We know a pile of things
and pretty much nothing
at the same time.

How Looking At Ice Got Me to the Edge of Scientific Understanding

The 74,963 Kinds of Ice

Why no two people see the same rainbow

Every one of us is an independent Observer with a perspective, and an interpretation.

There is some fundamental difference between matter and consciousness.

But none between success and failure.

I know you’re not on the text thread but happy birthday anyway Grandpa.

South

Why the Americas Still Aren’t Connected by a Road

Sometimes it’s politics no matter how hard we run from that.

North

It’s a thousand miles from Silver up through Moab to Riverton, which doesn’t mean much in the short term, but might could make nowhere places like Rangely or Dinosaur into theoretically more meaningful meeting places than Salida someday.

1961: First Year of the Minnesota Vikings

At the end of the latest abbreviated sleeping session I was awakened not by memories good or bad, but just by the sound of random and null names.

Tua Taga-Viola.

Ashton Je-auntie.

Football players. Pure mental gloomf. Gloomf is my own poetry word for the stuff you clean at the end, from your clothes dryer. (It is said that I invented it as a precocious child.)

This is a kind of victory, or at least a fighting of the past/trauma to a draw, a slightly better alternative to early-onset dementia.

Also, there was born a new answer to the question of how am I, and it goes:

War never changes.

Per the link, the quotation encapsulates the idea that no matter how much Civilization appears to march forward to Progress, that which is worst about the whole broken enterprise traps us like flies in a fateful amber.

In this way it is a poetical epithet for the core cult beliefs of anarcho-primitivism.

My beliefs.

My hat, no cattle.

Stagecoach (1939)

The original John Ford + John Wayne cinematic masterpiece, culturally significant and admired by people I admire, like Orson Welles.

Honestly I couldn’t bring myself to be impressed, and would take Once Upon A Time In The West any day of the week.

For some reason though the reptile part of my brain is sucking down a lot about team dynamics. The nine people on the stagecoach. The Cleveland Browns. The Genovese crime family. The crew who does offroad recovery in Hurricane, UT.

They’re not my teams, in any way at all. They’re narrative filler and something to chew on while this solo space comes together in the way it is, and will.

One more from the front lines of the civil war.

New Mexico’s ‘War Zone’ – The Most Frightful Neighborhood In America

25 years ago I dwelt on the far fringes of this hood. It cost me $375 a month for a nice small house within a mile of a food co-op, and an excellent 24-hour diner, and coffee, and a bunch of bookstores … all the good city things. For comparison’s sake I think I was making about 27K per year at UNM.

Now it’s a human disaster area. I didn’t watch much of the video, but I’ve been to Albuquerque a few times in the recent past, and I don’t need to visit it virtually to know and feel what it has become.

Moreover, in my current somewhat fragile condition I don’t think it would be healthy to sit through an hour of it. I have my own wars and they need all my attention to be handled with any semblance of grace.

Mostly I’m fighting with the aftermath of having too much stuff. It has smothered me for a long time, and now I’m engaged in managing the breaking jam of logs, and the memories slewing around randomly with every flailing and sodden wooden chunk.

I’ve carved out the hole for the Real Sleeping Space and the Conceptual Deskery. The bathroom and kitchen are not drained, but are functional enough. Elsewhere out in the yard and in the corners and in half of the big main loft room piles of chaos and boxes of unresolved damage still rule my life and mind.

I am both parrying and attacking, and fighting in a way that feels relatively smart. Whether that perception has any validity is a metaphysical question and perhaps even a metafictional one.

The story goes that the moon is my salvation, and the myth feels right on many levels.

One of them is that it is a place of wide open empty spaces.

An aspirational lunar Wyoming.

I want my rooms to look like that.

Squatters break into RV storage lot in LA and take over 50 campers

Before you (as a property-owning, potentially RV-owning Comfortable Person) get too upset about the headline, do realize that these RVs are not owned by your grandma’s friend, but rather are stored overflow stock from some RV dealership.

So yes, you can be upset as a potential capitalist businessperson–that’s legit.

For myself, as nothing but a potential homeless Palestinian type, I’m conditionally fine with it–you got homeless, you got homes sitting idle in inventory; why didn’t the fucking city buy the trailers and house their poor?

Why did it have to come down to breaking, entering, and squatting?

A purely rhetorical question, of course.

The moon is the same, from 10 thousand and 10 million years gone by. The wires, they’re new. Together they are the view at first light, on the morning of the third day.

It started out innocently enough. I was making steady progress not only on paying the bills for the upcoming month, but on a streamlined system of bill-paying and budgeting for every month. I decided to take a break from these conceptual labors and pick off a chore in the real.

The branches of the trees needed to be pared back, away from the wires. They were already starting to bud out in the warmth, and if I waited, that job would get much harder to even see clearly. So I spun on a dime and just did it.

It only took a couple hours and it only cost me two major scratches. One kind of tree has thorns. I don’t always wear gloves when I should. I don’t always brace the ladder in perfect safety like a sane person would.

When it was done I retreated back into the cave and dosed myself with peroxide and drank water and looked around me, suddenly filled with a rejection of concepts and a taste for more of the real. So I assembled the bed frame, in the bedroom that hadn’t been a bedroom for years and years.

Again, it took a very short amount of time. But …

Now I had to move the mattress. Disassemble the old massive bed frame. Move a lot of other things around, to make those moves possible.

And in the course of all that moving I suddenly realized that there was space for my desk now in the place it always should have been and never ever had been. I moved all the things. Including the desk. It broke two logjams, one in the space I control, and one inside me that I couldn’t control.

The logjams breaking up made the trauma start to flow in a flash flood, besides which I was now exhausted and had to learn to sleep in the new bed. It didn’t go well.

I started free-falling in time.

