The Crisis in String Theory is Worse Than You Think | Leonard Susskind

I watched a whole lot of these, trying to figure out the nature of this Crisis.

There seems to be broad agreement on two things.

1) String theory, the dominant model for 40 years, does a great job of describing a SpaceTime. But unfortunately, it’s not the SpaceTime we happen to exist in. And …

2) Describing this SpaceTime, ours, is not happening for the simple reason that young physicists don’t think they’ll be able to get an academic job if they try to do it, and in the main feel that they’d fail both theoretically and financially, if they did try.

In this one, kindly professor Susskind is telling them to man the eff up.

If I were a young physicist, I imagine I might be inclined to tell him something like:

Well that’s sure easy for you to say, Mr. 84-year-old Stanford Genius!

I’m old myself, so I agree with Susskind (even though he is a crotchety failure of a rhetorician). Fuck your career and your visions of a lovely husbandWife and a house in the Hamptons.

Do science. Man, or woman, up.

And yes, it is lusciously easy, now, for me to say.

In the meantime, as we abandon the ship built by eminent deans, crafty entrepreneurs, brutal masters, and other reptilian shapeshifters of every stripe, here’s another clue for you all

The Author Is Not “In” The Book

***

I’m jumping the gun a little on where I need to take you next, but …

Try this on.

We are more ignorant about the nature of Consciousness than we are about distant galaxies, or about what goes on in the nucleus of an atom.

Why is that?

Some wise people would say its because although we pride ourselves mightily on observing keenly, almost nobody spends any time observing … the observer.

For many reasons.

Including the fact that breaking off and doing it for any length of time would be

Career suicide.

but but but why?

Because your collective response to the deeply stupid bumper sticker was morally tepid clucking, and emoticons.

While the response to Nikita’s heartfelt tactful plea, and shy offering of storge was … running away in dead fish silence, directing your eyes to some random spot on the cyberwall, and generally acting as if she just took a shit in the celebratory punchbowl.

That’s how we do, ennit?

That’s fuckin’ why.

***

(I got the taxes all the way done in one sitting today, and it affected my mood some.
I’m sending this out several hours after-tax and after the Incident, later in the evening.

Otherwise, I stand by every word, just exactly as written in the heat.)

In 1991, I was in graduate school for the first time.

My professors kept chattering with enthusiasm about something called “Hypertext”.

So one day I asked the smartest hippest youngest one of them: David, what the eff is Hypertext?

He didn’t actually know, but because he was a Professor, that didn’t stop him from trying to convince me that he did know.

The clearest thing I was able to glean from his non-answer was that it was, he claimed, a way of linking one document to another document.

To me, a document was an object printed on paper, like a grocery list or a novel. I had already produced many such documents myself. In fact, I was required as a student to produce them, and the teachers insisted that they be typed and not handwritten, even though there were already very few typewriters around.

So I had produced them via “word processing”, on a tiny desktop Mac, in a computer lab on campus, a lab that wasn’t networked at all, except to the lumbering tractor-feed printers that mechanically produced acceptable hard copies of … documents.

How were these documents supposed to be linked?

I didn’t know. Beyond idle intellectual curiosity, I didn’t care either. I thought it had something to do with footnotes, and I let the question slide away utterly.

1991 was (as things turned out) also the year Saint Tim invented the Web, and HTML. Hypertext. Markup. Language.

Thus we eventually got the formulation:

http://wwww … hypertext transfer protocol, networked over the world wide web.

Linkage, of documents.

Only problem with the whole idea was that no one, not even my hippest professor, had a browser, or any idea about how or where to get one. Much less a live network connection.

Three years later, Netscape Navigator began to change that, and a year after that, Windows 95 came out, bundled with another browser, called Internet Explorer.

We have liftoff.

Well, maybe you did, that early. Personally I was driving trucks with fiftythree foot trailers all over 46 states and two provinces at the time, and I had no environment in which to experience the slowly building storm of hype.

I quit the trucking industry on New Year’s Day in 1997. I had a fat stack of cash. I bought a van and put my futon in it. I bought a new Walkman for my cassette tapes. I bought a very fine analog camera. And I bought a computer. A real live laptop computer.

Trying to economize, I got one with a black and white screen. And no modem, because what would I want that for anyway? I literally and honestly had no clue.

Most of a year later, I was broke again regardless, and living in the van, and went back to a city to grudgingly seek employment, god dammit, again.

I was selected from a pool of 42 applicants to be the new paraprofessional librarian at a community college in Albuquerque. Because of a fond reference check from a lovely someone I hadn’t seen in a decade.

My new employer, the Library, had computers. The computers were networked. And they had browsers too.

I hit the freshly paved cyberbricks with a lustful, hungry vengeance.

Renouncen: “give up (something), resign, surrender”
from Latin renuntiare “bring back word; proclaim; protest against”
from re- “against” + nuntiare “to report, announce,” from nuntius “messenger”
PIE root *neu- “to shout”)

(Reportagin. Yes. To bring back the-word-against, and holler it. To the Void?)

The sense of “abandon, discontinue” (a habit, practice, etc.) is from late 15c.
That of “disclaim allegiance to” a person is by c. 1500
That of “to abandon or give up” a belief, opinion, etc. by open recantation, declare against” from 1530.

Those must have been interesting decades. Montezuma died in them, of cowardice.

The Friars Minor Capuchin were founded.

the life was to be one of extreme austerity, simplicity and poverty. Neither the monasteries nor the Province should possess anything, nor were any loopholes left for evading this law. No large provision against temporal wants should be made, and the supplies in the house should never exceed what was necessary for a few days. Everything was to be obtained by begging, and the friars were not allowed even to touch money.

Of course someone less than saintly would have to touch it for them, from time to time. No point in begging, else. But still, it was a step in the right direction, so that’s not a dismissive criticism.

I do not say that you can attain purity by views, traditions, insight, morality or conventions; nor will you attain purity without these.

But by using them for abandonment, rather than as positions to hold on to, you will come to be at peace without the need to be anything.

Including a sage; including a belletrist.

Peace.

A calm, confident state of mind.

As in, per the Greek: It is better to starve to death in a calm and confident state of mind

than to live anxiously, drowning, in the midst of perfect little butterkeepers.

In the same way as surrendering the image of self as Artist, if I could (and I can) stop needing to buy things, then the floodwaters would, inch by agonizing inch, drop away.

Before the dawn of “civilization”, or so it seems to me, there was no point in withdrawing from “the world”, or renunciation.

But now, afterwards: every reason.

Eleven dollars is a substantial splurge, right now.

Was it worth it?

We know the answer already, and it’s a no.

More stuff

no matter how beautifully artisanal

is the wrong direction entirely

at every turn.

***

Still doing it wrong. Occasionally, hurting myself, and having to re-heal.

So the bitter whimpering, yes, I foolishly let it knock me totally on my ass for a day.

I’m clawing my way back to the surface in my crabwise fashion.

By morning it may dawn.

I did turn off the comments as part of the Working Title subproject. 97% of them were spam by the point I did it anyway.

Updates on all that inbound but you can’t un-know where I live regardless.

***

I see that it’s tax time and I know that it matters–to you it does–urgently.

So I’ll do my best. By you. Because of who I always have been and am.

Lion Man.

Real Lefties Support Trump For Taking On The FBI w/Christian Parenti

I watched all of six minutes of it and learned: Christian Parenti is the son of Michael Parenti. Then I thought that had something to do with Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, but it seems I was wrong.

Tangent.

***

Building on the Ancient Americas channel, and the Peopling of this place, and the spiritual significance of the time of the Bølling-Allerød interstadial, there are these.

The Magdalenian Culture

What Was Life Actually Like For People In The Stone Age?

Doggerland

Poverty Point: It’s that interstate rest area in Louisiana. A National Monument. A UNESCO World Heritage Site. Another fillgap for the Lascaux and Altimira holes in my life.

And in its very name a rich metaphor, for where I am pointed today, and tomorrow.

Still closer to Home, the story of the Ashes from which Phoenix rose. You may find it piquant, relevant, amusing, or it may leave you cold.

***

Proxima Centauri is still about 25 trillion miles from here.

A gentle reminder.

No god.

No master.

No nothin’.

***

Dead end notes.

Popular Opinion should be the name of a big magazine, like Popular Mechanics or

But really, they’re all Popular Opinion.

unpop

antisocial media

poverty and unpopularity

pouty bitch why won’t anybody come see?

I think there probably is a good reason to keep on writing.

But publishing, here like this … it’s outlived its usefulness.

imma keep spilling in the long dark, turn some of those spills into belle sunshine, sure, so it goes, sure yeah maybe

here’s my email

madness

yeah

***

The next video is in the can and might well be up by the time time you read this.

Theoretically making slightly more sense than the time you read this

or left it to slide.

“Our own cities are our own animal factories; families, schools, churches, are the slaughterhouses of our children; colleges and other places are the kitchens.

As adults in marriages and business we eat the product … ”

–R.D. Laing, by way of explaining that what we call Madness is less of a disease and more of a rational response to the new insane Normal

***

On October 3rd in 1971, quoting those words by way of reviewing the book they appeared in, the New York Times responded:

“These charges may all be true, but they are tiresome.”

And there you have it.

The tale of our times and our lives, boiled down to the very essentials.

The Bering Land Bridge, 13 or 14 thousand years ago. That’s how Injuns happened, right?

The Settlement of the Americas: New Discoveries

What do you mean 21 thousand years ago? Thirty-two thousand? No way. They couldn’t have possibly gotten over, or through the mile-high glacial ice sheet!

That’s so.

Apparently, they went … around it.

Pretty cool.

Currently, the oldest definitive proof of human habitation on this continent now rests at White Sands National Monument in New Mexico.

Footprints.

From long before the Beringian Hypothesis could have made it happen.

And yes, I do want to go back there and see, particularly since that cave art thing over on the homeland au Francais ain’t ever gonna happen now.

Speaking of our nominally white boys, and girls, you can forget 1492 and even dear Leif Ericsson a few hundred years before that.

Ignorant backward tattooed cannibal savages in outrigger canoes from Polynesia beat Columbus to the good old New World by a least a couple thousand years their own selfs.

Well that’s good to know.

Thanks, Pete.

Old English heorð “hearth, fireplace, part of a floor on which a fire is made,”
also in transferred use “house, home, fireside,”
from Proto-Germanic *hertha- “burning place”
from PIE *kerta-, from root *ker- (3) “heat, fire.”

The Stone Age diet — What did our human ancestors eat?

So yes, we live in fear that someone undeserving of the privilege will see our genitals, and also the fear that we will see theirs. Fear that we might get caught farting. Et cetera.

The same headbroke ‘civilized’ kinds of fears give us modern day philosophies like both Vegetarianism, and the Carnivore Diet.

And other cults and religions …

Cooking itself though, is a pre-civilized art. According to the video, we’ve been practicing it for a very long time, on the order of a million years, even before we had the honor of calling ourselves H. sapiens.

