-all to do with Data.

Rather, it is about stories. Narratives. “A method of multiple competing hypotheses”, or Tales, put to the test in some way before they can achieve the academic imprimatur of “based on a true story”.

But not everything can be tested.

It often therefore gets really hard to say what The Truth is …

And what’s instead Crazy, if you’re picking up on what I’m laying down.

It doesn’t matter, according to Science, whether you think Donald Trump is a fascist (I don’t) or whether you see Prime Minister Netanyahu as equivalent to Hitler (with a high degree of, uh, moral certainty, I do).

Those hypotheses are not testable.

***

So anyway, enough about boring current events and the failures of empiricism. Let’s get back (with considerable relief) to the fascinating subject of me. (Narcissistic Personality Disorder?)

I’ve never been to a real shrink and I’m not going to start now. It would be a waste of time, because all I would really be caring about is a proper diagnosis, and

–I don’t think anyone out there is capable of giving me one, and, even if they did
–What would there be to do about it? Take pills? Fuck that. Talk? No thanks. Not for a hundred dollars and up for an hour of some therapist’s insight-filled time, especially with zero guarantee of any good coming of it. I can’t afford that shit either economically or morally.

However.

I’ve been spending time talking to the smartest genius person I know, for free, because that person is, you guessed it, once more, me.

I don’t even have to put on pants for these sessions, much less leave the house.

And they are already producing positive results.

You are welcome to the opinion that talking to oneself is a sure sign of Crazy, but I have to say:

Are you even fucking listening? (See Kris: Who do you thinks gonna hear?)

Asked and answered,; that ship has sailed; I’m crazy as a bedbug; I’ve admitted I have a “problem”, and …

The Question now, as ever, is So What; is

What Now?

Wait, no, wrong …

***

The Question now, as ever, is

Why is the loud sound of a dog so much more annoying than the perhaps louder sound of a tree full of birds?

My very scientific genius answer is: the dog is barking because it’s upset by something, or marking some theoretical territory, or stupid and bored, whereas the birds are singing in joyful life, or looking to get laid.

Laugh if you must, but I’m pretty sure I’m right this time.

***

The Question now, as ever, is

“Producing positive results”, huh? Okay. What results, Chief?

Well, there are some, from the self-talking, that I won’t go into yet.

But.

I walked 3.3 miles in under 1.5 hours today. Without a shirt on. Seeing no one, except joyful birds, one cottontail, and one roadrunner.

Pretty good, right?

Even better than you think. For one, I did some more self-talking, out loud!

And I was right on the edge of barking, because there were brand-new no-trespassing signs everywhere, but then I stopped and thought about it.

For months I’ve thought: If this was any kind of town, it would have a riverwalk, and certainly would not have all these ugly dumb-ass signs marking off somebody’s supposed private property and trying to completely block all access to the poor wasted ditch at all.

But on the bleeding edge of barking, I stopped myself and took a different narrative tack.

What if they did open a riverwalk?

Then people would use it. Probably by the family full, and some of the people would eventually even be cops. In short …

It would ruin everything I hold dear about this walk in the first place.

The broken way things are now, I can self-talk in a bellow if I want, with no trace of shame.

I can whip out my johnson any time I feel like pissing in the wind without fear of arrest or disapproval.

It literally does not get any better than this, because I’ve been to the pretty park in Flagstaff, and the National one with the geysers going off on schedule, and I’m sorry to say it, but there were lots of fucking people there, making it impossible to enjoy these places like a normal human animal.

So … I praise your funny last name, you mormonic absentee “rancher” from Snowflake.

I praise your ugly mangy bovines who roam the range eating up all the stray plastic bags.

God bless you all, cow and cowboy alike.

Because without you, and your fucking barbed wire, and your finger-waving signage … I’d have to share this place with crowds, or at least interlopers.

As things stand, it all belongs solely to those willing to overlook the rotting couches and the mud and your tepid warnings.

It all belongs to me.

Most every day at almost any hour, no one else wants it for nothin’.

So it’s mine. Even more than it’s yours, Pardner.

How rare and precious is that in this shithole of a world?

I’m serious.

I’m seriously whack.

Maybe now you finally believe me, at the point where I’m finally beginning to move past whether you’re listening or hearing, caring or complaining, crucifying or wanting to know at all.

Positive.

Results.

If you waste your time a-talking
to the people who don’t listen
to the things that you are saying

Who do you thinks gonna hear?

And if you should die explaining
how the things that they complain about
are things they could be changing

Who do you thinks gonna care?

There were other lonely singers
In a world turned deaf and blind
who were crucified for what they tried to show

and their voices have been scattered by the swirling winds of time
.
because the truth remains, that no one wants to know

–Kris Kristofferson, 1970

Source

***

As I was putting this together, Israel started bombing the capital cities of both Iran and Syria.