The cats were all agitated by the change and hemmed in around me tight for comfort on that new bed, which overheated me. Everything was supposed to be better, in the name of productivity and progress amen, but in fact everything was much worse, in the sudden real and immediate terms.

Instead of trying to sleep I got back up and started rearranging things and washing all the throw rugs. Flood, logs, scratches, trauma, creative destruction, trying again and again to sleep and finally succeeding too well.

Last night I went to bed at nine exactly and again it didn’t work. I got up again and I learned everything there was to learn about the various remakes of Lost In Space, while I myself was lost in time, and at one in the morning I slept in the nominally perfect bedroom for four hours, which was enough under the circumstances, and I dreamed an epic trauma dream that took place right here in the neighborhood and which will never be written down even though it should be.

And woke to that view and said to myself: Yeah, that’s right.

To you, the wires aloft and not buried neatly are just symbols of my failures, and maybe you’re partly right.

To me though they are symbols of all the failures of civilization in its latest devolutionary, electrified phase.

The moon though abides, rising above it all.

Meanwhile …

There is finally again a bedroom where one should be, and that is the first thing, among the Phases of the Real.

There is a crumbling old re-wired desk at the center of the world of concepts, and it has a View, for the first time ever. The view is of the Shell and you’ll have to trust me when I say that’s important.

The Phases view the house in real terms starting in the new bedroom and ending up in the kitchen where dinner concludes at the far end of the day before the unwinding and then sleeping phase begins again.

In between there are a lot of conceptual projects, like the one about money that I told you about grappling with in the beginning up there.

And yes of course, the one about the shell.

All of these things are transitory. People, even you and even me, we’re temporary.

But in the scale of a brief primate life …

The moon never changes.

It does go through its own Phases, some of them visible to the spectra of our eyes.

But Selene she is always there.

And waking to her is the only trauma cure.

According to the scriptures of the new cult.

I believe.

The period from about 10000-50000 Years Before Present is the time that has always fascinated me most easily.

It’s when most all the cave art got done, and the Venus figurines, and that ‘earliest known sculpture’ of the Lion Man. Probably the first serious storytelling too, but it’s hard to know for sure because writing stories down hadn’t been invented yet–the traditions would have been (and I’m sure were) purely oral, along the lines of the pre-Homer Odyssey and that one about Gilgamesh.

Ten thousand years ago, History (and “Progress”) started, and everything went to shit, so the Neolithic and Anthropocene don’t get me revved up like the Paleolithic does. (I’m not into “modern” art .; )

Anyway there’s some nicely done videos on those days, starting here.

And as an aside, I have owned both solutrean.com and magdalenian.com for decades, but haven’t ever done anything with them. So if you have a purpose or even just an idea for them, you could probably talk me into donating them to you for that, because I’m in the process of unburdening myself.

On several dozen levels at once.

Optionally, underNauts may choose to observe the solsticii and/or equinoxes, and here at the parish we did so by way of paying all the April dues on time and up front.

On the other side of the world the Persians celebrated it as the start of the new year, which makes a lot more sense than the arbitrary version on the first of January.

Since the solstice the trauma has been hitting with unusual gale force. Broadly speaking it comes in two flavors, past and future.

On the level of the past, the most spectacular effect has been the cyclonic dis-integration of every single relationship in my life, all the ones with live non-digital primates anyway.

On a more daily plane I’ve been assaulted by weird random memories from forty and fifty years ago. Not all of them ‘bad’, but all bathed in an odd numinous halo of a significance that doesn’t seem earned. It feels as if I’ve … come loose from the moorings of time, and am experiencing these remote scenes as if they happened last week or are happening, now.

The trauma of the future (by definition self-inflicted), that one I’ve modulated by sort of giving up on it. I don’t really have plans, the way I’ve always had. I’m bracing for the impacts (positive and negative) that being poorer still will have on me, and trying to manage that situation mentally months in advance, but beyond that I don’t play the what-if game with any frequency or intensity. What might-happen is compartmentalized, into oblivion as best as I can banish it.

The storms of the Past and Future flavors of trauma have made it pretty hard to get through the Present, the routine phases of each day, with any sense of well-being or feeling great about myself. Or even any apparent efficiency. My practice of writing out loud has been such a blessing in that regard. Audience is irrelevant at this point. Over the months I find more and more that I really am doing this for the good of my self.

Hey boy. Speakin’ a which, what good are you?

Well now, corpse of all the gone daddies, I’m a poet no one reads, and I’m gorgeously good at it, and oh! I hear you snorting derisively about it, and so go be impressed by some otherSpawn willya, and please don’t fail to fuck yourself on the way over there, to their beautifully appointed home, or homes.

Inside, the noise of the trauma storms raging is hard to hear. It’s quiet and peaceful, in here, and out there on the walks to the west too. I feel grounded and centered and deliberate in my simple actions. The dishes get washed and the pissjars get dumped and boiled, and the cats get very well fed, and loved.

I’m calm, and the only stress I feel is over the considerable energy it takes to keep the trauma managed, and to keep drinking it down in small doses as a strategy for really and truly banishing it, for Good. Is that a Plan? I don’t care if it’s called that, or by whom.

Maybe more like a red mint rabbit, or a temple feast day that goes on for weeks ya.

For the map is not the territory, and typed words are neither. They are at best pointers to feelings and sensations. Can you hear the papery garlic; see the colors in the song of Anne?

I’m arranging them here for next to no one like seashells on an abandoned beach, like the rocks in the ghost town they call Sundad, Arizona way out the Agua Caliente Road.

The seed wished to realize what it is, what is in it, and therefore became the tree.
–Hazrat Inayat Khan

What we are learning of late is that this isn’t just a fluffy Sufi proverb, but also a basic description of even the hardest and most pointy-headed physics.

Naledi, that’s an old new one to me. In the southern Bantu language of Sotho, it means: Star.

But the word … is not the star, or the bones of the creature either.