To never
or almost never
find myself in a place or situation
where I can’t just whip it out and piss
if that’s what my body in the moment
needs to do

***

By any humane standard, taking into account all of primate history, anyone shocked or distressed or offended by the sight of a breast, or pussy, or penis is literally out of their god damn minds.

So: pretty much everybody we know.

And: Teaching children that these sights can harm them somehow?

A pedagogy of the criminally insane. You’re teaching them to be crazy too.

“Public” pissing is literally a sanctioned crime. Why? You tell me.

We live in a world that is truly mad, by these and many other metrics.

The sheer number of mental patients, some equipped with badges and guns, makes it dangerous to live as if we were free creatures, much less appropriately wild animals.

One more reason to stay out of their field of vision as much as possible.

One more reason to treat walking into the public eye as an expedition that must be carefully prepared for, mentally as well as physically.

To get the hell out, and stay the hell out, of their mad way, except when necessary for research, or to purchase avocados.

I was asked to keep this confidential

My title above does not consist of my words.

Nor are they the words of Sabine, who created the video.

They are the opinion of someone who wrote her, begging her to not tell the truth, because truth-telling might go badly for assorted obedient idiots who have mortgages and kids to put through school.

This is how the System works.

I don’t think you’d want to be part of it if you thought you had any option.

And …

You do.

Or to put it a different way:

“It is better to starve to death in a calm and confident state of mind, than to live anxiously amidst abundance.”

–Epictetus

If you were to take Stoicism seriously, you would take this Stoic proverb seriously too: You would live and believe as if it were literally true.

But in the meantime I offer this, as an alternative .

The Liberating Truths of Anarchism, Atheism, and Nihilism (ASMR)

Truthfully … I could only get through the first half hour of it before the digressive clauses and rambling knifed my patience. But that was enough. It’s a good insight.

No god.

No master.

No nothin’.

I could write for quite a while on what each of the pieces really means, and how they fit almost seamlessly together, and in fact I have been doing so, just … inside my own head, rather than here.

Maybe I’ll put it down. On the page. Down like a rabid skunk.

Or maybe I’ll glance off it like a marble in zero G.

Either way it’s okay, because there ain’t

No rules

neither.

***

The distance to the Moon is about 240,000 miles, which is a little hard to imagine, but you can do it. Forty or fifty round trips from New York to LA, right?

To the Sun, it’s 93 million. Eight minutes at the speed of light.

Don’t know about you, but I cannot relate.

How many miles to the next closest star?

Proxima Centauri is about 25 trillion miles from here.

It’s not a distance the brain of a mammal can easily apprehend.

And that’s just the closest one.

According to the esteemed NPR itself …

If you buy or get flowers for the holiday, there is a very good chance that they will come from Colombia, and a further decent chance that they were grown on an illegally ripped up and ruined chunk of Colombian Cloud Forest.

Outlaw local capitalists just trying to keep their families fed. Multinational corporations coordinating 500 planeloads of floral joy each year for the festival of the pink hearts.

I don’t repeat this story to be a killjoy, or unromantic. I’m just staying on topic for another day.

Point is, to be blessed with living the American way of life, and having the associated standard of living, is of necessity to be oblivious about the murderous damage that routinely does, and to be privileged to not have to think about it, in a thousand different invisible and insidious ways.

You Celebrate this holiday or that in the way you are culturally conditioned to do so.

And every other day of the year too.

Sending the flowers and being warmed by your own loving intentions when doing so does not automatically equal qualifying as a truly Loving Person, in the end.

Just as crusading globally with these or those Good intentions (liberty, equality, democracy, Success!) doesn’t make your country and its shared culture … Good.

Internally, I’ve thrown up my hands in despair for the most part about the utility of shrieking about politics–the day to day kind, the red and blue kind.

It’s all ‘good’ fun to watch the debates and vote and boo and cheer and post our bitchy little comments on social or antisocial media, and root for this corporation or that one.

Oh that Orange devil, look what he’s done now.

He’s certainly not America!

But of course, neither were drooling Joe or his diverse henchperson, babe.

No, America is you and me.

Buying flowers online in that sentimental way, and turning a blind eye to the bulldozed forests and the dead parrots, the buffalo and passenger pigeons, the human beings that our acts of Love, or savvy, leave in their wake. And feeling all Right about it.

Or: spending our mental lives and spiritual bandwidth recycling, and trying to spend with a conscience.

And feeling all Right about that.

***

I know that you’re never going to engage with me seriously about alternatives, in part because you don’t think you need an alternative.

I know what you think anyway, about that guy living in the park I’ve been flagwaving for, or the other losers, living in a van down by the river, Haw!

And yeah, about me too.

How am I? Kinda sad and resigned about that, on some level down deep. Not, I hope, out of any self-pity.

About the whole very civilized mess, about its impending death anyway, about the fact that the horror of a family Monopoly game is only a pale metaphor for our very real and quite broken dynamic, interpersonally and internationally.

I have done all that I could?

To see the evil and the good without hiding. You must help me if you can. Doctor,
my eyes:

Tell me what is wrong …
Was I unwise
to leave them
open for so long?

As I have wandered through this world, and as each moment has unfurled
I’ve been waiting to awaken from these dreams.

People go just where they will.

I never noticed them until I got this feeling
that it’s later than it seems.

***

May you have an intimate and warmly venereal pagan day, in spite of everything.

That ‘ugly’ video only came out in the last couple of days, and it was truly brilliant.

Crystallizing for me.

The guy who put it out is called Moon-Real, or just Moon.

After I got done springboarding off that brilliance, I hit his channel to try to find more of it.

What I found instead was: He’s built up a million and a half subscribers over four years. But apparently, in spite of the arc of success, he’s only now just coming into his own about what all his own content really implies.

In other words, and for now, there wasn’t much of value for me.

Here’s one fun one: When Saul Goodman Realizes Society is a Lie

And another, unwatched by me but with a title that might grab you: Why is San Francisco So Rich Yet So Broken?

But: No Guru.

But: I still have Rob Greenfield drip-feeding me wisdom.

And: A bunch of others, unlisted here, reminding me again because I need it, of the central significance of coziness, as a mechanism for pushing away ugliness hard enough and long enough to want to go on living and perhaps even daring to thrive, in spite of it.

The Uglification of the World

A short smart brilliantly obvious essay on why and how our world got to be so ugly.

First and primarily, the answer is that uglification is a by-product of Americanization.

Toward the beginning, there’s an appropriately brief acknowledgement of the nominally positive concepts and themes the America could have and perhaps did at times, stand for: liberty and equality first and foremost.

But then there is the waking nightmare of how Ugly got to be the Reality.

Modernism. Colonialism. Globalization.

The virtualization of Community, a phenomenon that has exploded with technologies like social media, and omnipresent smartphones.

Leading to increasing surveillance on the one hand and censorship on the other.

Capitalism, perhaps most of all.

And the weird reactive flavors of it that happened in places like Soviet Russia, and now China.

Notions of Property and Ownership themselves.

America stripped its own ecosystems and populations bare, and went forth across the world, sometimes enforcing its own profit and ideologies with hard power. (“Making the world safe for Democracy.”)

But all the different cultural forms of soft power were far more insidious and effective in making the planet what it is today.

And now, when even that was not enough to satisfy the appetites of Moloch, America began to eat itself from the inside.

How The USA Is Destroying Itself From Within

In the comments section of the Ugly video, someone says:

“It’s not Americanization. It’s the Corporatization.”

And in turn I say to you, fellow toxified virtual citizen: You’re missing the point.

What we label it doesn’t matter much.

If you want to keep thanking the troops and waving Old Glory and believing the big lie, retrospectively worshiping the Founding Fathers, or the Greatest Generation, while putting the blame for the disaster that is your world on Corporations, well, fine … you’re not wrong.

Just foolishly limited in how you’re thinking about this place and what we’ve been doing to it all your life and all of mine.

And if you want to try and convince me, or yourself, that what “We” stand for is still mostly Good and Right, at least on the blue side of the captured aisle, you can waste your time thus, sure.

Just don’t expect me for one minute to buy that shit like a good cultist, or consumer.

To join you in your addictions to prosperity and optimism.

‘Cause I was born at night, old son, but it wasn’t last night.

Well you shut your bloody mouth

How can you say?

I go about things the wrong way

{somea the time yeah}
{and so fucking what}

I am, arguably, human

and I need to be loved just like

everybody else does.

His specialty was to yell at me to stop, because I was doing It Wrong.

Her specialty was to just fret, that I would do it wrong, oh no not again, and hurt myself.

Or the plumbing.

Which, ironically, was broken from the start … though …

somehow no one ever thought to yell or worry about that. It wasn’t self-evidently herniated or ileocaecal enough, as I understand the self-justifying mythos, and so the fault became simply mine, a character flaw inherent, and just another thing we didn’t talk about.

Too shameful, yeah buddy.

I patched myself with libidinal duct tape and old introspective wire, and the patchwork is fucking ugly as Sin, but it serves the Purpose.

I grew a specific kind of orbit, around that shame. That sneaky shame.

Anyway, I’m out here attempting to de-internalize all this ancient useless shit, and, mostly …

Still doing it wrong. Occasionally, hurting myself, and having to re-heal.

But I did learn not to yell, and I am working on learning how not to worry, and I’m doin’ alright, with that. (See: How am i?)

The main thing I want to know from you is: Do you have any genuine interest in helping? (It’s another way of asking if you love me or if I can rationally dare to love you)

and

What, in your considered view, does helping even mean?

I covet your genuine help, and I am very willing to compensate you for it, by helping in return, reciprocally, or most other ways. I’m quite good at many of them, too. Expert, in a few.

But I don’t need it, not any more, to keep on abiding or existing in my patched way.

And I definitely don’t want it if it comes with strings attached–I’m thinking in particular here about the Yelling string and the Fretting string, but there are others, naturally, some of them legally binding and others more nebulously grounded in the day-to-day flavor of the relating.

I am modestly proud that, at my advanced state of decrepitude, I can at least still feel and say these quietly brutal things with calmness and clarity, in service not to the Truth, whatever that is, but just because it’s for the best.

Congratulate me.

Not for being a good feeler or a good writer or a good man or so full of something we’re gonna experimentally call Integrity.

But just for making it this far, still alive and still kicking like a mutant radioactive mule.

The Experiment of Non-Ownership – Week 1 Update

Quote: “You need to do something different maybe, I’m worried about you.”

I’m sorry to have to report to you that telling me this is a failed strategy

that will not do what you want it to do

and hearing it does not make me feel good at all.

The world might well be a better place if you and I both learned how to worry less.

Personally, I’m on it, and actively documenting my learning here.

See if you can keep me informed about your own progress, or even lack thereof

preferably without using the word ‘Trump’.

Please

and thank you.

In stock at the world-beating anaprim.com, I mean.