This makes three countries they’ve attacked now, not counting Palestine.

BREAKING: Iran Nuclear Plant HIT

… on a road narrower than your truck is long.

Or, incredibly, even narrower than your truck is wide.

Which seems impossible. The hint is: this might be what you really need a trusty winch fer. Besides the ‘it looks cool on muh jeep’ factor.

They had another one a couple days back I almost posted, in which a truck spring got compressed with nothing but a load strap, enough to get the spring and a replacement strut in place while out on the trail.

It’s almost all the … example of innate ingenuity, I guess, that keeps me coming back to their channel.

Once Auntie Charmaine asked me, after I did real good: “Are your actions always so effective?”

I loved her so much for that.

The answer is no, but I sure try to keep myself aimed that way.

I can’t wait to hear from the quasi-enlightened, when Israel declares war on Iran any day now, how that one’s all about self-defense too.

Or upon consideration maybe I can wait.

Because Iran is allied with Russia now. And Russia is allied with China, and …

Israel is allied and then some with the US …

Fuck, maybe those little bastards are two days away from nuking Tehran and starting Armageddon.

Maybe those dim Sunday-school teachers were on to something after all; God Damn.

Capt. Matthew Hoh: Can Israel Take on Iran Alone?

Ray McGovern | Netanyahu’s Plan: Dragging the U.S. into a Catastrophic War with Iran

(As always, Mr. McGovern is full of brilliant points. For example: Do you know why, decade after decade, Israel continues to play coy about having nukes? It’s because under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it is illegal for the US to give military aid to a country that has developed, or is developing them.

This land of the free is run top to bottom by duplicitous hypocrites.)

“Yeah buffer. The Family had a lot of buffers!”
–Willie Cicci, The Godfather Part II

According to the rules-based order, the State is the only one allowed to use the tool called violence, whether through noble soldiers, noble police officers, judges or lawyers in lawfare, or simple bureaucrats denying a claim and sentencing people to malnutrition.

It is the only entity allowed to kidnap and incarcerate. It is the only entity licensed to execute and kill, and if innocent people, as often happens, are robbed of their freedom or their lives, well, that’s a shame, but it’s just how the sausage gets made. This is “the price of liberty”.

It seems like sausage is made of pig carcasses.

But really and mostly and non-metaphorically, it’s made of money.

The Family is a metaphor as well. Once upon a time, families were defined by blood ties, or tribal ones at the very least.

In the state of Progress blood may have little to do with it. Families are defined by sausage ties–primarily, economic relationships.

Cosa Nostra means: Our Thing.

“Ours”.

(“our thing” or “this thing of ours” or simply “our cause” / “our interest“)

You can lead, within our thing, or follow.

Both options mean serving the Thing, the State, and of course Its Interests. Its profits–our profits.

Other choices are imaginable. Other choices mean, though, that you are in some ill-defined but nonetheless tangible sense no longer fully

One of Us.

Other choices mean Isolation.

So for the love of all we hold Holy, kids, please.

Stay in school. Get that bachelor button, get Made at any cost.

And oh.

Don’t forget to vote, either. It’s a sacred ritual. Democracy needs you bad.

Honest. Would I kid you, kid? Nah.

I don’t give a shit about Woke ideology one way or the other.

But I think Christian Parenti has it more or less exactly right. Birds and trees might have a sexual biology than leans M-ish or F-ish, and it might be so pronounced that we can more or less say that this one’s male, this one’s not; close enough.

But gender is a purely cultural construct, and I think that’s all anyone has to know.

It might be somewhat based on one’s apparent biological sex, or it might transgress or subvert that appearance for any number of reasons–Most all of them valid.

If I choose to think of myself as trans- (“beyond”) gender or the prescribed gender binary, that’s my business, and none of yours, unless I edge toward making it yours by, for example:

–Walking into a public restroom where you might happen to be, (triggering you somehow), or

–Insisting that I have the right to compete in any sport I want, especially “women’s” whatever.

Trans people have every right in the world to be trans, and to be treated Fairly.

Some trans people, some men, some women, are assholes trying to game the system to their own advantage.

To bend it to suit their own Interests.

Be Trans and god bless you for your heresy. I mean it.

Don’t be an asshole and that goes for everybody.

And, especially, don’t be a meta-asshole and try to pump the brains of schoolchildren or other naïfs full of brainwash. About gender.

About democracy.

About capitalism.

About history, heroes, gods, monsters, right … and wrong.

friþstow

Old English friþ (“peace”) +‎ -stōw (“place”)

friþstōw f : “refuge; sanctuary, asylum

grith

From Middle English grith, griþ, from Late Old English griþ, from Old Norse grið (“domicile, home”), in the plural with a meaning “truce, peace; sanctuary, asylum tranquility, refuge, safety, protection, mercy, leniency … (derived term griðastaður “sanctuary”)”.