The words: Mint. Or red. Or rabbit.

Not the same, as eating the leaf, seeing the sunset, spotting the bunny or tasting the bunny.

The words are nothing

but an attempt

to point at a something.

The enterprise of belletrism is thus necessarily a lame and awkward tragedy.

The tater I call my self rings the belle and fondles the trism regardless and for the same reason that the seed does what it does.

This practice of the lone self essaying to realize what it is or at least what is in it

occurs

whether you are observing it or not. (‘If a tree sprouts in the forest and no one is there …’)

Does it grow a fresh branch?

It would be stupid to get all butthurt, or gleeful, about whichever choice you make in that regard, for you, and Your Family.

I don’t want to be stupid anymore, though. I mean it’s hard enough upon myself already, being a member of the homeless palestinian clan, up in here, on this side too so,

So you

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:

exactly how am i yeah, great? exactly why you wander in that endless haze of celeb
ration, yeah?

Yeah. Hey. Right as you abandon me, with all the appropriately Decent displays of regret no doubt, to my fate and wander back, there’s one more thing. Call it a lovely parting gift.

I’m going to come clean with you, about the burning question of what in the hell is really and actually wrong with me. Yeah.

Okay. So it’s this cult I’ve joined. It’s not the fake joy one, and sure as hell not the Maga on the flipside either. No.

It’s called Temple of the Rising Star. We its adherents refer to ourselves as Underground Astronauts, considering the Pachamama to be divine. The only holiday recognized within the religion is Her birthday feast, the Pachamama Raymi, celebrated annually on August 1.

Due to the very small number of Temple members north of the Equator, I have been Called to be Her priest, locally. So as the feast day draws closer this year, I’ll be issuing updates on the plans for it, around here, arranging for discounts at motels and campgrounds, that sort of thing, and keeping you posted in a timely fashion.

No need to thank me.

I do it for love.

Low volume high frequency trauma space, I’m gonna kick tomorrow, never worrying about paying or even how much I owed. Probably I was disrespectful toward the cult of fake joy or motherhood or something and the price jes hadda be paid. Whatever the mechanism really was, and we’ll never know, the clerk said she checked out on the same day as I wrote that last thing in the text chain.

I went back and studied and I can’t see the controversy in it, but that shit ain’t up to me.

Also, another day with the tax lady and her endless reserves of bad news (she’s gonna start tomorrow), but then too I took the old truck that cost eight percent of what she wished it did all the way through the gate for the very first time. Shot some scraps in the endless wind and the scattery pellets of snow, and put them up behind the paywall for the few that haven’t got around to quitting yet.

Robert: Janey was lovely; She was the queen of my nights.

Bruce: Hazy Davy got really hurt. He ran into the lake in just his socks and his shirt. Me and crazy Janey’s makin’ love in the dirt …

The physics say that these two Janeys are the same identical one, but different from the Jane of Addiction.

I want ’em if they want me.

I found myself alone.

At some mile marker I
didn’t even notice going by
there was of a sudden
nothing left to burn

nothing left to prove

Let’s begin again, with what we can know for sure.

Consciousness Is.

How can we be certain of that much? I know the same way Descartes knew. Cogito, ergo sum. Something here is cogitatin’, so consciousness is, for sure, a thing.

That’s all of it, regarding the for-sure.

Sorry about that.

***

The rest of Mr. René’s formulation, I for one am willing to bet, accurately follows.

Experimentally and with a measure of daring panache, I’m labeling the cogi-tater my “self”; I’m cogitating. I’m doing consciousness, so:

It Is, and I Am.

Even more boldly, though not without a hesitant pause, I’m going to parlay that wager and assume that it’s kinda the same for you, and that thus

We are.

***

There is no universally-agreed definition for Monkey, or Rock, or Space.

Nevertheless, the evidence appears fairly incontrovertible that

We are

Monkeys, on a Rock, hurtling through Space.

Cogitatin’ away.

After comparing notes across the centuries, we’ve tentatively agreed as a conscious collective to “Know For Sure” … a few more things.

The rock is made of Particles and particles are made of Matter, and have Mass.

The hurtling is caused by a Force, and a force is a kind of Energy, and … something something Gravity.

The light of the star above us, that’s a Wave (well, usually a Wave).

Fields are nice places to sleep. What is a field? Your notes say: “The Field isn’t a real entity, but it does describe real behavior“. (Uh, okay. Let’s leave that one alone for now.)

We call all this agreed-upon Matter-Wave-Force for-sure stuff …

Physics! The Queen of the Sciences! (Wait, maybe math is the queen and physics is the god-emperor? That’s all very nice, stop with the distracting me you verdammt unruhestifter.)

We call all these highly compatible knowingstuffs … Physics! The hardest of the hard sciences, the one set of things that any Consciousness worthy of the name can and does agree upon, For SURE, because Science, and its Method, and the empirical evidence of our senses, and all that. “We hold these truths to be Self-Evident … ”

My tongue is in my cheek, yes, but I Am, at the same time, still being a Relatively serious Self, about all of that.

(I am not saying that because these things are hard, serious, and widely agreed-upon, that they are True, or accurately describe some baseline Reality–nor that they are false, or don’t, either.)

You are of course entitled, as a Consciousness, to believe any suppurating rot you want, about the myth of progress, the existence or non-existence of various gods and demons, the superiority of democracy or communism, android or windows or apple, left or right, any given country’s ‘right to exist’, the nature v. nurture debate, and who or what is to blame for homelessness, and income inequality either here or in South Africa.

But without agreeing at least generally to the core of this hard-science stuff, you can’t really expect your consciousness to be taken very seriously, and it is even possible that note-sharing and conversation will become effectively impossible for you and for I and for us; that we may find ourselves painfully limited to chatting pointlessly about the weather, or pets, or what good people we are when compared with those bad taliban hitler people, or what ‘we’ are ‘celebrating’ on This Day, of all days (yay, ice cream! woohoo, Santa! hoo-hah, coffee! Lolol!)