The current answer:

Guatemalan Huehuetenango, quantity enough to satisfy 5 bags worth of orders

Peruvian Perfiles, quantity 4

Honduran Marcala, with an added cert of Bird-Friendly from the Smithsonian, quantity 4

Peruvian Water-Process Decaf, quantity 3

Also a few scraps of the old favorites, Ethiopian Sidama and Mexican Chiapas, probably more of each on the way soon. And, one precious pound of that rare freakin’ amazing Congolese that you can have for fifty dollars and not a penny less–or just drop by and we’ll sinfully drink it up together for free.

Everything else is on sale for $20 per twelve ounces, until such time as I get my e-commerce shit together, if ever.

It’s not together, and I have no social media presence, because really I have zero interest anymore in “building a successful business”. I only do this to make you happy and to make myself happy as a result.

As always, everything is organic and fair trade and roasted by me.

I don’t ship ground coffee (unless you beg nice), and you shouldn’t want me to, because (well, ideally) you’re the kind of coffee connoisseur that grinds your own, fresh.

If $20 is still too rich for your blood–no shame–buy from EqualExchange. That’s what I used to do. It’s not as good, but acceptable, and quite a lot cheaper if you buy in mass quantities, in addition to mostly being okay in the sociopolitical arena, maybe better, because they’re a co-op and not a lone evil pretend capitalist like I am.

Hope that’s all clear and if not, you know where to find me.

Thanks for the notions, good ol’ Bob.

How to Turn a Van into a Comfortable Home for $365 | No-Build Van Life

And the rest of you too.

Bed: A ‘cot’ and layers

Bath: Jar for piss and bucket for the other.
He does mention a ‘basin’ for bathing, but says nothing about how to get water, much less hot water–an exercise for the reader perhaps. I did get a HotTap with those sweet pension funds.

Kitchen: Stove and fridge and pots and pans, et cetera. Again, the sink or place to clean them is elided. The idea about putting this stuff in a single tote for inside or outside use is a good one.

‘Living’ Room: Sitting, and surfaces, so chairs and deskage.

(and 0rganization): Cabinets, drawers, closets, duffels, totes. Windows and ‘drapes’.

The four basic food groups are not new to me. I’ve thought about allocating 100 square feet to each in the context of a tiny home, to equal the 399 sq. ft. maximum, and about ways to billow that space (like vertically, with a sleeping loft).

In the context of yesterday’s post, what we’re thinking about here is midpoints or half-steps between normal stupid first-world life and Owning Nothing. Or: providing yourself with Sanctuary wherever you are

.. alongside the flash of recent enlightenment that teaches the rather obvious-in-hindsight truth that Sanctuary ultimately isn’t a function of Stuff. Not even cool minimalist Stuff as in the gospel according to Bob.

He’s a pragmatist where I’m a visionary, roughly, but I have no intention of again falling into the trap of peddling Visions, and especially not to myself.

***

A small postscript for the person who asked me specifically about Gaza-Now.

Caitlin Johnstone speaks more eloquently than I can, for me and the other small parts of the electorate who essentially voted None of the Above.

Many years after apartheid supposedly ended in South Africa the white colonialists, 7% of the population, still ‘own’ 70% of the agricultural land.

I feel sure you can see how that capitalist and post-imperialist state of affairs might piss off 93% of The People.

To address their concerns, the democratic government there has passed a law stating that it is now empowered to seize land and redistribute it in some classically leftist fashion. Also, that they don’t even have to Compensate the landowning Afrikaners for it in any way.

I feel sure you as a fellow Owner find that wrong and egregious. (Cuz i-as-owner do too?)

Now comes the new US President suspending the flow of dollars into the country because of this radical new law.

I feel reasonably certain that will outrage you too, because, well, Truuump.

“I’m going to explain to you the true nature of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, and you will see that it is indistinguishable from the Biden administration, the first Trump administration, eight years of Obama, eight years of Bush … there is one single foreign policy because there is one single circle of special interests …”
—Berletic

A single circle, comprising, oh, about … seven percent, let’s say.

At each step, decade upon decade your whole life through, you are invited to indulge yourself in outrage or some adjacent kind of distraction, blue or red or right or left or apolitical and benign, whatever, and to vent this cope conveniently onto some social media scam, or your perfect and pristine blog, where it will collect some number of laughs and woohoos from your family, friends, and … followers.

Ultimately the point is to distract us.

From the perpetual fact that they own it all.

And the deeper truth that Ownership itself is the conceptual control mechanism they invented to make sure it stays that way forever, while we war with each other over the scraps of Property that happen to fall from their table.

The only way around the Machine is radical and arduous. Narrow, to use Christ’s word.

The Experiment of Complete Non-Ownership

Robin walked from Canada to LA and is there now, living in and around Griffith Park and planning to do so, without possessions, until April at least.

When I figured that out, my first impulse was to go there, and listen, and learn.

But then I realized that doing so would only be an attempt to own a new experience.

A self-devouring paradox going nowhere but fast, in the American tradition.

Instead I started to look around me, and to think about how the things I think I own …

Own me. Enslave me.

Yeah. I’ve joked about it often, how I’m trapped in this place by my three-hundred dollar mortgage … can’t afford to live anywhere else, right?

It seems right, but it is not.

I too could start another walk and just not stop walking this time.

Like my childhood hero Kwai Chang Caine. Like my new guru Robin.

You could too.

You won’t. I probably won’t either, in the real world, all the way, and yet …

Admitting the truth and doing it as a thought experiment has already been very empowering, in deep ways that are hard to describe.

It feels like I might start trying anyway.

But only as long as I can do it without having to own some image of myself as an an artist, heretic, belletrist, monk, or sage.

Because I am very much of a mind now to give shit away, and that kind of shit first.

To rewild in some hard non-fluffy sense.

To live anarchically without the need to own the label of anarchist.

To live like a saint without being one.

Today I think I begin at last to finally understand what I’ve always needed to.

I knew it when I was three (Yights!) and I knew it when I was 15 in the trauma fields.

Then I sort of got distracted until yesterday or the day before.

Also, I got some basic insta retread libby links passed to me today via fam, via text.

I responded minimally in that limited space, and without saying it anywhere near directly, I meant in replying to mean:

Your Robert Reich is not the answer, sister, not even ballpark. Not Noam Chomsky; not even a Finklestein or a Hedges himself are the answer, neither and no.

Tomorrow I will try and tell you who does have it.

I told you already but you got distracted too
and under the circumstances I can hardly
fault you for that, now

can I?

It’s never been a question I liked to hear, or felt competent to answer. That is especially true today. I’m inclined to reply elliptically, maybe by answering a different one, in spite of the fact that I’m not sure what that different one might be yet exactly

jail exactly. Alas

If you have to ask, then the odds are that I won’t have a good way to explain.

The chakra bowls didn’t do as much as I had hoped. (See also: “a small farm or ranch”, American Spanish, from Quechua chakhra.)

The Blanket app is working though, in a treat-the-symptoms fashion.

If I ever do get enlightened enough to own nothing, then the very last and very hardest thing I will give away ownership of will be called: Peace and Quiet.

Until then the raging of a metafictional storm will have to do.

On the related subject of how-art-thee, I would tend to agree with that opining about there being nothing Wrong with you, with the sole exception being that you are, of late, just a speck too Normal for my taste.

But my tasting buds are pretty trash, and I feel it probable that in the eyes of some theoretical and nominal Higher power, you are likely just a few clicks north-northeast of canonical human perfection, and Rightness.

8 Chakras Sound Bath || 70Hz Grounding Earth Frequency | Singing Bowls

***

Quaere: Who are you and what have you done with my husband?

Short answer: I don’t know and I dindo-nuffin.

Slightly longer hypothesis: A hot shower, which I have, is a profound luxury as it turns out. A clawfoot bathtub, which I don’t, would be pure Decadence.

So, for the first time in my life, I’m considering the possibility that I’m actually glad I don’t have one.

And that feeling, hands-down, beats the everloving hell out of pouting and scheming and feeling bad in various ways about not-having, and I mean not-having the bathtub of course, but also and maybe anything.

Life at the end of Empire is genuinely crazymaking for all of us.

There are paths around that mad fact. You might not like the ways, but they do exist.

First you have to know and feel, that the land you say you own, or exclusively rent, is stolen land, and that a lot of people died so that you could be that owner. They were killed, for the land you and I now say we own.

They were murdered, for your comfort and privacy.

The same is true of any property. All property is Theft, as Proudhon said.

And that’s especially true of any money you or I say we own.

But … but … I worked hard for it!

No doubt that’s true. You may have even murdered parts of yourself, for the privilege of having the things, in addition to working to … earn them.

Either way, the truth of your hard work doesn’t change those other less pleasant truths.

Knowing and feeling all of them is the first step on the road to less crazy.

The prediction of 70 degrees came true, and so I wandered the outback for three hours, and realized that I have another alternative for getting there: I mean the bike.

There is plenty of footage. I may use a few scraps of it.

***

About this monk.

He says that his favorite movie is Forrest Gump, and I find that appalling.

He says that he wants to be a Leader, and to Master his own mind, and I think that these linguistic formulations are counterproductive at best.

Nitpickery aside, I agree with everything he says, and I suggest to you that he’s a better man than either of us, because he’s walking the talk, literally as well as metaphorically.

I wonder if his mother would disagree with that, and want him to settle down.

I am happy, that there are half a million people in this world that are interested enough in what he’s doing to have subscribed to his YT channel.

And that I am now one of them.

The Experiment of Complete Non-Ownership

What I Eat in a Day on a 1,600 Mile Walk

My Natural Personal Hygiene and Preventative Healthcare Practice

What Do I Do When I Have to Go Poop? And Other Vulnerable Sharings

Am I Losing My Mind?

Truth Talk: “The Experiment of Non-Ownership in Depth”

One post and only one, per day, for a month running.

The February bills are paid.

Even if the dues are not.

Could be worse.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/straighten-not-121229213

The next two days are just going to consist of getting through.

But oh, Saturday, and its promise of 67.

***

The three meanings, in our tongue, of spir-.

1: From PIE sperieh, turn, twist, wind
and the Greek speira, a winding, a coil, a twist, a wreath
thus: spiral

2: From PIE spei, sharp point
via the Old English spir, sprout or shoot of a plant, spike, blade, stalk of grass
thus, spire, verb, to send up shoots, germinate, sprout
and spire, noun, to extend to a height (in the manner of a spire), to rise aloft

and 3: From PIE (s)peis, to blow
via the Latin spirare, to breathe
thus, spirit–the animating or vital principle in man and animals, and
life itself

***

Some spirits spike sometimes, and some twist and wind, others.

All spirits are holy, Espíritu Santo, because life is … sacred.

From this formulation we are most of the way already to seintuarie,

Sanctuary.

How a Chinese AI Disrupted America’s Tech Titans Overnight| Vantage with Palki Sharma

One version of the story we are all supposed to care about right now.

Another, nominally better:

Chinese DeepSeek AI System Just CRUSHED American AI Market & It’s FREE!

I went out looking, trying to find out what good this or any (worse, american) AI is supposed to do for me.