útočiště

Czech for “place where an attack is carried out”, and yet … útočiště n : refuge (place).
So perhaps more along the lines of a refuge as a citadel, alamo, fortress, a home for a last stand

sanctuary

From Middle English seyntuarie, from Old French saintuaire, from Late Latin sanctuarium (“a sacred place, a shrine, a private cabinet, in Medieval Latin also temple, church, churchyard, cemetery, right of asylum”), from Latin sanctus (“holy, sacred”); see saint.

Derived terms:
animal sanctuary
gun sanctuary
sanctuary city
sanctuarylike
Second Amendment sanctuary
wildlife sanctuary

***

There is more. Haven’t touched the etymonline yet … there needs to be a hushed consideration of the basics, first

Lying down as it’s dark
once more to dream. I could tell you the pieces and I might, but the most important thing was that someone there asked me What I Really Want, and I answered:

Sanctuary

The main piece is about the trailer and about the beauty of having that sanctuary anywhere.

Also a small one about the imagery of sage/woman/book/wisdom and a kind of zen/tao spiritual practice.

***

Then comes the morning and the insight that Exporting democracy, freedom, whatever to the rest of the world is a cover story and a pretty sick joke.

You cheer the curtailing of freedoms in the name of fighting misinformation, in the name of fighting terrorism, again, whatever it is, and take your shoes off meekly at the airport.

You accept the rigged primaries and the swapping out of the candidate with no due process.

You try to tell me that this is about Joy, for the love of christ, when all I can see are acres of devastation and charred bodies.

It was never about exporting freedom and democracy.

It was always about extraction and importation of wealth back to the Hive.

You bought into it all mainly because they shaved you off a tiny sliver of that wealth, if you behaved yourself, and thus financed your lovely standard of living.

Our national saga is a story about colonialism and imperialism and manifest destiny and being the unipolar top dog because it’s the right thing, the free thing, the best thing. The Greatest country.

Lies. For the papering-over of a vast Mafia enterprise. This Thing Of Ours.

Real happy for you and all, but I want nothing to do with it–as little as possible, anyway.

I want sanctuary … from it.

I prefer splendid isolation … to it.

Yes, even in spite of the very real ironies abiding in the double negatives.

***

The first father’s philosophy was one of selfishness taken to psychotic extremes. The second’s amounts to: Get your button. Become Made. Rise up the ranks of The Organization by doing what you’re told to do–following–until you get to the place where you’re doing the telling. “Leadership”.

Collect more slivers, of the rotten pie.

The baseline difference between us is this.

You hear Anarchy and think: Chaos!

I say Anarchy and mean: Sanctuary.

Am I starting to get a handle on the question that obsesses me, the nature of what other people, including you Think, and Why?

It feels like a handle, to my fingers, but proving what a Handle is … It’s hard to say.

Working so hard to prove it, I start to see, might in the end be nothing but a distraction, and I begin, finally, to regard the whole enterprise, spilling included, as a fool’s errand.

I wonder what could be next.

As in: sloe gin

As in: sloe-eyed

What could be the connection?

A sloe is a berry-like thing called a drupe that grows on a bush called a blackthorn.

By the way, apropos of nothing, people get kicked off Delta for t-shirts all the time. Not even two months ago it happened to someone in a Trump shirt. Perhaps, somehow, that one didn’t make it to your Facebook for some reasons.

Time for a drink and a pair of dark peepers.

I am almost exactly who he would have been
except …
I’m a good bit book-smarter (it scared him how much),
a little bit kinder due to being a little more secure, most ways, for whatever arcane reason;
and, I’m not quite as tough either, in the usual manly-man sense. (I hate saying it but it’s true.)

Most of all, though
I am who he would have been if he never
had a bunch of kids he was unwilling to support.
Specifically, unwilling to do what it takes, to support them right or well.

I would have been willing.
Deep down I might have been resentful of the resulting necessary compromises, but I’d-a made them.

For better or worse, biology is destiny, and I didn’t even have to try to not have them.
Not having them was the default and I would have had to try and try again to produce an heir.

Not-trying was easier, so it became my … ‘Choice’.

I am who he would have been
except …
I’m not quite as much of a selfish irresponsible bastard.

I thought hearing it might be useful to you.
I’m telling you because it might help to explain why you feel some of the ways you feel about me,
suddenly or not so suddenly,
this late in the game.

Another rabbit-warren, another distraction.