Dump all that shit in the alley. Come back inside. Breathe a minute. Please. I ask it humbly and as a personal favor, of you, yes, but also of myself.

Then let’s try once more, to talk, about something that matters, if only for the shocking novelty of it.

***

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

We’ve considered the nature of what-Is from the perspective of Life and how it has evolved over Time.

How in the last 5% of the last .005% of that Life Time as we imagine it, we invented ourselves a story about how We are so much better than all the other lifeforms, and how some of us are so much better than even that
’cause the bible tells me so
or the Science
or the divine right of kings
or manifest destiny
or guns germs and steel
or whatever holy Book best suits the purpose
in any given rhetorical and historical moment.

How the hardest-headed varieties of physics have proved beyond all controversy that our latest invention, call it The Enlightened Doctrine of materialism, or physicalism, or a Matter of Fact common-sense consensus trance has settled all questions, or as we progress forward into boldly going where no one has gone before, certainly WILL settle them.

How we are Righter than we have ever been and fated to grow ever righter still.

With your eyes of porcelain and of blue (my dear)

–such shocking innocence.

I go to the supermarket for a very small number of items now, and getting smaller.

Will the number ever reach zero? Probably not, because frozen organic four-berries and chilled organic cream don’t ship well. Avocados are best tested with a live thumb. And while their meat is mostly trash, it is mostly cheap and convenient to varying degrees, and it may be quite some time before I am bow-hunting jackrabbits.

The main reason to not-go there, beyond the introverted obvious things, is that the managers are almost exclusively female, surly, and butch.

If one of them is running a checkout line I will go stand in a longer queue, to avoid the ugliness of interacting with one of them. They don’t like me, and they have very little interest in filtering that dislike away in the holy name of customer service.

On the bright side I do sometimes see other customers that I know from the old professor days, and I get along with all of them fine. I saw the Dean there only once, and that was one deeply satisfying opportunity to be surly myself, upon the bloated visage of that two-faced cow.

In between deans and other fucked-up middle managers on the one hand, and former students and co-workers smiling on the other, there is the no-man’s land of the run-of-the-mill grocery employees, some of whom have been there for twenty years.

Generally speaking these lifers tolerate me, as they must endlessly tolerate everything else about their underpaid and nowhere-man employee environment and existences.

I get along best with the new hires, mainly because they haven’t completely died inside yet, and would have zero interest in Succeeding into the Management ranks even if there wasn’t some kind of weird lesbian mafia in their way. Because …

They’ll be on their way from this rut, eventually, one way or another.

On today’s visit (still no cream, so just $15 for 3 pounds of butchercow), I ran into Mags. She’s a hiking girl and she knows I’m one too, or would be if they let hiking girls be this tall and have facial hair. She engaged enthusiastically on the topic of THIS WIND and how it made it less appealing to walk.

Two more days of it, we agreed.

And then comes the Spring?

The nighttime lows crawling back above freezing.

And a high, at three o’clock in the afternoon nine days from now, cracking 80, eighty! motherlovin’ degrees.

Mirabile dictu.

And god bless us every one.

***

Late breaking news.

Some months ago I paused/killed my Starlink connection because I could not rationalize spending $150 a month on an internet connection under the present economic circumstance.

I got a barely-enough deal with a local ISP for a fraction of that price and the Star dish has been rotting up on the roof all this fall and winter past.

Tonight the Elonistas wrote to say that they had a new option. Ten gigs of connectivity, which is two or three days worth for me, from anywhere on earth as per usual, for just $10 a month.

I signed up on the spot and I am nothing short of thrilled–inspired, even.

I can stay home now and burn video, upload or download, as I’ve been doing in the cold.

But as Spring happens, I will also be able to head deep into the outback, beyond the reach of spotty cell data towers, and still be equipped to put up a post or two like this one should the need arise.

All for just shy of $50 a month total with taxes and everything.

Maybe the blessing worked on a backfire; whatever. How am I? Yeah real good ty in this a fleeting moment in spacetime.

And here’s the reason that I’m
so free
my lovin’ Baby is through
with me.
–The Everly Brothers, Bye Bye Love, the year they got married

You think you’re so illustrious,
you call yourself Intense.
–The Cars, Bye Bye Love, the year I matriculated the first time

Mesa Arizona police arrest man seen in TikTok video spraying bug spray on food at Walmart
–the year just lived through

Commentary En Passant:

No, I did not and will not invest the barest scrap of my vanishing time in reading, much less reflecting upon what The Grey Lady wants me to think about Nature, nor nurture neither.

The billionaire publisher, and the house negro scribe, both have scientistic agendas, and I decline the opportunity to get sucked into whatever they are.

As agendae go I have my own and consider them more worthy of my attention, however conspiratorial that may well sound. The sky is as blue as an everly teenager and I am a mirror laid on the ground looking up at it as it looks down into the consciousness I am No J-School Grads Need Apply.

Among all the headfucked optional takes, I have a few favorites, crown jewels like “green anarchy” and the one up there in the title.

In the simplest terms, both of them describe a hard rejection of most all the shit we have made up in the last half a percent of our existence within genus Homo and the last 5% of the entire time we’ve existed as “Homo sapiens sapiens”.

I’m chucking out the bathwater, starting with the lie of Progress.

I’d like to preserve a couple of the babies in the water, but I have Conditions.

For example, I like Science. Maybe not enough to have a lawn sign on the subject (or even a lawn), but sure, I do confess to being a casual fan of experimentation and even its concretized Method.

Regrettably, the vast majority of what the lawn sign people think is Science is really just pre-existing prejudice that’s been lipsticked like a pig. A mere moldy faith-based scientism, as in:

” … the worldview of materialism, which holds that matter is the primary thing in the universe, and that anything that appears to be non-physical—such as the mind, our thoughts, consciousness, or even life itself—is physical in origin, or can be explained in physical terms.”