I found things like: well, it can build you a bunch of meta and hash tags that will ramp up your SEO.

Yeah.

I don’t care.

In the past, I’ve used image AI to build thumbnails for my videos. It was fine. I stopped.

Nowadays, deepl.com works better for quick translations than the traditional google product.

But beyond that, and so far, I don’t get it at all.

And of course, there is a downside.

The Next 3 Years of AI: Why Even Experts Are Terrified

I refuse to be terrified. About that.

Skynet’s gonna Skynet, I guess. The terrors we have now, in Gaza and Flint and the place where I walk past the dead couches, these are plenty of terror to fill my plate bounteously.

I don’t feel a compulsion toward having any form of AI in my life, for the same reasons I don’t want anything to do with social media of any stripe, even the fancy new chinese rednote.

I lived the first 35+ years of my life one hundred percent non-digitally. I read a lot, I wrote a lot. I listened to the NPR and I made my own NPR.

Then for 25+ more years, I played with the new tools and toys, and curated out a few that work, sorta. This self-hosted WordPress platform. Patreon and Shopify and the almost-necessary evil that is googletube. I have two phones, and they are both allegedly smart, and it was stupid of me to go in that direction for the sake of text messaging.

I dream of having only a landline. But my dream doesn’t end there.

There is a cabin on the edge of the world. It is disconnected.

Not just from the Digital either.

There is no thermostat, and if I am cold I burn wood, and make a pot of something on the same stove.

If I need to shit I squat over a pit.

If I am thirsty … well, fuck. You and I ruined all the creeks, with our civilized modern Lifestyles.

Maybe a well, or a spring, or a trailer with a Navajo tank on it for hauling in the stuff of life.

Details, to hell with them right now. I’m trying to tell-a-Vision.

On some level it’s scary to think about being that unhooked.

But mostly, that’s a junkie’s fear.

That time Theia crashed into Gaia and bore Selene.

If she hadn’t we probably would never have existed.

Please honey don’t break my heart

The video in question

Just … thanks again, Brian.

“Epictetus believed that happiness and inner peace are entirely within our power, but sometimes hit shore don’t seem that way ennit.

Anyway it’s a starting point. Once again we are thus indebted to the Einzelgänger

who (nevertheless) goes on to note:

From that point forward, I think you might be able to see why I entertain doubts about the ultimate utility of this philosophy you have on offer.

Just as I am able to see why you might be dubious about my Diogenes-leaning and more anarchic spin on it.

See also: “aligned with Nature”, and what that might really mean, or could possibly mean

within the capitalist

Anthropocene.

***

Maybe you know the names, or maybe not.

Team One: Bret Weinstein, public intellectual, and Walter Kirn, novelist

Team Two: Whitney Webb and Jeremy Loffredo, journalists of a sort

All of them have pretty good hard-left credentials, but the teams are engaged in a bitter hot twitter shooting war, a barn-burning tempest in a rhetorical teapot.

Whitney Webb Triggers Weinstein Tantrum With Facts

That which is being debated isn’t very interesting or important.

The analysis offered by DD in the video is, at least to me.

… because once upon a time, it seemed as though making professional-level money by becoming some kind of ‘content creator’ was a sure-fire way to maintain ones integrity and live truly free.

I’m rather convinced now that it’s not all that straightforward or simple–not just because of this example, either. Some of those video-game essayists I’ve been watching avidly make some of the same points about the world of game reviewing.

As creators of content we are, it turns out, very much at the mercy of those who watch and support us, in nebulous but nevertheless concrete ways.

Fortunately or not, I’ve never yet made any serious money from this. So theoretically, my motivations can still remain Pure.

There are about three or four people in my audience regularly, according to Jetpack and YouTube analytics. Similar numbers over there at Patreon, where all of the actual support comes from. And critically, there is some overlap between audience and supporters, but not complete congruous 1:1 overlap.

The Lord, she moves, in mysterious ways. I don’t even pretend to understand things like the Unholy Algorithm, and I have zero interest in trying to fatten up my bottom line by clever use of the plague known as social media.

In part, throwing down that first job application was an admission of failure, or … if not quite that, at least … resignation, to the facts about how this world works, whether online or in the meatspace world of allegedly real jobs.

I tried like hell to bargain with the devil. It didn’t work out.

I do have a roof, nevertheless, and if I go hungry it’s because I choose to.

That much, and a pickup truck and a camp trailer, and the freedom to say whatever the hell I want to say …

Is enough for me, six days out of seven.

i know all about it
so you don’t have to shout it

i’m gonna straighten it out
somehow

yeah
I want to do right

but not right
now

***

“Tahiti people say:
‘you eat life
or life eat you'”.

–the character portraying the real-life woman called Maimiti

Mutiny on the Bounty, 1962

At some point I was motivated to paraphrase the Henry Chinaski character in Barfly.

“No, I don’t hate people. I just seem to feel better, when they’re not around.”

And she said: “Lol. Most people but thankfully not all.”

And I didn’t know what to honestly say to that without sounding completely psychotic, so …

I opted once more for silence instead.

This post means: definitely a me problem; nothing personal.

; )

I was born in an age without video games. I played Pong in my twenties maybe, and spent too many quarters at arcades, but the first time I ever got down and dirty with a real video game in the modern sense, I was about 35.

It was called Civilization 2, and as things turned out, it was a pretty good simulator of the real world, in my empire, in my lifetime.

The Imperial Dilemma of Civilization

I know you’re not going to burn two hours on that video essay like I did, but let me just share a list of keywords or topics from it, which I scribbled down while multitasking and listening to it:

Civilization, of course …
Imperialism
Capitalism
Colonization (and ‘pioneering’, etc.)
Nationalism
and most importantly of all:

Progress.

In the years since 35, I haven’t played many more titles, and most of the ones I have played were variations on the theme of Civ 2. And in fact, the only game I still sometimes play is, arguably, its closest relative. It’s called Alpha Centauri. The single most notable difference between it and its civ-sib is that it doesn’t play out on Earth, but on the first other planet humankind is supposed, in the conceit of the franchise, to have … colonized. In “The Future”.

The reason I still play that one singular game once in a while is simply that:

Alpha Centauri is NOT Civilization in space

And that, for now,
is all I gotta say

about that.

Images. Left to speak for themselves while I take care of some bidness.

Jefe says: Nobody goes hungry, not in my camp, and that feel should, in my tergiversating opinion, grant a blessing of a lesson to us all.

A Conscientious Observer says:

One day, Jimmy Carter’s mother Lillian, was being interviewed by a reporter.
Hoping for a gotcha, the reporter asked Does your son ever tell a lie?
Lil replied Well, I imagine sometimes he’ll tell a little white lie.
The reporter pressed on. ‘ What’s your definition of a white lie?’
Mrs. Carter replied Well, when I answered the door, I said it was nice to meet you.

Because I have eyes that only see colors, I don’t know if that’s a bit, or a true story.

But I can factually say that I found it in the comments section of Dave Chapelle’s SNL monologue from this week past, and so should you.

OH and 1 more thing.

Why yes, often, I am angry, at your complacency and the unthinking stream of cliché falling heedless from your lips, trying to pass itself off as informed and productive conversation, or as enlightened, or simply as the happy banter of a kind of … celebratory intimacy.

It’s stupid to let it enrage me. But I embrace that stupidity. Stupidly.

Over and over I swallow my anger, and spit it out here instead of in your face, in this place where you can and do safely ignore it–not all of you, and not every week, but (by the cold hard numbers): Mostly. It’s quarantined.

I don’t have that luxury, face to face. So the rage comes a-spillin’ forth, over turkey …

When am I coming to see you?

When I feel my way to a solution, for all that, one that doesn’t do more harm than good.

Until then I practice my own religion as it evolves from Anarchy! to the quiet phases of the day in this town that is neither here nor there.

***

Just before that day of stuffing, your gal lost big at the polls.

Mostly: I refrained from any gloating, even here. I did do my best, to understand why.

There is new evidence that tries to address that question.

Source

So the masses abandoned, in droves, the project of senile evil you championed and clapped for, and the number one reason for that was the genocide you cheered, and dismissed as self-defense.

You don’t have to take shit from me for that. The electorate gave you a full mouthful, and months later I’m still wondering what you will have to say about that once your throat is again cleared up from it. If … you know … that ever happens.

***

All these months on, roughly the same electorate is trying to find ways around the ignorant TikTok ban, and that is having the unexpected effect of deepening their disaffection with both cheeks of the same saggy ass.

Americans SHOCKED After Flocking To (alternative) Chinese Social Media Platform!

The tldr; is that even after “winning”, the next phase in the evolution of the Zeitgeist involves their sudden realization that this isn’t a First World country any more.

A year ago, 50 percent of Murka supported the ban. Now it’s dropped to a third. So pols on either cheek are rushing to revise their public positions. None of it matters, to the lived reality of We, The People.

But maybe just maybe it will provide a further cause, for a reflective pause.

Meanwhile, forgive me if I decline to hold my breath for that.

***

Late breaking news.

Overnight, the prediction of 3 degrees above zero (likely the coldest night of the winter) has been revised to -4 below–the coldest night in many a winter.

The cats, outdoor especially, have been shoveled full of quality calories, and have shelter enough to live until dawn, with luck. Plus prayers.

As the sun sets I have three days and an evening to complete that application if I actually and truly want to complete it. Which at the moment I do, feels like.

A couple days after that deadline, there is a 50% chance of the first snow here. The weekend will be gray and an exercise in Live Through This. But if we all do, or even if not, the middle of next week is expected to herald a return to at least Mostly sunny, highs of 50, and only modest winds.

So say They.

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Time to die.

***

A year ago we had no idea such things as JMBOs could even exist.

Now we struggle dimly to somehow account for just how on earth they could.

Sandblasting? Stellar “bullying”? (God that speaks of us and our trauma, not of them.)

Photoerosion? Sure okay. I don’t know. No one knows.

(Parenthetical: link, more about Enceladus)

***

A thing we know, about what we don’t know.

If the whole electromagnetic spectrum were the size of the space between New York and LA …
then the part of the Spectrum we can see with our eyes, as colors, would be the thickness of a thread.

As the basic meat creatures we always have been, we see almost nothing, and thus, even if we religiously follow the homily about believing the evidence of our own eyes, we still know next to nothing, about the realities of our world and the universe.

There are two commonplace rejoinders to this truth.

One is the retort of the crystal-packing mamas: “Oh, but it’s not just about vision, or hearing. Secretly, we’ve got dozens of senses, including ones that are completely paranormal!”

Not a bad argument, and even right, to a point. But still.

Even granting that all those spooky senses exist … prove to me somehow that even one of them isn’t just as limited and narrow as our eyes and vision, please. Then we can talk about this … rationally.

Rejoinder two comes from … everyone. All the normies anyway. And that goes: But Science! But Progress!

And again, this is not completely without merit and validity. Radio telescopes and electron microscopes and lots of other technologies do extend the range of our ability to see, along the Spectrum.