I binged on MobTube, which is the shorthand for the phenomenon of Mafia-adjacent people in a post-Mafia world turning to YouTube and trying to make a living by talking about This Thing of Ours, which barely exists, and mostly died out because pretty much every single one of them turned Rat.

They … “co-operated”. With the Machine. Like a lot of normal people do, and so it all dies.

This is about the only really interesting thing that came out of my hours of listening while Cleaning.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s all Hatred.”

“If people don’t Hate you, you’re not interesting. You just aren’t.”

The Kardashians. The Jersey Shore. “Just a bunch of complete idiots, but people loved it.”

“I think Kim Kardashian is a transcendent human being that we need to study and understand.”

Do tell.

“Eventually society will fall because of people like that (within) it, won’t it?”

The other guy, laughing: “You would hope!”

I think it will.

And, more or less, yes I would. Because your analysis, wiseguys, is mostly correct, and even the fall of this societal regime would probably be better than this society as we know it just continuing to churn on; in the same way that even President Donald II: The Orange Sequel, would be (in one very specific way) preferable to the current Alzheimer’s patient pretending to run the show.

Better than the revolting spectacle of hatred cynically posing itself as Joy.

“Just don’t keep lying to me.”

Yeah. That is the interesting part, that The People. Here in this Democracy. Are so fuckin’ sick of being lied to, about everything all the time, that they would rather blow the whole thing up, burn the whole thing down, than have to be force-fed multi-layered bullshit about Everything, from the top, for another four years.

I’m not predicting anything either way.

***

I’m just trying to stay clean, and undistracted if I can, most days, here in the hole, isolated from the gen-pop.

Determining what your “interests” or mine really are is complicated, but a lot of it comes down to cold hard cash, or individual perceptions of what will put more of it into our pockets, or give us more “freedom” regarding how we might spend it.

“Our interests” differ, for pretty stark and practical reasons that are not hard to see …
if you’re choosing to honestly look hard enough.

Interests. What is Interesting, and why. Trying to turn the trick of seeing it all from a DisInterested perspective, or trying to decide whether that’s even a thing … trying to decide whether Jim Carrey might be on to something, or Crazy, and whether crazy is even a thing.

(if you wanna subtitle it: if he’s up and out tonight he must be truly down)

One more time–half a time–regarding the rabbithole distraction that is Warren, and at the same time is the rabbithole distraction that consists of conducting familial relationships almost 100% exclusively via those god damnable pocket computers everyone is so proud to own and be leashed unto, at least proud if their ear tag tracking beacons are branded like so many cattle by the place where that one young man and his betrothed are Prospering so.

‘Cause cheap is how I feel, and I just can’t-want to hear them failing+failing to scream, neither

‘Cause we have real business to attend to and fish that matter, to be poaching from that little river, and I sure as hell am not talking about the Politics that seem to be so paradoxically very legal, now I’m gone, to discussing in that place of Don’t want Nothing to do
with you. Not politics. No. Poetics.
All the rest
is nothing more than staring
into my empty coffee cup,

thinking that the gypsy wasn’t lyin’ …
that if California slides into the ocean, like the mystics n’ statistics say it will, I predict right here and now–write it the fuck down–this motel will still be standing

Until I pay my bill.

May heaven help the one who leaves.

Desperados Under The Eaves

I’m not going line by line this time. Instead, all I really want to notice is how he quotes other poets repeatedly, incessantly, all through this one. (I’m sure this list is far from comprehensive and that I’m missing many more.)

–the Eagles, most obviously

–Randy Newman’s Louisiana 1927, especially in the opening phrases

–and toward the end, somebody else’s favorite song, the specific somebody in this case being Good Honest Abe himself:

Away down south in the land of traitors,
Rattlesnakes and alligators,
Ride away, ride away, ride away, ride away.
Where cotton’s king and men are chattels,
Union boys will win the battles,
Ride away, ride away, ride away,
Dixieland

@okamaman7324
5 months ago
Warren is my spirit animal.
Anyone who has ever sat somewhere not leaving ’cause anywhere else is just worse.
Is my brother.

Kin I git an Amen. Anyone who’s ever had a heart. Or more to the point, anyone who’s ever worked hard to keep it beating in time with the one real god, and not the Injections of lying hate lying around so conveniently, so coincidentally oh yes I’m sure.

Are you, after all and really, waiting for Jimmy down in the alley; waiting there for him to come back home? Or–I say it and I ask it with trembling hope–at the very least Waiting down on the corner and thinking of ways to get your own self back to your own?

-30-

***

Now finally we can shake free of the muck (The Congregation Splits)
Wipe the slate
go on back ten days into the past before the Fall
when he wrote it on the pure white gray wall (Give A Fuck!);

when it was still summer.

***

I know that you love me and want all the best for me, and especially for me to get Well Again so I can finally have a happy, and productive, and … adjusted Life.