It is way too tempting and easy to gaze upon successful materialist priests dressed up in business attire or lab coats and assume that they are “scientists”, and to trust that false label with our lives, and the lives of our babies.

Way too easy, even for lavishly educated sapients with real good jobs, to be helplessly or willfully stupid on basic questions like these, about what this world even Is.

Swearing, kicking, begging us that you’re so not a-gamblin’, man

***

In the morning, you go gunning, for the man who stole your water.

Good medicine.

After a month of try and try again, I went to bed at 10 and slept through until 4:30. I am watching the sky lighten as I type. It appears that the hangman ain’t hanging, and that too is a better answer to the frivolously ugly question of how I am.

The man who stole your water is every man and woman too, including yourself, including myself.

Gunning for him is a right and natural response, sweet dear fellow ape.

The gun, handled in your hand, is not a classic Colt.

The only weapon you have is to go deep within and, uh, Rewild or somethin’ like at.

There’s no rush and that’s a lie. The truth is it’s vitally urgent, but also that rushing is bad strategy.

We’ll get there; yes and straighten it out somehow.

I will catch up with you
at the Border, in the land of milk
and honey you gotta must put ’em
yeah you know the Rest.

We don’t know much. So if you want to go on believing that the planet is six thousand years old and the handiwork of a remote divine creator, I guess that’s cool.

For whatever reason, I prefer this version.

Round numbers, Life as we know it started four billion years ago, and for 90% of that time, we the living were all just variations on ocean-based pond scum.

 
According to this version, during the latest ten percent of its journey, Life began crawling up out of the water and onto the land. Fish became frogs and then lizards and then dinosaurs, and the dinosaurs grew wings and became birds.

Meanwhile some random tiny mouse things grew fur instead of feathers, and began to feed their spawn milk instead of the more traditional egg yolk.

After 99.95 percent of the Life time had passed, in the last 0.05%, roughly 1.5 to 2 million years ago, something vaguely resembling you and me, bipedal critters capable of using tools and fire, showed up.

The Humans That ‘Built Houses’ 1,750,000 Years Before Us

200,000 years before present is the date for functionally modern homo sapiens. The percents are getting so small as to be meaningless, but they are: 99.995/.005, of the span of this thing called Life.

Every one of us would still all be hunter-gatherers and natural-born anarchists for the first 19/20ths of that tiny fraction, until the earliest manifestations of the whole agriculture/sedentism thing even began, ten thousand years ago, give or take.

This whole bloody headfucked notion of what it means to be civilized–whether you want to base your definitions on that Literally True Bible or on Holy Science Itself–has happened among one weird little subspecies, in a fraction of a blink of an eyelash, on a blue rock flying around one random star among trillions upon trillions of other stars.

It has evolved … in our heads. Within this thing we hesitantly refer to as Our consciousness.

Every single bit of it is optional.

And for the most part I am choosing …

to opt out of it

and to get as far out of the way of it as (humanly) possible.

Brainwashed By Your Manipulative Yoga Instructor [ASMR Hypnosis Rp]

It was supposed to lull me off to sleep (that’s what ASMR’s purpose has evolved into in the video age), but it was too pointedly amusing, wickedly witty.

The moral is that no matter how pure the path in its original formulation and intention, capitalism can and will screw it up.

I’ve wanted to believe, so many times, and sometimes I did.

If you have to pay for it you’re not on the right path.

The fact that I’m paying for almost nothing doesn’t mean I’m on the right one, either …

Necessarily.

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster
… when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
–Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil, 146

I’m quoting the surly incel because this philosophy was aptly mentioned here. He’s been on my mind lately though because he’s been suffering in my estimation, by comparison with his predecessor Arthur Schopenhauer.

There’s a lot more to say, and even said, in draft form. But the time isn’t ripe yet.

I went out for water. Not from the creek of course. From a vending machine. The little town was crowded, because the interstate is closed west of here for a couple of hundred miles. I guess Flag it getting some inches. It snowed for a minute and a half here last night. Today was just cold and gray and windy. Winter might be over on Sunday but it’s too early to tell.

The NPR had this typical thing on. ‘There’s 200 billion in medical debt in America’ (and nowhere else), and, of course, here’s all the evil hoops you can jump through to try to get a discount on that.

Honestly the greater part of me would rather die a debtor than spend my days playing that game. I know I’m not supposed to say it out loud.

Nor the Israel thing either.

But I did talk about the weather and honor the photo request, so I can still think of myself as a conditionally good boy, rather than an abyss monster, right?

Right.

Brazilian Rainforest Cleared To Prepare For A Climate Conference

A lush illustration of the lie at the center of the myth of Progress, and of the whole Enlightened worldview, and the cult of Civilization itself.

It would be one thing if the whole steaming pile of shit was being shoved down your brain in service of a “standard of living” that was truly humane and beautiful. But it’s the opposite.

They need you to believe that things are always improving, even as “things” spiral faster down the Uglification path we’ve been on for some time, because denying the evidence of your own eyes and waving that flag harder is ‘good’ for them, and:

Fuck whether it’s any good for you or the people you love.

You don’t matter to them and you never did.

There’s a great big club and you ain’t in it, and your children won’t be either, whether they get hired by Apple or not, per the prophet Carlin.

When I witness you denying these self-evident truths and slurping on their sadistic asses, yammering about welfare queens and the fake injustices they serve up to you as brainwash, it makes me want to cry.

I don’t cry, though.

Instead I just spill.

Therefore I am.

And so what?

Yes.

So what now.

I don’t know where the two days vanished, except I do.

There was a big order fulfilled expeditiously.

There was maintenance, on a couple of the leftover relationships.