But, but still.

I don’t have much faith in either of those abstractions, and faith is required for both, at least if they are going to be used as the basis for a system of Belief, and values, and morality, and judgments about non-concrete things like human beings and their emotions, much less what the Right Way is for them–us–to live their (our) lives.

Like whether getting a Covid shot, or not getting one, is moral or immoral.

Very like that.

I’ve been working in this factory
for nigh on fifteen years
All this time I watched my woman
drowning in a pool of tears

I’ve seen a lot of good folks die
that had a lot of bills to pay
And I’d give the shirt right off my back
if I had the guts to say

Take this job and shove it
I ain’t working here no more

The narrator never does get the nerve to say those iconic words out loud to the evil bosses. He dreams of it day and night. But it remains a silent howl of pain, and a fantasy.

It was for me too.

It’s too late for me to say them now. My wish for you is the youth, resources, and towering moral strength to actually say them out loud.

Some a’you will say something along the lines of: But … but I like my job.

And I would reply: It’s not technically impossible for that to be true.

Statistically speaking, however, you’re lying to me, and yourself, and have been taught, and then taught yourself, how to go along and get along as a happy house negro.

To look down on your brothers and sisters who work in the fields, and factories.

And to look down most of all on those who would rather live the hell out of the way and on the run, under a highway bridge, than to live your life of enslavement.

To damn them as lazy moral defectives, from the comfort of your Master’s warm kitchen, from the lofty heights of your Commander’s horse.

To me, an outlaw is a man that did things his own way, whether you like him or not.
— Johnny Paycheck

Which sounds exactly the same as the sentiments in the lyrics to “My Way” …

But honey, I’m here to testify.

It’s just not, no matter how pretty and tempting it might be to think so.

***

I hope you get out while you still can.

Not just from the hell of your owner’s corporation, but from the country he owns too.

The Delusional Policies Driving America’s Decline

Israel is in Total Disarray

In the 1950s, Paycheck was court-martialed and imprisoned for two years for assaulting a naval officer.

Maybe he smacked The Officer because he was a moral defective. Yes, may be.

I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

I’m old and I’m done with judgments.

At least about that sort of thing.

I went to my first “meeting” of any kind in years.

It was the first meeting, of a very local ‘Alliance of Charities’ that doesn’t have a real name yet. About 50 people showed up, and as you might expect, every single one of them (of .. us) was a well-meaning do-gooder of one arcane kind or another.

Afterwards, I went up to the only person I knew there, a former boss at a part-time job from 20 years ago, to get re-acquainted. (I had an ulterior, or at least non-social motive).

Once again, even in this nominally liberal setting, I was treated to an earful about Those Homeless–they’re all drunks and addicts, they’re all nuts, they don’t Want To Work.

And once again, in as sugar-coated a way as I could manage, I replied with words that meant: Fuck you. You’re talking about my family–these are the least among my brothers, so you don’t get to run your stupid mouth that way about them. Not to me. Shove your crafty secondhand homilies and your faux street-smart realpolitik. I don’t want it.

I won’t have it.

The hypocrites and moralists–I confess it–are not entirely wrong. Yeah, anyone on the street has problems, and some of those problems are disorders of character, whatever that means, or just plain flaws.

I don’t hesitate to pull my knife when one of them steps too close and violates my robust security concerns. It’s already happened once this year. If necessary, I’ll beat on them until they’re not capable of advancing further in my direction.

But I would never wag my finger at them for what they are, behind their back, or take a superior moral tone about them, like so many dipshits in this world seem so eager to do.

Because the meanest nastiest least moral drunk in the world is still quite capable of freezing to death on a winter’s night with no roof and no coat.

And if they sell their charity coat, or roof, for their next hit, I would still want them to have another, to put off the chill for one more night of life.

You’re more than entitled to feel differently.

And I am entitled to my opinion, about who you really are deep down in the end.

Bonus: where the same garbage values lead geopolitically.

Bonus: What Then, Are We To Do?

The Dark Side of Absurdism

I’m sorry to report, Senator Reed, that the best answer to your question is to demonstrate the definition, on live TV, by asking it.

Are We Actually Controlled by Mitochondria?

Or, why I spent so much money on things like cod liver oil and beet root powder.

To Be Real: Seven Desktops.

Maybe it’s a series. I’m not taking any solemn vows.

But to begin what may never end, start here.

This moon is call Enceladus, a word that takes me far back to when enchiladas, and hot springs, were very important symbolic elements for me.

The People brought their damned dogs into the holy public springs, and they became plagued with giardia. That was even before the covidian hijinks. Never goin’ back again? Well, probably not; I don’t really even like the idea of motel hot tubs any more. The point is that Enceladus has geothermal energy. Geysers shooting out from under the ice, and how can that not be still cool?

There are no dogs or human lungers in the orbit of Saturn. It will remain, for all my lifetime anyway, perfectly pristine and symbolically unreachable.

On the enchilada front I moved on to tacos I make myself, and every element they are composed of being organic, or trying to get there in lieu of being venison I shoot with a compound bow out near the grave of the child that only lived three weeks in this month of January, year of our lord 1920 A.D. when Saint Grandfather himself was only eight years old.

And I still long for a deep private tub of hot water in which to baptize myself, all over again every single day if I feel like it.

Dream on my brother, whether it ever happens for you or not, whether you ever get to trade in a Bucket of bloody gold for the myth of Silver: some things happen, and most things don’t.

The last part is this. Like I implied, the picture of geysers in space is a desktop wallpaper here on this free and open source operating system. In the FOSS world we get to have as many desktops as we want, and to name them: suck on that, you gimped and walled garden of an iOS.

This one, the first one, is called, by me: 0steer.

It’s holds the app for the VPN. Another one just called Notes, which I use as a steering scratchpad–sometimes amplified by Zettlr.

And the Tor Browser open to the local weather for today and tomorrow and the fortnight to come, because it’s really important right now to my spiritual stability to be able to get at least an hour-long scrap of winter sun most days, even if a girl in trouble is a temporary thing.

Please remind him

We have to allow for the possibility that no one else sees it because: it isn’t there,
and also feel the deep satisfaction and pride that comes from hitting it anyway.

and not let any of that distract us from the truly important question

What you gonna do when you get out of jail?

I think I might actually ‘want’ this one, in that a-job-is-a-bad-deal-no-matter-what way. 18.96 x 40 x 50 -33% = 25K/yr net.

So one year of full-time wage slavery equals freedom
from indebtedness, not counting the mortgage or that god damn student loan I will never pay back if I can help it. Plus a little left over to start on the Turtleshell Project, even a trailer besides, and replacing an engine, transmission, transfer case. All of which is more important than ever making it back to Silver in style, even though that’d be nice too.

Selling off a year. Or two …

Closing date is twelve days from now.

I was wrong, about the Katana seeds from the Congo. Even though the roast aroma was unimpressive, once in the cup, they are a revelation of eye-opening deliciousness.

The reveal comes too late, because Maria’s only had a very small amount to begin with, and isn’t selling more, this growing season at the least. There is only what’s left of the test pound I’m drinking, plus one precious more that I would be willing to part with, but not for less than fifty bucks. Minimum.

Learning: first of all, extremely light roasts are definitely The Way forward. Let them ease into first crack and then go straight to the cooling.

Secondly, no final judgments, until the creamy taste is on my lips.

And third, this is now a standard that everything else must live up to, to make it onto my product list going forward.

***

FEMA Shelter Assistance To EXPIRE For 3,500 NC Households

Living in one’s truck should never be the only option in a great-again land.

Being well-prepared to do it comfortably even at fifteen degrees should always be one (normally, of two), and that is a kind of truth that gives me purpose this morning in my very own transformation village.

For the day, as the quoted victim says, that “all my friends are long gone”, or sitting in a line of cars a mile long, hoping for enough propane to keep the death chill away another day.

***

Oly Jesus, Don, you are SO VERY CLOSE to getting it, when you call the border with Canada an “artificially drawn line“.

Now just realize the same is true of that other border you’re famous for trying to close down …

and every other border ever, from the Sonoran Desert and Palestine, to the one that ran right through Berlin.

***

And finally, the quote of the year, hands-down and already:

“All of this can be found, at U. R. L.”

Maybe just maybe, the puppets of the evil ones, the stooges that my former audience used to insist I must keep voting for, for voting’s sake, are simply too mortally stupid to care, about you or me or anything.

And all those people standing around her moping through the inanity?

They’re jus’ doing their jobs, man, and …

that means that sadly, they and we get exactly the democracy we deserve.

The conversation with Monica has a hundred views
At least three or four of them are mine
And … I haven’t even seen the whole thing to the end.

It’s incredibly rich and dense and I’ll keep going back until I feel all of it.

Meanwhile in the theoretically real world, this may be the worst of times, because on top of the deep chill and the snow lingering just up the hill over the horizon line, it is gray again.

I study the lore of the bride of Chaotica and I ready myself for the temperatures to plunge beneath that threshold of ten degrees Fahrenheit.

Sometimes cathair gets into my mouse again and trips, and sometimes those mistakes are fortuitous.

In the time of the other solstice, the main thing is barely enough light to see steps by, no more, and not enough to produce any sweat. Hit the ground at the first crepuscular hint of the solar return, then.

Here on this side its all flipped. The more sun the better the hotter, and driving to the farpoint before going pedestrian is almost mandatory to keep away from other eyes.

***
One way to tell if your cult leader is lying to you. (There are other methods that drop in from above.)

The Wrong Way to Rewild; I love this shit and nominate PMB for President of my own Heaven’s Gate, and Monica in place of Walz. (Is this relationship between us parasitic, or a mutualism? Is there even a difference, or is it really only a distinction?)

Fifty percent of all human consumed calories come from wheat, corn, and rice. Eighty percent of the total come from just eight species altogether (taters. soy, et cetera–the carbs again). Of course that’s wrong, and harmful, and twists everything else, and you don’t even have to be smart, to see that as obvious. The scarecrow in the big ag field is the apotheosis and avatar of the capitalist satan, and so it is in any vast rice paddy no matter how socialist or fair trade or communal it may seem to be.

***

I tested the Congolese Katana and the results were Nicaraguan.

All that remains is the variations on the theme of Chiapas, a strange little Guat Robusta, and one potential African from the Horn, which I tend to favor, but I alone.

It takes a lot of time, this testing, alongside the amount it takes to keep the stove pristine and the powder jars dryly filled.

I count it all as just on the side of worth it: Life.

Greenland, Canada, the Canal, it’s all too easy. Low hangin’ pomegranates. Juiceless.

Je suis réservé. Rather behold, my beautiful new mind and life.

I have reservations too, about implicitly celebrating the ruin and the damage, about why I might be drawn to pictures of dead couches or scrap metal or defunct railroad crossings.

I think the answer has something to do with the fact that … these things are simply what is There, in the places where people are almost completely not any more.