Johnny Caveman, pour les grottes, down in the alley, and …

They had all been warned, and the (pure whitegray) walls came down.

Never ever be that horse; it’s not in your

Interests. Yes. That is, where we Were, that one place
where the blacktop ran over the top of the river of thirst and drinking,
toppa the fish, in water of the river
not seeing it because it is the liquid air in which they live every moment of life.

(Whether or not you don’t-treated Margo right, Time itself has been Kind, to the demeanor she wears, this Margo.)

That’ll be as far back as I can reach
on the night before the night before it freezes.

“Not many songs deal with a failed suicide, domestic abuse, and a brush with sadomasochism. I’m a huge Warren Zevon fan”. —via Powerpop, a proper blog

Speaking of that verse:

“She asked me if I’d beat her.”

It happened to me over a half a lifetime ago, way before I ever owned a goat leather daytona beach jacket, at a place named after a Rainbow.

I simply told her No, Babydoll. In what I hoped was a calm and neutral voice.

I did not get into any of the trauma or baggage I had, and have, around the concept of men beating women.

We did go back to the Hyatt anyway, and any further detail on what transpired I cannot provide, and still remain the honorable gentleman I aspire to be.

I’m making it sound far more salacious than it really was, by saying it that way, and I am doing so selectively and strategically. Mindful Cultivation. See?

In the Reality, it could never have been satisfyingly salacious, because I could not give her what she needed.

Not just the beating itself, but that which she was truly craving–the masculine intention to dominate, master, even humiliate. The kind of cruel rainfall that she could absorb, and transform into dewy, fertile feminine wetness, somewhere inside the synapses of her magical brain.

I was incapable of doing her that Kindness.

And for that I will always be sorry.

In the swirling mix of those potent spaghetti-western brews, it is easy to forget:

The Pitiful

Forgetting, in this case, is only a venial sin: deep down no one wants to watch a movie about that shit (and the wise belletrist, ever mindful of cultivating an audience, will always remember that).

Also easy to forget is the fact that this was in the first place another brilliant WZ tune, precisely because that beautiful mestiza* spinster covered it in a way that surpassed** the original.

* “a person of mixed European and Indigenous non-European ancestry in the former Spanish Empire”

Works for me–on me–I (technically but legitimately) qualify and perhaps it would be in my Interests to Identify that way, eh? Eh?

In the end I doubt that. Credit to any gender or not … Woah-oah is Me.

** Surpassed it, that is, in most every way except that she dropped the line (really the whole killer verse) that goes:

“I don’t wanna talk about it”.

Bob Dylan is no folksinger, by his own accounting of things.

In my opinion humble or otherwise, he was (and may still be) closer to a belletrist.

Either way, he was pissed off before you were even born, sunshine.

Mostly for the right reasons, too.

All by itself that’s enough to qualify him as kindred to me. Probably on Daddy’s side, and by that I mean my daddy, that rat bastard, and not anybody else’s.

Whether he (and that might could mean either Father, or Bob) would embrace that familial connection in reverse must necessarily remain a topic for

Distracted Speculation.

May be.

Part Three in the blossoming Splendid Isolation series in Celebration, as it were, of the first day of the cool half of the year.

You may be could take the No Cell Service part of that a couple of different ways. Just like you could take every line of that heartbreakingly beautiful song.

If I was writing that sign I would want it to say No Motels, instead of no ranger station. But an iPhone with a slash through it will have to suffice, and it does, too–I was genuinely shocked at how well, in live-fire real-time exercises.

The second picture is for the logistics squad.

It’s a rental ennit? Shades of Blue, from the other end of the state a mere five weeks ago.

“I don’t want to see their faces
I don’t want to hear their screams“

“Like you said, it is now an atrocity to deny it’s a genocide.”

Thanks for asking,
or thanks for not asking,
either way …
I’m doing exactly precisely

Splendid

painting these cow skulls
releasing these Thrillers
watching, rapt, the TikTok Auschwitzes;
all the small discrete variations on their impossibly durable themes.

Finally I can say it with clarity, that
I am grateful to Him sure, for all that you perceive that he did For you
and yet, in all equal honesty
It’s a very different story in my heart, when viewed from the perspective

Of what he did To you, to the waterfish embrace, his name,
to the potfrog staying in school now, staying all into it in fact to the
Last Syllable of Recorded Time
ever since the nineteen and fifty-nine, or the IGY

and not, just
to the freak and ghoul who grew belatedly tall at long last
only to scribble so, nuts, monk mad, in daily devotion
eh Mr. Gibbon?

“Fallish.”

It’s the last day of summer in this localized micro-geography. A sunny 80 degrees.

Tomorrow the wind ramps up and blows in a front filled with chilly rain.