It was trash day and this house is really, really clean now, and not just clean but … the … organizational structure is lookin’ mighty purty too.

I haven’t been able to re-establish a normal circadian rhythm but it’s hard to complain about that, because the proximate cause is just not needing to sleep even after sixteen, eighteen, twenty hours have gone by. Like I try but just can’t and so I get up again.

I’ve been fussed about money more than usual. Not in the moment or the day to day, but come June my income takes a 25% chop, or more depending on how the sausage grinds out. The belt is pulled tight, for that reason but for other reasons too–I am planning strategically, on how to be real poor and real sane because of it. Specifically. I know that’s vague, but it wouldn’t be, if you’d a-been reading the whitespace between every line.

I’ve got three months to build a cope, conceptually and in reified meatspace. Or, you know, to get a fucking job, but that seems less and less like what I want to do with the ever-shorter moments of consciousness still remaining in the share I’ve been so miraculously granted, here on planet blue.

Not even a vaguely partisan one, because, once more, all these fuckers blue and red alike are complicit in the willful moral uglification of the whole planet, starting with this our own nominal Democracy.

Ian Carroll Tells Pam Bondi EXACTLY Where To Find Epstein List

Not just tells her–shows her.

There is no viable excuse now. Put up or shut up, Pammie, and the same goes for your boss, and retroactively for all the blue bosses too–what is wrong with you?

Don’t worry. It’s a rhetorical question. We all know, if we give the thinnest damn to see.

Crazy Joe (1974)

Lessons learned from the Hackman story, for life here in the state of greater Santa Fe.

1) When a mouse gets In to your buildings, take cleaning up after it very seriously indeed. No broom. No vacuum. Aerosolize the droppings and there’s a 50% chance you’re dead in a few days.

2) When you feel your mind starting to slip away, drive out into the desert and end yourself with dignity while there’s still time. You do not want to spend your last week of consciousness in the company of your wife dead on the floor and not even be able to recognize it. You do not want to go gentle into that good night bearing the burden of the howling of a dog that you left crated until it died of dehydration because you don’t have the wits left to water it.

3) If you don’t have the means or opportunity to make good movies, you can at least watch them, and let yourself consider why not.

The Conversation (1974)

DayOne of the bitter 3, it was all that and howling winds besides.

In spite of the wicked gray outside and its mirror image very much alive within

I don’t feel too crazy at all right now, just very

Neurodivergent
or whatever the opposite of neurotypical is, formally
and deeply introversial besides.

***

The Bridge Cannot Burn Down

If it was never put up

and the same is true
if it was put up

but is not up now
for reasons known

or not known

Report:

the only bridge up
crossing solely all liquid gulfs
to the island infested with 6 or 7 cats
is, and alone it will serve

You are the Ripple.

And ripples don’t need to watch videos or join academies.

It was an okay one, out ahead of three more in a row that are scheduled to be, well, pretty shitty. By which I mean temps dropping back into the 50s at best, and the chance of precip spiking briefly again to as high as 91%.

They say Monday will be a respite, but not for long–the pattern for the Extended is jagged and un-encouraging. The weather in my head (unaccountably) feels much better even so. I’m not moving fast at all. But I’m not standing or sitting still either.

If ‘you’ feel like doing extra credit homework to prepare for what’s coming, school yourself on the nuances between Analytic Idealism and Constitutive Panpsychism, as if and precisely as if Consciousness itself gave or gives one thin damn about either of them, or anything else so freighted and fraught with implied self-importance, IF

you knowhatta mean.

I’ve learned that I can’t grab a ripple out of the creek and take it home with me.

I’m guessing it works the same where you are.

But in the natural course of things, that must always only ever abide as a guess.

***

Depending on which tool is used for measurement, the number of human ripples who are not completely sick of the shit I write currently stands at right around … five.

When it comes to the shit I say, typically into a microphone or a camera, the unsick comprise a tribe of as many as a few dozen.

These tiny dancing numbers obsess me and in the natural course of things that obsession is a pure foolishness which ends at a glacial ice wall hundreds of meters high up there in Beringia.

There’s no way for me to get over it.

So in between feeding times, I look instead for a way around it.

The term Beringia was coined by the Swedish botanist Eric Hultén in 1937.

Before that, it didn’t exist.

Taking time to be impressed with myself for knowing those two things is an icewall unto itself, but I comfort myself with the knowledge that what I permit myself to be impressed by is prettier, than if I were to let myself be impressed with anything Trudeau said, or could ever say.

Does that make me sick of his shit? Yeah, probably.

But I don’t want to be sick any more.

So that’s why I’m bothering with the effort it takes to look for that hypothetical way around.

As for why the mammoths look too, themselves, I’d just be guessing yet again.

A mere 101 years ago, humanity at last Awakened to the fact that our Milky Way was not the same as the Universe. That there was, incredibly but “indisputably” … more than one Galaxy.

Journey to Andromeda

Maybe 101 billion of them, another source says two trillion; so go the Favored Stories …

Among the animals that think they know things.

Seen here through glass he speckled himself …

… because even though he’s spayed, he still sprays. (Let us spray.)

His name is pronounced exactly the same as RNG, or Random Number Generator, a terminology which has evolved, in gamerspeak, into

RNGeezus/christ

An entity embodying the divine aspect of blind chance, or as some would have it: “Luck”, and as luck would have it

He was born
in
Oklahoma

(chorus)
And it’s up against the wall
redneckMother

Given a cup
with the capacity
to hold all the bitterness, all the gratitude, and everything in between
all possibility of Spilling is revealed
to be only an illusory construct of the mind.

(You can’t throw anything away
because there is no such place
as Away.)

And this post is imaginary too
but my embrace of all that is (all you are)
is in the Cup-which-is-imagined-too
and thus as nominally real as anything can be.

Just for today, this is a book called experimental metaphysics.