As I pushed on past the graves and the old new house, the evidence of ruination faded, except maybe for an excess of old crumbly dry cow shit.

The absence of the evidence was very welcome.

I don’t want to walk anywhere but way out there right now.

I don’t want to walk at all, really, in temperatures hovering at fifty degrees max.

But it is good for me in more than one way, and the predicted lack of cloud makes the reservations less powerful.

Almost to the point of overcoming.

Whether I overcome, on any given day, is a blessed mystery that unfolds itself.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ideation

It’s a perfectly serviceable tool of language
with the potential to be useful for many things
so why in this time and place and culture
is it almost always prefaced by a word that means

the end

Ancho is just dried poblano, according to the smiling expert at Villa Cocina …
and not to be confused with arbol.

You broke down and let me in-
-made me see where. I. been.

She don’t know what it means to win …
Come down … and see. me. again

Been down, 1 time
Been down, 2 times
Never going back
again

***

You can’t go down on the same anything twice, but going down for the third time, at least I know … what it’s not.

Even though the conceit of it has been ‘Daily’, it’s not a diario, in part because the teenage-girl baggage that has accumulated around that makes it uselessly misleading as a descriptor.

It’s not a blog. That one is a contraction of web-log, and the original meaning there was: Look, here’s where I’ve surfed on the dubya dubya dubya and here’s some of my thoughts about those places and the ideas found there … The Spill has actually been at its worst when following that approach. Not to say that whatever succeeds the Spill will never link out or anything, but based on the history, the less of that the better.

The common word that fits least badly is probably: journal. It doesn’t satisfy me much better even so. The best part of it comes by association with newspapers, but this ain’t journal-ism either. At best then, Journal is a semantic cul-de-sac.

What it is, is more obscured by various breeds of rhetorical fog.

I have some words and parts of words that are trying to sort themselves into coherence and clarity and … something akin to impactfulness though that is barely any kind of respectable word itself.

It’s a spir- at least for sure.

If I had an audience it might’ve evolved into a conspiracy. I performed CPR on that concept for some months, and only achieved breaking several ribs on a corpse.

Also, it’s winter now and things are slow and gelid.

Angelid.

i think the reason i have no honest desire to go back to Chicago again

is that marriage is an Institution, and i don’t want to live Institutionalized myself

much less spend a pile of money i don’t have Celebrating it

there are fish shoulders right here to roast fry and that much i can afford

and i’m well aware that the institution joke is not even original

but it works for me regardless

i got a Shell god dammit, and it was free but for the cost of mighty labors
just like all of life and just like every decision that shapes our lives
every choice of which road to trip or not
(regardless who do you thinks gonna even read about a turtleshell)

i am not a dependent charity tortoise

i am a free anarch and liony among men and wimmenz alike

temporarily alive

conditionally autonomous

neither emancipated nor enslaved and in love with walking that very edge

while it lasts

which ain’t all that long now

if we ain’t too scared about the future

look out, Spike

it’s something to olvidé and remember at the same time.

***

Tonight in the great land of America, 150,000 children will sleep without shelter, aka “be homeless”. That’s just the number for the kids alone.

But the Rose Bowl is on, and Matt’s Offroad Recovery has a new episode, so we got that going for us ayyy?

A poem in one line

olvidé ser claro, dulces sueños mi querida

them that will never read it here …
(no one, no one i called back knew a thing, about the Shell)

can just do It there
do that
i dunno
whatever-It-is they’re doin’

Know what I mean? celebrating they say and i say

wooHoo!
uh yeahuh

They will tell you you can’t sleep alone, or Pick your Family.
Fuck it, I challenge all the other easy assumptions. Why not add that one to the pile? and god damn isn’t her whole sermon that I had a choice at the time?

Hot off the presses: Yes I did, and I made it, back then.
And I am such a genius that I can make it all over again every single day if I feel like it.

The poetistic part is that mi querida here is both a cat and a lover who lost her cat.

It also means:

Been attending to that party less and less anyway
I think I’m pretty much done with it for good

So do me a solid baby and let me know
If there’s something I need to pay attention to there

if you would, like that policy we had
when i blocked that guy that time y’know

i don’t give a shit about birthdays, I know when the important ones are
thanks

For that
For being what’s left of my readership
For being a good mom to the Buddhacat
For the memories

***

another cool thing about it is that in English, it rhymes

Like the towers falling down
Like a bomb blast in your town
Like a hostage tied in chains
I could not forget your name

Destroy she said

Detruire dit elle

Destroy, she said
my love again
the end will come quickly
Don’t try again to make amends

you’ll just end up sinking
If you explode in aftermath
don’t think you’ve been dreaming
Destroy, she said

my love again when it’s
not worth keeping

Like a helicopter crash
Like a ghetto that’s been smashed
Like bodies on a battlefield
I can’t live with how you feel

Alone and not apart
You finished what you could not start
In the corners of the day
you catch my eye and then look away

What a generous remark you made
when you blew it all away

***

Apple SUED by Congo Over Alleged CONFLICT MINERAL Exploitation

Brightness.

I roasted a shoulder that used to belong to a big hog, turned it into pure chili verde, and have been indulging myself in eating it and only it, unadulterated by even so much as a tortilla. Just straight out of the crock, sufficient unto itself, sinful delicious and satisfying.

Then I walked and even filmed a little.

Darkness.

Google Is Reading Your Email … It Knows & SELLS Everything About You

The headline makes it sound bad. But the fourteen minutes of the actual video will teach you that it’s actually far, far worse.

If, that is, you are ready to learn, or even give the smallest shit about what you actively permit them to do to your heart and brain.

as it was in the beginning
so shallot be in the end

since filth and entropy are everywhere
i mean, it blows in on the very wind
then and so the work of consciousness
becomes holding it at bay, at a line called frontdoor

first you must engineer access to clearwater
(there is no clear water in the creek no more
:filth won the culture wars) and next, a way of warming
or boiling it up with sun or the blood of dinosauruses

there are okay ways and better ways
there are major appliances + mere pots

and this is how i fail to celebrate
the lie that they call newYear holiday
i’m not online now but there’s no cause for
worry unless you enjoy that sort of thing

still deep in
the solstice fog
gone fishin
back soon

Yesterday was Friday. Before it happened, I finally got the perfect night’s sleep again. That’s roughly eight hours between roughly nine at night and five in the morning.

Then I worked steady and hard all day, and went to bed again at 9 PM again, tossing down a little magnesium to make sure I stayed on track. Couldn’a been better or more virtuous or more promoting of all that is healthful and right.

But after three hours I woke up anyway. It’s a little after 1 AM on Saturday. I’m at the keyboard when I’m Supposed To Be Sleeping.

The temptation is to feel frustrated, and honestly I am, but honestly just a little.

I might blame getting old some.

I might blame myself, for not perfectly observing the ‘no eating in a three hour window before bedtime’ rule.

But …

I also realize that the main reason to blame at all, or to feel frustrated, is Habit.

“I’m going to be a mess at work tomorrow”. The chant of the wage slave.

But I’m not a wage slave anymore. so it’s not really and truly that big of a deal, unless I let it be–Habitually.

Instead I get up, with a minimum of fluster.

I turn to tell you this story, and brew a pot of perfect peruvian decaf, and remain alert to signs that my body and brain will be willing to take a nap, say between four and seven in the near future.

Keeping on schedule more or less.

Or … not.

Maybe I’ll stay up again until 20 hours from now, groggy toward the end of it, and nail the ideal bedtime yet again for another try.

Maybe the theoretical nap will be later, and shorter.

***

At some point in the three hours, I dreamed of fighting my father again, only this time I did not beat him to literal death as I did in the last such dream.

I just parried him to a draw.

Awake now, I am considering that maybe he, and other dead people like him, are my only real and true audience after ten years of this practice.

Or, in parallel, that I myself am a gaistijaną.

***

Then when I was waking I was thinking about major appliances.

Throughout most of civilized history, Owning A Dishwasher meant owning a person (or at the very least paying them wages to dishwash, which is pretty close to the same thing in terms of economic theory).

Nowadays a ‘dishwasher’ is an expensive appliance, though that doesn’t stop the most morally lost of us from hiring people to load, run, and unload our dishwashing machines.

I don’t own either kind and I don’t want to; I wouldn’t even if I too was loaded.

In some weird anarch-ronistic way, I want and need to wash my own dishes, regardless of how much money I have or will ever have.

***

Sinks, therefore, are the most important and essential of the modern appliances.

Alongside a water heater. Hardly any practical way of getting around it.

Followed closely by the other big food ones, the fridge and the stove. (In some idealized world, a garden and a pasture and [let’s face it] an abattoir.

Then out past doing your own food, there’s the furnace, a convenient way to avoid freezing to death. (AC, on top of the HV, if you live somewhere you shouldn’t.)

And a tub, and/or shower, kind of an almost-essential.

Way down the list there are optional conveniences: washer, dryer, toilet, and so on to the minor appliances: “coffee maker” (please don’t fucking keurig ever), grinder, roaster … uh, “Ninja Foodie”.

However long or short your own list of Necessaries is here, there’s a tremendous amount of work involved in maintaining them and using them, every day of allegedly civilized life, yours and mine both, in varying degrees.

There’s a lot more to say about it all.

But I’m not saying it right now; in part because Who Do You Thinks Gonna Care?

and I have other fish to fry

What I’m watching in lieu of politics, mostly, during the solstice.

The Best Survival Game of All Time: A Review of The Long Dark

A good specific example episode of TLD letsPlay.