The afternoon following, the daytime high drops by 20 degrees, so they say, and the night low as well, brushing right up against hard freeze.

This is exactly normal, in my twenty years of experience at dwelling here. The change comes mid-October. The past few years, the heat extended itself toward November. Not this time.

So many things did not get done, in that month of weather that was neither too hot nor cold. Instead of incremental progress, the line was merely held, in the most urgent areas.

In others, it fell apart just like the battlefront at Vulhedar, and concurrently … it turns out that for the most part, text threads are the new hotel california–you can check out of them any time you like, but you can never leave.

Sticking a fork into the notifications is the next best half-measure available.

There’s just the right song for the micro-zeitgeist, meteorological, psychological, interpersonal …

Lock the gates Goofy.

Take my hand. Thank you so much, Lia. Bless your eternal soul, Warren.

(A thing I did not know before:
“Splendid isolation is a term used to describe the 19th-century British diplomatic practice of avoiding permanent alliances from 1815 to 1902”.)

Ah Neutrality, sing of its many virtues once more, but as we wait alone together for peace in our time (whatever peace could mean, livin’ in the heart of the war machine)–please to be sending the lawyers, the guns, and the money–you take up the spill-guitar in the first place precisely because you are an inarticulate person, trying to make it one day at a time

After the Fall.

Black Woman: “This message is for Barack ‘ain’t-never-did-a-fuckass-thing’-for n*****s-in-8-years-he-was-in-the-White-House-ever” Obama.
Keep black men’s name out yo motherfuckin’ mouth.”

Black Man: “Being a young black voter, it feels like the Democrats are constantly trying to gaslight me about my own reality.
We are sick and tired of being expected to Feel Good with Barack Obama or–now–they’re trying to put the ovarian version of Barack Obama up there … ”

Source

Saying these things myself would open me to being called a racist (or by extension a misogynist or an anti-semite or all those legitimately scary things).

But you can’t realistically expect to get away with calling Dr. Gabor a Jew-hater.

Neither can you validly call Ms TONYxTWO prejudiced against black people, without contortions that would shame an Olympic gymnast.

You can, and maybe will, ignore them, though.

If not at your peril, then perhaps merely at that of your Interests.

(updating the next day, just to say: thank you for being the better man and calling–one love)

Okay. I won’t. For now–out of respect for you.

I don’t understand why you’re asking me not to though.

–Not everything is a Celebration, alas.

–Jacking that thread to make it seem like it is … that felt gamey and suss to me honestly.

–There are people who feel differently about how that medium Ought Be Used (the Utah Man doesn’t want ‘politics’ but posting a meme about the KKK somehow strikes him as apolitical and mere Levity).

–I would like to have a place that starts with Everybody, of course, but where the sensitive can feel free to remove themselves by using the “Delete and Block this Conversation” feature at their own discretion, no noses out of joint and no missing out on the non-controversial happy happy joy joy things in the Safe Space.

And where I can get away from the palpable chill and subject-changing hand-waving that happens a majority of the time when I speak what’s in my heart.

Like I do here.

So explain like I’m five to me, please and at your leisure, why I shouldn’t have that.

You decide.

To me … it’s yes or no depending on where you decide to wall off ‘politics’ from … cat memes or whatever.

Elitist Detachment From Reality

There’s plenty of electoral-adjacent politics in it, but IMHO this is a story of the increasingly divergent two Americas.

The America of manicured lawns in Arlington, Virginia, let’s say, and the other, of somebody’s dead couch on the banks of the Puerco a mile from where I sit, or somebody’s ripped-away propane tank on the banks of some river running past Chimney Rock, North Carolina.

If you live in the Arlington-America or some cozy cottage in the Hamptons, then of course you’re much more likely to vote for the person that represents all your life stands for–No Matter Who, or how they even ended up being the nominee.

Most places are not those places. That’s what makes you elite, and why your life is full of Celebrations. You’re glad about it, and maybe you have every right to be. Maybe you feel you’ve Earned it, and … maybe you have indeed. Bootstraps. Beating the odds. Rising up from the humble circumstances of this or that shithole to be a Success according to the logic of the Successful, thanks to the help of this or that Saint.

The shitholes still exist, nevertheless, out there beyond the gate and the guard shack. They are growing, becoming the norm across the fruited plains, and becoming ever-shittier by the month.

It costs ever-more to live in them, and it is ever-harder to figure out a way to do it and break even, much less prosper.

If you do live in them your perspectives are going to diverge sharply from the perspectives taken for granted within the air-conditioned studios of ABC News, or Fox or The Hill or whatever.

You will believe, and act, and vote, in accordance with your Interests as you perceive them, either way.