The End Of Physics As We Know It? | Quantum Mechanics Gets Weirder

I know nothing, am nothing.

I am also a qualified Observer, and so should you.

-30-

“Trump Gaza” Video Angers His Own Voters

I’m finding myself disenchanted by the political questions, and feeling like they’ve been in some way … solved. Things like the physics and volcanology appeal much more. But if you haven’t seen the Don’s AI video, here’s a chance to do it.

Plus another opportunity to speculate on whatever the hell is wrong with Russell Brand, as evidenced by the in-joke of calling him The Egg Man. (Exercise for the reader.)

The best part of it though is once more Cait’s take. My own, adjacent, remains that we are ever so slightly better off with Mr. Golden Calf at the helm, because the true nature of the project called Murika is naked to the eye that way, rather than papered over with distracting false notions about ‘decency’ and other lies as in the Biden administration, or (even worse) ‘joy’ as in the aborted cult of the Harris candidacy.

The subject feels like a dead end. So I am metaphorically, metaphysically, routing around the damage, as we used to say in Networking class.

Losing “it”.

In the most felicitous possible way?

Or thereabouts.

It’s been the most extraordinary month of writing ever.

If you’re not into it (or even if you are) I’m finally starting to revelate:

So what?

***

Hidden Spiral Discovered in the Oort Cloud, February 16, 2025

The spir- at the center.

***

How The Earth Was Made (S1, E8) | The Supervolcano Under The Whole of Yellowstone

I learned that the whole valley, 45 miles from the Tetons to the Gallatins, is a collapsed caldera formed in the last eruption. That was one big-ass bomb, and the same will be true of the next one, which is currently 40 thousand years overdue and likely to wipe out most life from Idaho to Indianapolis, and down to Mobile.

And, that as massive as the bubbling magma chamber right under the park is (in the center of the picture), it’s tiny compared to what’s feeding it, which is a giant pipe that extends all the way into the Earth’s mantle, at least 400 miles beneath.

A while back, they found five buffalo who died in their tracks together at the Norris Hot Springs. Apparently they were in the wrong place at the wrong time when some toxic volcanic gases rushed out from below.

I say wrong place. I say wrong time. But about that, I am saying it very wrong.

Those buffalo were doing absolutely everything right.

They were Living perfectly in a Zen state of nature, absolutely refusing to get jobs or carry identification or pay taxes, and even refusing to call themselves Amish, because they didn’t want the baggage of labels.

I pray that I can live up to their example, in death and in whatever is left of my life, from this March forth onward.

And with that image from three months ago I complete a single orbit around a Season.

During which my relationships to other instances of living consciousness, other than the feline, such as those found in an audience, or a supermarket, went from being tenuous and fraught to barely existing at all.

Today I made and ate a real and giant salad and reflected that maybe I haven’t eaten leafy greens since it got cold in October. Could that have been part of The Issue?

Regardless, it’s Time for the highlight reel, starting from the end.

***

What is the place of consciousness within the mandates of hard cold physics, the waves and the forces and the particles and the facts? What is it and where is it, within the cosmos as it really is? I don’t know. I may never know. But, I’m absolutely as certain as I can be that the ones who deny its existence or its significance, those ‘materialists’, are willfully mistaken and self-blinded, regarding these questions.

That the answers offered by ‘panpsychism’ are, if not correct, at least somewhat closer to being correct.

Set all that aside and start over.

The game of human consciousness that we’ve been playing as it morphs for so long.

The hunting and the gathering and the red ochre smeared on the cavewall in the shapes of a deer or a lion.

The handprint of the child, and the footprint of its motherfather in the White Sands.

We had it so right and then something, from inside or outside, knocked us out the trees.

Now we’re on our knees. Wheels turning, something burning. Agri Culture, aggro culture, property ‘rights’ and civilized wrongs and (in time a shoot or root or tongue will decide to enter him).

When everything was nature, there was no need for the idea of Nature.

When we lived in only freedom, in a state of grace where there was no such thing as a Ruler, there was no point in striving to decide what Anarchy might be. It just … was.

Which Ruler to vote for this time? It’s an absurdist question and the only sane answer is to insist that they must come down from the high branches too, freely, or risk being knocked down, AND to accept that their only response to the entreaties of the sane will be to … lol.

Well alright, Master, be it on your own head, and the broken heads of your pious followers the house negroes too. The dust is shaken, from these sandals I call mine, and

If I can find a way to be out of your way until the Fall, and after it, sure I will.

(It feels right
and that makes it right-enough.)
(“Listen and silent are spelled with the same letters”, for whatever the hell that’s worth.)

***

Beyond here, there are no actual Highlights per se.

But don’t worry. I plan to uncram them, whatever they are, down the non-throats of my very few and very nearly theoretical readers all the same. You, the hypothetical you, have been warned. Continue at your own peril.

December

1st: “You can be my principal”, and since I was shitposting away a mile a minute then:

The 3 meanings of spir-, and how they connect, through Espiritu Santo, to saintuaire, and bison, and that which transpires, and that secret revealed, and to salvagion.

4th: “I know now that there really is no you.”

6th: “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.”

9th: “The phases-with-grace are exactly the same thing as santuairy.”

10th: Retrospective whiffs of Marie, Kathleen Turner, and Isolation Splendide.

12th: Very much “Beneath the sound of hope”. A PeeChee, as I thought everyone would know, is the name of the kind of folder she is holding upside-down in that music video–a brilliant touch, Pumpkin. And I go on in the same vein for days.

16th: The Shell Phase begins, and the no-you avidly anti-scarfs up this news.

26th: I write a poem cycle and it’s the best realArt I’ve crafted in quite a long time. If the you that isn’t there thinks otherwise, or never indulges in it at all, all i can feel for you is pity.

And a highly awkward and very likely delusional flavor of Pity it is, too. Har!