Road to 500 Days – Part 22: Ptarmigans

guess i cared for whatever reason about what you think/say at one time
but unmercifully and relentlessly you beat that caring out of me
one rabbit pellet triviality after another One
half-baked truism and a doz’en clam refusals-to-even-engage on the side
…
today with my time running out i’m not deeply/particularly interested no
mo’ in that shit / in your sallow and compromised opinions and worldview*

however
i can’t say
the same
about Monica’s

***
*(vide:
them homeless they don’t really want to work now do they
and
dem serial killer colonials have a right don’t they hurp to defend demselfs
or, simply:
Murka fuck yeah baby ty for yr service)

i am an autristic

and
for the most part / on most days that is all i ever am

episodically : as ‘necessary’ : i morphwalk toward
husband son brother catdaddy for visits holidays

but not friend nor colleague
neither innamorato nor citizen

titular neologism meaning both
artist, if you’re on team, and spergy, if-u-ain’t

leaving it up to your opinion
to define me for yourself either way

and still be
accurate enough

to satisfy
the opinion of the i that am

***
***

The Ever-Popular Tormented Shaman Effect
variations on a theme by Rundgren
******

You’ve got something that’s a secret to the average eye
been saving what nobody’s seen in your Hideaway

I can’t stand another second in this tinker-toy empire
bless me with your direction

***

In the back of my head there is doubt, suspicion
with my latest fascination
I should trust myself, should beware of this, but
it’s like the Stranger’s kiss no man can resist

***

It seems like trouble so you hide,
keep it bottled up inside
til its too late and
you track down the tears that don’t rhyme

***

I stand behind every word I said
It takes a special thing to make her stay
I was convinced I’d found the Way
Now I can’t believe it’s happened to me cuz

there goes my bay … bay

***

All I need is your whispered Hello (it’s me)
your gin-soaked smile melting the snow queen
Memphis hazel eyes that are deeper than time
Give me your love before mine fades to dust i guess

***

I am the Emperor of the Universalizing High Way
(Where’d you ever find that ancient gas sucking pig of a truck?)
Chino Valley. This time my friend, you are outclassed
(Any real man would drive a stick and shift)

That stings but my uncle is the Duke of Highway Patrols
(Cut me off again and I will punch your headlights out)
And he will place his Royal Boot upon your aaasss
(This is my exit but on a live wire

right up off the street
you and I should meet
[another
day])

***

*I* DON”T WANT TO WORK EITHER
no sane human doz,en moralizing is shitty fooldump
Ah jus wanna bang on the belle all day, don’t
want no candy I don’need no toy, jes grab my sticks

and go out to the shed
and i pound on that drum
like it was some boss’s head
Because IIII

***

IIPIty the man scanning the pitiless sky
hunting for a sign from above to gather
never catching a glimpse of what he’s worthy of–
Don’t sit and wait for the hate world to plate you

just get a clean, white line on that motherfucker, motherfucker

and drive

***

we don’t hold the power reins own even
a horse, Somebody else greed up the control.
Mustn’t waste another hour
to get directly to the soul

the words don’t matter just feeler
deep, in the thump and spatter and
zipper blues. As you see thers
no. 1 a round

May your days

be Merry

and Bright.

And I do mean each and every one of you.

Christ and the Rubble of Palestine

I will always listen carefully and with intention when anyone speaks of the relationship between film art and the written kinds.

On an unrelated topic: Any source claiming that Stoicism is really about Having A Positive Outlook is delusional, and not any kind of veracious Answer.

But that might be okay, if the Answer is not what you’re actually after, or if, as I surmise, you already have your answer and are instead after the delicious forbidden pleasure of indulging in a confirmation bias that comports with it.

This is the answer I theorize you already think you have, and a few variations on its central theme:

If (as any of these flavors suggest) you see yourself as being … redeemed, enlightened, emancipated … free? according to the arguments of the Answer, then you are (by virtue of that answer) philosophically permitted to live in what is here being called Positivity.

That is a most enviable place to be, from the perspective of chronic irredemption and perpetual inescapable enslavement.

Mainly I think because it is so attractive, perhaps engendering a genuine charisma, and facilitating an aura of contentment, success, and health.

Yet even so.

It will never be the path I walk, nor Be a Deal I am willing to make.

Progress, whether in terms Christian or Marxist or Capitalist or whatever …

It’s still a lie
(even if I have no problem admitting that it is a very pretty one)
(even if it was told to you long ago by a well-credentialed, doubtless well-intentioned spokesliar)
(even if it looks to have been a very Rewarding one, to have Adopted as a belief
and a haunting spiritual tune about the power of positive thinking, as sung by the noted rock monster Dale Carnegie, in the bargain)
(and even if its shaking really does bring all the girls, boys, et cetera to the existential Yard).

I prefer the truth as best as it can be ascertained by all too human means, even if that truth is not pretty and smooth and a good investment, but rather expensively nasty, brutish, anarchic, and short.

And yes, that must be, I fear, my final Answer.

Thank you for providing half of the context today, for the dark blessing of that intuition, and thanks to Rosencreutz, for the other half.

Maybe it is nihilism and maybe it isn’t.

Might I suggest instead
that it is the awkward position that results
from an actual and honest form of modernized …
stoicism, let’s call it
if you see what I am meaning
or if you don’t.

Either way. Splendid.

Onward, ChristDay Soldiers, to the death of metanarrative, the question of what to do about that or any death, and the relentless reality that considering every question has a sunk cost, in terms of the expenditure of conscious time, the one precious very limited resource whose value exceeds that of money even if you are, and you are

loaded. Keep moving on down the road sunshine to your best life
with your good and kind self, and I mean it unironically, admiringly, even covetously:

but my path has been twisted and diverges, in this winter wood, this mess of pottage and
I must needs hang that left alone at Albuquirkey
to get to the place where one sole wolf learns to go on living dare I say
Hunting
beneath
the sound
of hope

Regardless.

Beautiful ennit

Rep. Kay Granger Found in Texas Memory Care After 6 Months MIA

These phrases around remembering, or not … so evocative. Poetic.

Such a symbol of democracy in decline, or something …

This afternoon I am considering to what extent this house is a memory care facility, and in what ways the art that I do here might be seen as a therapeutic modality.

The next thing is to get it to where I can drive it again, without load straps and a clenched asspucker.

The next interesting thing is to figure out how (or really even if) the back hatch and the tailgate can co-exist peacefully.

Just as with getting it all acquired and home at all, that will take far more time than I want it to, because even though I tell myself again and again that I don’t have to do anything, there are things that pretend loudly that I am wrong, here at the end of the month and year, and I have to spend hours either addressing those things effectively or handwaving them away credibly.

Not to mention the Phases of the Day which are exempt from the Anything rule.

Not to mention keeping myself holding course, just this side of what the society glibly calls sanity.

The shell was still there, on Bucket of Blood Street, for the next four or five solar returns.

Which is how long it took me to figure out how to actually acquire it.

When cyber-research led me to realize that it was exactly and precisely made for a longbed Ford like mine, back thirty-odd years ago, I quickly abandoned the idea of cutting on it.

But–no chopping?–I could not figure out any way to get it home in one piece, and certainly not all by myself, which is how all things have to be done here and now.

It didn’t take very long to realize that the only answer was: the hardest way possible.

The rooftop tent would have to come off the rack.

So that the rack could come all the way off the truck.

Making room for the shell to sit exactly where it was supposed to these past three decades.

After trying and failing to invent another way, and then groaning about the obvious state of affairs for a couple of days off and on, I got down to it.

At length, some moments after sunset, there was a happy ending.

It is still very far from a completed project.

Among other things, the stray boys and I have no clue what to do with the rack now.

Or the tent for that matter.

And by the way: at the lower left in the cat n’ rack shot, you can see the back door to the shell, also free, and filthy, but mostly intact and modestly functional.

To which

I can relate

Come the night evil, come the gray day. All ways darkest, before the full of the moon.

Friday and 13 may well have been the blackest of it, or Saturday, it all ran together.

Then Sunday, and there were five precious hours of sunny warmth. At last I walked in their honor and they in mine.

Since I was out in it anyway, I made a bridge back to myself for later and cold and wet.

This bridge is probably going to be useless, and building it a waste of effort, cuz:

1) If it’s wet enough out for the bridge to be needed, it’s probably too muddy for my liking on the other side anyway.

2) This low road walk is less than perfect, at least on days when the least hint of hiss (or any sound that says people) is enough to set my teeth on edge, and

3) This way of getting five miles in works, but involves either walking through neighborhoods, or parking the truck somewhere less than perfect.

But: I also learned that wasted effort is better than no effort at all.

And I found a vast, previously undiscovered dry duck lake, which ain’t nothin’.

In the last moments of full sun, having decided that the low road will have to live as a dead end on those sensitive days, I drove out to the other end of the wash again and ate a wicked burrito.

The other end still exists, as an option, for the times when my head isn’t right enough to just jam out the low road an call it done. Doubtless I’ll be making use of that option, in the very near term.

So I got my five in for real.

And I made sure of an option.

In between all of that there are two more little pieces to tell.

Little Piece #1 is why I was so god damned depressed for 36 or 48 hours.

Let’s get it over with as quick as possible.

“When you find a turtle on a fence post, it didn’t get there by accident.” The turtle in this case is named Syria, and the post is The American Way of Death, International Edition.

More about the everlasting fence.

More about the Domestic Edition:
FL Woman Charged w/ TERRORISM For Angry Response To Rejected Medical Claim

“A Lakeland woman was charged Tuesday after police said she ended a call to an insurance company with the words:

Delay, Deny, Depose”.

Why is that terrorism? (Besides the obvious fact that it isn’t … )

Because those three words were the same ones that were engraved into the casings of the three bullets that killed that evil fuck of a health insurance CEO.

So by uttering them, in the course of ending a phone call to Blue Cross in which she herself was having a claim denied, she became a terrorist in the eyes of the Liberty and Justice For All Crew.

The judge denied her lawyer’s request to release her on her own recognizance and set bail at One Hundred Thousand dollars. Really and Truly.

I don’t recognize this country any more, and I damn sure am done pledging my allegiance to it, or to any corporation including the one that claims to be in charge of caring for my health. These things they say routinely are all lies, and they keep coming even though everybody knows that by now.

I might not have gotten so depressed over this kind of bad news, this time, except for the days being so gray, and except for the fact that the people in the family adjacent to mine don’t think anything is wrong, either with any of what I just detailed, or with the philosophical slavery they were sold into back these forty-some years gone by.

(and why lord oh why do i still care what they think i am such a fuckin’ dumbass)

All together at once, it was just too much for me.

The nose of my plane dipped sharply and for some long moments I was seriously in danger of crashing, of Losing It. Hitting the unforgiving ground a Loser.

It’s not over, either. The dishes are still piled, and I’m still wearing the filth and the fear that coated me in the midst of all that.

Walking in the sunshine even though I didn’t want to just leveled out my descent path somewhat.

Little Piece #2 is this.

I’m not going to go into it too deeply.

I’ll just tell you that the cardboard sign you probably can’t read just says one word:

“Free”.

And that to advantage myself, theoretically, by acquiring that questionable piece of freedom, I would need, at the least, a proper circular saw.

Which of course is not free, but between 50 and 100 somewhere, per Harbor Freight.

It might be worth it anyway. Maybe.

If the shell is still there when the sun returns.

Why It’s Okay to Be a Loser

Taoist Philosophy for the Unambitious, Failures and Nobodies

The title is clickbait and the content is recycled, but …

That doesn’t mean that the Wolfman is a Loser.

I might say instead: Decide for yourself what a loser is, and whether you are one, based on the murmurings of your own best heart, rather than anything or anyone else’s.

It doesn’t matter how big a deal you are, or how much you love or are loved, conditionally or otherwise. Eventually all trace of you ever having existed, good or bad, will be gone.

Ten or a hundred or a thousand years from now, the last person who ever heard your name or looked into your soul will die, and you will die your second and utterly final death with them, no matter how many books you write or how many times you get laid. Thus I say unto what I acidly think of as my self: You don’t need to do anything.

Thus speaks the prophet:

We don’t know just where our bones will rest. To dust I guess; forgotten and absorbed into the earth below.

Underneath the guilty traffic lights of the cement town, beneath the sound of hope.

I incline toward believing it will be the same for the whole species. I’m right about that. I’m always right. At the same time, I don’t know anything.