Thousands Trapped in Jabalia as Israel Bombardment Intensifies

Jabalia, what’s that?

The sanitized Wikipedia version:

“Jabalia Camp is a Palestinian refugee camp established in 1948 by the United Nations to house those displaced by the 1948 Palestinian expulsion”.

Expulsion, what the fuck?

Shhh, don’t fuss. They have it linked for you. Yes, even they.

“In the 1948 Palestine war, more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs – about half of Mandatory Palestine’s predominantly Arab population – were expelled or fled from their homes, at first by Zionist paramilitaries, and after the establishment of Israel, by its military.

Dozens of massacres targeting Arabs were conducted by Israeli military forces and between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were destroyed.

Village wells were poisoned in a biological warfare programme codenamed Operation Cast Thy Bread and properties were looted to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning”.

Oh … yeah.

Go right ahead and think what you want, about the goodness or badness of that little manufactured state down Galilee way.

What I care about here and now is … Us; and Our Interests, naturally.

Russell Dobular, Jewish man, from the video:

“All moral authority this country has ever had is going out the window.”

A concurring opinion from his cohost Keaton Weiss, Jewish man:

“Like you said, it is now an atrocity to deny it’s a genocide.”

Do you remember our dear friend Dr. Gabor Mate’, Jewish man, survivor of the first holocaust, and brilliant trauma expert?

He’s on board with the same sentiments:

“Zionism will be looked upon as one of the greatest disasters in Jewish history“.

“It’s like we’re watching Auschwitz on TikTok.”

Given that all this is so fundamental to how we live and have always lived in this lifetime, I just can’t get too excited about the blue lady’s free school lunch plan or the fact that the orange man might get in the way of your abortion.

Either the whole country is completely insane and lost, or I am.

I know you’ll make that call in perfect consonance with your own Interests, whatever they may truly be.

I continue to work out my own answer to the question from one trash day to the next.

Well I’m goin’ out west
Where the wind blows tall

‘Cause Tony Franciosa
Used to date my ma

They got some money out there
They’re giving it away

I’m gonna do what I want
And I’m gonna get paid
Do what I want
And I’m gonna get paid

Little brown sausages
Lying in the sand
I ain’t no extra baby
I’m a leading man

Well, my parole officer
Will be proud of me
With my Olds 88
And the devil on a leash

I know karate, Voodoo too
I’m gonna make myself available to you
I don’t need no make up
I got real scars
I got hair on my chest
I look good without a shirt

Well I don’t lose my composure
In a high speed chase
Well my friends think I’m ugly
I got a masculine face
I got some dragstrip courage
I can really drive a bed
I’m gonna change my name to Hannibal
Or maybe just Alex

Gonna drive all night
Take some speed
I’m gonna wait for the sun
To shine down on me

I cut a hole in my roof
the shape of a heart
And I’m goin’ out west
where they’ll appreciate me

Goin’ out west

Goin’ out west

So I wonder if it landed with such a thud because it was Too Soon?

Too on the nose?

Just fell into the sterile soil of an audience who has already had it Up To Here with me for mostly unrelated reasons?

In the spirit of authentic reflection I have to at least allow for the possibility that it simply wasn’t funny.

But … that’s not true. It was.

How do I know it was?

Same way I know that everyone in the government is a reptile from outer space.

This new philosophy is making me feel better about my world in so many ways.

This fresh way of thinking and feeling, it’s … in my interest, yeah, I guess you could say.

Now.

Toward reconciliation, toward racial justice, and toward the embrace of the common weal of every American heedless of Creed or Color or Status, plorable or utterly deplorable, in sickness and in health, here is a song for the expiation or attempted exorcism of our collective original sins.

***

And old Joe did and said as he would
Took all the shopping carts from the mall
And took ’em to Utah
which was Zionism

He built an empire out of the desert
Out of the dust and the sand, just like Las Vegas
But he never took the rap
that the mafia did

And he thought the Indians were some lost 13 dudes
But he didn’t treat ’em any better
And they were never
on his side

They drove their historic pickup trucks out into the desert
Into a ditch along the side of the road
And acted like they were drunk
all the time

— Camper Van Beethoven, “The History Of Utah“

I clean the house, I pet the cats. I stay home and spill, and check the constantly chiming phone and frequently curse. I run out for jug water. I return quickly and order the very best organic beef, online of course.

I stay very informed, though you might say misinformed, malinformed, disinformed; whatever.

I try with mixed success to make progress on becoming Energetic, on organizing, on tackling the bathroom in one last valiant push. On cutting into that last September footage before October ends.

This morning I went over to 270toWin and played the electoral college video game.

My half-ass conclusion after doing so is that it makes no practical difference who you vote for, unless you happen to live in Pennsylvania, which some politi-wit once described as two blue urban cities with a couple of hundred miles of Alabama in between.

As a corollary, I doubt very much we will know the outcome of the stupidest election of our lifetime before we go to bed.

Then, regardless of how long it takes or who the System claims won, a new round of No Practical Difference will commence.

Zelensky will continue to fade, away from Kyiv and toward Miami. The little brown bodies will continue to pile up. The $750 checks will circle the drain toward this or that bit of stopgap consumerism and credit card balances will continue to rise, because there is no other way to Make It, for more and more democrats, republicans, and disenchanted protest voters.

Again I will clean the house.

With a bit of character or luck or both, I may poop in the new toilet at last as the chill descends and the leaves fly until only bare branches reach for the sky.

US forces have not been engaged in combat in Israel. Mr Biden has previously said he had ‘no plans or intentions to put US boots on the ground in combat’…

But the story is only a story because he’s changed his “mind”.

Meanwhile, the madman who runs the nominal democracy down there for US is telling UN peacekeepers to get the fuck out of Lebanon, and beginning a program of actively attacking them to emphasize the request.

Project Ukraine may be winding down but things are just getting really started in Greater Arabia.

And any criticism of hurricane response at home is Misinformation.

Just so you know.

How the Doña Rosa Tortilla Press Is Made

2024’s BEST BOOK For Molding Young Minds

Headlights
pointed
at the dawn
We were sure we’d never see an end to it all

and I don’t even care to shake these zipper blues
and we don’t know just where our bones will rest.
To dust, I guess, forgotten and absorbed into the
Earth below.

I know you better than you fake it.
Faster than we thought we’d go
Beneath the sound of hope, hung down
with the freaks and ghouls

***

Learn all you need to learn, from some other man’s poetry for days, but if you quit there, what are you?

You are that, dear self-appointed belletrist, which tilts at the windmill of trying to awaken ghouls.

Stop. Look. Listen again to the sound of your own headlights
(left foot tapping up the brights)
and re-point them once more
at The Dawn.

It sounds so pure and simple, right?

But to do it means having to leave the babies crying and dying in the collapsed wreckage of the places they lived. It means letting the liars get away with their lies; saying okay without the moving of lips as they make off with the braaiins of those you loved.

Okay? Nah. Not.

***

I will never be okay again.

If I live on it will be addicted

to the remembered dream drug of a pink sunrise that never once comes again, jabbing the needle deep and plunging flooding veins with the question of whether that’s a life worth living at all.

Maybe the roller girl can still Skateaway and god bless her for her young fresh escape.

I am old-painted in pointed by my own hand. The hand of fate.

Fatima also lives with this lesson until she dies.

The hand of fate brings a son to this house.

No one knew what role he would play even he.

I will tell the secret.

In this world ghouls rule sovereign, and so it becomes unfashionable to speak of the link between genius and madness. “It’s quite overstated,” they say, “romantic rubbish, pish tosh”.

You must see that real genius is Nothing at all, except seeing more and around and past the lie.

You must see that the price of such seeing is to be cast out past sane, beyond the beam of one remaining headlight, out of the reach of decorum and politesse, and that then and there

the link does quietly abide.

Knowing the secret truth provides no light of salvation.

Walking on in twilight stumbling over clods is the blood of the lamb.

I am man enough

to watch this

and admit I need mental help; man enough to live with the fact

that none is coming, because I can’t afford the right insurance

and my government spent the money on getting people dead instead.

So hundreds of billions down that rathole, ultimately buying nothing except inflated stock prices for weapons manufacturers and the generous goodwill of the donor class.

Tens of billions more going out the door as we speak to the new and improved kind of Nazis and their carpet-bombing of the southern Sudetenland.

But oh! In the heartland, a hurricane blew your house away and buried Granny under floodwater?

Ain’t that a shame. You have our deepest sympathies.

Here’s a nice crisp form for you to fill out, for $750 in aid. We’ll check it over, means-test your application, and get back to you, either way, promise. Promise!

***

I try my honest best, to translate your indistinct warbling about all this, in my head, on the fly. Not that you’re talking to me, because you’re not … I’m just trying to eavesdrop. To overhear.

Sometimes I catch a phrase or two: “good guys” … “dawn’s early light” … “save democracy” …

And all those snippets make me want to do is stop even trying to understand, where you’re coming from, any more, my dear, because the vague bits are so disheartening and paint you in such an ugly light.

I’ve loved you longtime, and so I know … you can’t possibly be that stupid–what’s the alternative to that, then?

Those god damn lizard people must have got inside your head somehow, in the years I was too busy working to pay you enough mind.

Bad lizards. Bad lizards. The scariest zombie movie I ever saw.

Madness.

Do I choose it, or does it choose me?