Either way and in the meantime:

Oh my life is changing every day in every possible way.
Oh my dreams, yeah, never quite as it seems.
I know I’ve felt like this before. Now I’m feeling it even more, and
then I open up and see the person falling here is … me?

A different way to be. Different from the ways of 1979, or ’84 or ’00 or ’08. Some of them already all but forgotten. The new way to be is cool with even that.

All the ways are stories, and all stories are born and burn bright and fade away, to dust I guess.

As you see there’s no one around.

I defined that scene as isolation and for a few weeks I sardonically said it was splendid, and maybe saying it was necessary but necessity of course is a story too.

As it was when I said no, no, not splendid, but schismatic, the SchisMatrix explains it all, He took all the shopping carts from the mall and took ’em to Ormond, which was Zion.

Stories.

Lovely fragile things.

Sometimes the reason you don’t know who I’m talking to is because I’m not talking to anyone anymore about anything.

I’m typing words, onto a screen, in the night that is never so endless as it seems, and asking why?
the only difference being that the new way is to never live in expectation of a reply.

From up above
Them, you and I together are feeling the pull
(a pull quite lamentable, but assured, in equal measure)
of the concrete lights
and the guilt towns
below.

From up above
we are pulled down toward them
at seven or eight hundred feet per second-
-much faster than we thought we’d go–
into, and then under,
beneath the reach of

the sound

of hope

We feel the pull
(in the land of a thousand guilts and poured cement)

(lamented and assured)
To the lights and towns below.

Faster than the speed of sound; faster than we thought we’d go

Beneath the sound of hope

Politics Carved Off To The SubStack

Slowly and admittedly painfully, I am starting to get a handle on the platforms and Project(s); what they really mean and are for, and (thus) how to best present them, and where … how.

I keep manual text file backups of all the posts here. Part of what I decided was not to do that, at the pure-politics version of the substack. Just like with Twitter, that’s solely a venting spot. For now. Nobody cares, probably not even me, once it has been spit out.

Tomorrow is a warm-winter day, by which I mean that it may struggle up to sixty degrees.

Today I’m just making myself ready for that.

I burned two hundreds worth of money I might or might not have, on an Azure order. Including a dozen cans of that Bar Harbor herring.

The cats got very well fed after a 9-degree night.

That was about as much as I was able to manage under the half-lit sunless skies, and it was enough.

Girl pink energy expressing itself openly and unashamed.

Boy bone energy permitted at last to respond to it purely in the same fashion.

I found this rare thing at a party in a closed bank, after hours.

In suburban Glendale.

In the company of Marianne Williamson, who was feeling quite a lot more milfy than I’ve seen her in a long time.

Everyone kept all of their clothes on.

It was the barbie movie, but for real human adults with brains still intact, and passions still somehow against the odds undimmed.

And I had to dream it into being, because there’s far too little of it in the real Glendale, or anywhere else in this real and unrelentingly ugly world.

I know it was quite stereotypically the dream of an old man.

But I’m telling it to you anyway. Open and unashamed, because fuck it–I don’t have anything to lose by living that way.

For a change.

***

A-em, scuse me sir could you maybe put down the newspaper just for a second

We was all alone
and she said Tone (-Lōc)
Let me tell you one
(more) thing
or two sentences
of a minute each.

The fact that I woke up 24 hours before with that Falco song about Kathleen Turner on my brain was a preview of coming attractions for the pink-lit dream.

Both things and the attitude in which they’re steeped are partly attributable to finally having enough meds for my bio-condition again.

And.

When I’ve whined orangey (naggin’, braggin’ putting things down in the world) over the course of the past few months, in some sense all I was really asking for was someone to gonna-care

about things exactly like whether or not I had those meds, could afford them, could navigate the evil system efficiently enough to get them; to get what I

really needed: an echo of what I was asking in the months before I did what I needed to do in order to get the checks rolling in again, way back early in this same benighted year.

It’s not an easy life for anyone right now, and

yes I’m self-centered, selfish, and

most everyone I know and knew had their own fish to fry on up, down at the Bellagio or in Molokaʻi or
wherefuckingever
(not too well-humored ’cause life doesn’t show any pity).

Whatfucking was left was a nearly total isolation
and of necessity
down in the local ditches
I called it Splendid.

Called it splendid and spit those facts across the table at the holiday, which of course changed nothing
but

Now in the winter depths I rub the cream into my shoulder and twisted flowers
(somehow against the odds)
begin again their vivid bloom.

Now at last again the walls of bedroom red are washed after all this time
and I am making my way to sleeping between them
after so many cinders of years (he wants a kiss)
“You can be my principal”.

Is it a dream
or what?

Marie? Kathleen? Marianne?

Can you still hear me babe?

Claire?

Do you know what I’m talking about?

I’m just talking about
I’m just talking about
not the first kiss of my life
I’m talking about

Our Planet

And as it does, we start here.

***

Organic Honduran Bird-Friendly Green Coffee
Cupping Notes: Chocolate. Roasted Almonds. Heavy Body.

[Region] Marcala
[Cooperative] COMSA
[Altitude] 1220-1524m
[Varietal] Bourbon, Typica, Catuai, Caturra
[Processing Method] Fully Washed
[Certifications] Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center Bird-Friendly. Organic. Fair Trade. Kosher

***

Organic Peruvian Green Coffee – Natural Water Process Decaf

[Region] Amazonian Highlands, Peru
[Cooperative] PANGOA
[Partners Since] 2003
[Altitude] 1200-1800M
[Varietal] Caturra, Typica, Bourbon, Catimor
[Processing Method] Fully Washed
Cupping Notes: Low acidity. Nutty. Smooth.

And speaking of PSAs:

You don’t have to do anything.

Except move with grace through the Phases of the Day, addressing quotidian issues that seem to threaten that grace.

The phases-with-grace are exactly the same thing as santuairy.

That is all.

For now.

Meet Jennifer.

Jennifer is a mom. A baker of Christmas cookies. A fictitious creation of some faceless bureaucrats bent on propaganda that serves their corporate pharma overlords.

The only happy part of this story is not the baking or the invented family togetherness, but that when the covid drones posted Jennifer to Twitter, their PSA got:

59 likes
but over
1000 comments

This math, along with a lot of other stories I’ve felt compelled to discuss this season, makes me happy, because it strongly suggests that people are actually beginning to wake the fuck up–potentially, about a lot of things.

May we, every one, have just such a holly, and maybe even jolly Christmas.

This year.

Under the seven moons

Syria: A Battle Lost Amid a Wider War

Mr. Berletic is a genuine thought-provoking treasure.

In this one, he will explain for ‘you’ how Academia (and the rest of the weaponized media-informative complex) has been systematically compromised to serve the Interests not of The People, anywhere, but of the hegemonic elites, everywhere.

I saw College as my alma mother and Journalism as my godly salvation. Either might have been marginally true, once upon a time before I was born …

But I was, in the end, proven dramatically and definitively wrong on both counts, in this world.

In this world, there is no reason for hope.

Or: If there is any marginal malnourished sliver, it will only be found in the quiet seintuārī̆e of each of us, especially the twenty-three-year-olds, as every new day breaks.

Western Elites Are Scared Of Their Own Kids | Harry Berger

I made a solemn vow

Helene Victims Out In The Cold as Biden Sends $725M To Ukraine

Bonus video within the link of him sleeping through a conference in Africa, as seen above. Word has it that when he woke up he pardoned another elitist sleazebag like his shitty son.

I don’t know why the you that isn’t wanted me to vote for him, or his cackle puppy.

I have no idea at all why the opinion of smart people I love, regarding Ukraine, is exactly the same as the opinion of little Lindsey fucking Graham.

I don’t understand why their views on the homeless mirror precisely the views of Greg Gutfeld of Fox News.

Over here in my family, we buy destitute people pancakes and then get fired for doing it.

And we care that there are people sleeping in tents in freezing weather in Asheville, more than we care what happens to that puppet of alleged democracy, no longer even the pretend president, in Kyiv.

***

Three two one zero.

Americans EXPLODE With Rage At Health Insurers After CEO Murder!

As I was going to post this it suddenly occurred to me that I could wish you a happy Pearl Harbor Day, and still be on topic.

EX-Army Officer Makes Reversing The Illegal Occupation Of Hawaii Into His Life Mission|

Thirteen or so generations ago, America was just another ragged pile of colonized lands.

Then the Americans had a Revolution, and it was good.

But alas, at some point back halfway between then and now, they started to become colonizers themselves.

Early into that process, Hawaii stands out, as not only a victim of colonization, but as a victim of fascism, which as you recall is the merger of the corporation and the state.

After the overthrow of the monarchy, Sanford B. Dole served as the provisional president of the Republic of Hawaii while the US was in the process of invading and illegally annexing it.

You might recognize the Dole name from pineapples or bananas, or involvement in later projects of fascist colonialism and massacres in places like Colombia and Guatemala.

This is how Success works, within an Empire. Corporately.

But that’s not what the video is about.

It’s about an unusually promising effort to right that habitual wrong, out there in the Kingdom of the Hawaiian Island Chain, as it existed in great-grandfather’s day.

And the former US Army Field Artillery captain who is spearheading that effort.

You care about what’s happening in the Syrian war, right?

On a related note:

Why Being Born is a Disaster (Einzelgänger, on a kind of deathwish Romanian Buddhism)

I can’t say that I find the philosophy as a whole useful, but pieces are:

To live sanely per society’s norms is to worship cheating and the big lie.

To prosper, in this context of insanity, is no kind of success worth the name.

In the words of the Romanian’s friend Camus, suicide is the only real moral question …

… and Cioran himself says that writing books is a ‘postponed suicide’.

I think that’s all more or less correct and accurate.

Even if it ain’t right.

And thus:

“He evaded fame

rejected praise

and lived in austerity.”

Yes. And in some twisted way that assists me, in enduring.

So bless you, Einz.

Noted liberal Lewis Black Roasts Democrats’ Post-Election Coping Mechanisms | The Daily Show

Meanwhile, I went to a real doctor for the first time in years (mainly to see if I could get cheaper meds for my existential condition–the jury’s still out) and I learned that I’m in generally excellent health.

The one major area of potential concern is arterial plaque. I think my aorta is probably pretty blocked up.

There are a ton of things out there for potentially reversing this kind of sclerosis.

I’m looking most closely at the ones called K2, berberine, and longer forms of real Fasting.

As for the Who do you thinks gonna care factor, I think there’s three, maybe four of you, and I’m very grateful that you are in the world. Thank you.

***

I got to wondering about the numbers, and it turns out that 3 out of 4 Americans are now overweight (BMI above 25) or obese (BMI over 30).

I am finally now among the 1 in 4.

Even taking the high side of my measurements for weight and waist, which vary some, I’m sitting at BMI = 24.5 now, just on the upper end of Normal.

(And by the way, I’d have to drop more than 40 more pounds to be considered underweight)

Wanna check yourself with the same calculator?

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/obesity/in-depth/bmi-calculator/itt-20084938

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