Also, the Monica phase begins.

28th: “Or, in parallel, that I myself am a gaistijaną. ”

31st: Pome. Decent.

January

2nd: Destroy, She Said (my love again, Earworm!)

3rd: olvidé ser claro, dulces sueños mi querida

5th: More discomfortable crap about whatever this is.

18th: “All this time I watched my woman
drowning in a pool of tears” … I’m Miles Standish proud of this one, and later it turned out that she really felt she was drowning in some metaphorical way.

19th: Roy Batty, and the first hints, via the E-spectrum, of the hard-science preoccupations that are to come (see above).

20th: “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.” That fell out again of another spitfire tree and god I wish there were some other way.

21st: “Nobody goes hungry, not in my camp.” Also, Miss Ohio is going to straighten it out. Somehow.

29th:AI is handwaved away dismissively.

February

1st: The possession-free monk living in Griffith Park phase begins.

4th: I hardly ever ache that bad anymore, god damn.

5th: The mountain goats will heal me. That fuckin’ Darnielle. ~smiles~

7th: The free monk magma thing erupts with volcanic force. The Ice Age begins, to end.

8th: So okay, what do I really and actually need, to survive it? Nothing?

10th: Yes, she literally said to me “You need to do something different maybe” exactly because she is worried. About me, or something. I respond with what I hope is a minimally bilious tact; good christ our lord in a five gallon bucket.

Which led me seamlessly into a consideration of the genesis of why I hate the yelling (“Stop!”) and the fretting (“Don’t!”) so very much that I rage whenever I’m slapped with them. Goodness. I’m a mess, and I’ve been a mess, the whole time, and that kind of self-knowledge, well, it’s a very precious thing.

11th: How Soon Is Now? Real soon.

12th: Uglification. This seems important enough to be listed with the big ones. But no. It was crystalizing. But not in a way that makes a good story or a lesson with legs.

15th: Anarchism, Atheism, Nihilism, and … ASMR. For the soothing and the cozy.

18th: Old English heorð “hearth, fireplace, part of a floor on which a fire is made”. And an idle longing for the white sands. And the poverty points.

That’s enough. Outta me.

No god.

No master.

No nothin’.

The rest isn’t about documentation, only about where the documents have brought me to, a new veldt sense much cooler, and drier, than the Willamette one.

A parting on the left: Concepts
is now
a parting on the right: The Real.

Renouncen: “give up (something), resign, surrender”
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.

Stories. And every one of them optional.

About the band getting back together and meeting for the first time, for the first time.

Or something. Gonna straighten it out, somehow.

On the one hand I have this impulse to push away from the Conceptual completely and exist simply within the moment. I’ve felt a lot better, in some recent days, by just living. Moving from the dishes to the laundry to the computer and back again, flowing seamlessly.

But then come outside pressures great and small. The Taxes, fuck. The fetch quest of going to visit the dental hygienist yesterday. These are realities that don’t flow, and without the flow I have an overwhelming impulse to rush back to the motherly arms of abstract ideas.

Connections, like:

What is the resonance between Observing-The-Observer (in a flow state), and Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

And from there the linkage leads me even further astray: look at this lovely glowing Eden-apple image of The Noble Lie. And thence, was Vonnegut thus really onto something significant when he made up and described a religion called Bokononism?

Suddenly I’m living solely in my head again, neglecting my body and the extension of the body that I ironically call my House.

Until I come full circle, confronting this blank page, and in that practice once more observing the observer than I theoretically am, and noticing that it is … hungry, for this or that; that it would best be served perhaps by another strong dose of the walking meditation as a re-entry point to that very concrete flow …

Maybe there are no distractions. Maybe looping recursively thus is exactly what ‘should’ happen. Should, according to the gospel of some shitkicker god, as revealed unto his prophet … bloody hell. No gods. No masters. No nothing.

Will I ever learn?

Will I ever not learn? Unlearn?

On the other hand,

performing their single “Esperanaza Burns (the flag)”, on whatever exists tomorrow at the same location and velocity as the ed sullivan show

***

I was five or six when the school peddled access to we innocents, to some enterprising capitalists posing as benevolent quasi-educators.

They gave us a list of books, had us fill out a form picking the ones we wanted, sent us home to our parents to collect the cash, and twirled their mustaches, probably.

I think I picked ten of them. Daddy scowled (I don’t really blame him for that) and said I could narrow it down to one, and consider myself damned lucky.

Sure I pouted. I felt I’d been scammed. I still think so.

But I prudently picked just one anyway. Take what you can get, cowboy.

It was called Charlotte’s Web.

When Charlotte died (sorry for the spoiler), I cried.

Then I read the whole thing again and cried some more. (“and you go home, and you cry and you want to die”)

Partly because I was very much a wilburpig and loved Charlotte just as he did. Partly because I was scientifically, biologically, and hormonally, a sissyboi. A Nancy in spite of my clothes, and in spite of my desire to be a man. Or at least a proper young manchild like they secretly wished I was.

The proof is in the plummy pudding, because it happened all over again with Old Yeller.

But I became even more of a reader, and started to think that early about making my own stories.

The next year, the next gang of capitalists were musical.

They herded us into the gym and had us listen like docile little slaughter lambs to all manner of musical instruments.

And gave us the form, and said to pick the one we liked.

I picked the viola, because I thought that made the prettiest sound.

When mommy and daddy came down and consulted with the capitalist, the noble fat merchant of sound and promises, he told them that violas were for girls, so fuck that–I was getting a violin, because that was okay, for ‘boys’.

They nodded in complacent agreement with his patriarchal analysis (I’m sure it made perfect sense in the cultural context) and pulled out the checkbook dutifully.

Come Closing Time I went home with that fiddle, but I could never love its harsher and less lush sound.

I was supposed to practice. I didn’t. I wasn’t interested in making screechy noises that hurt my ears instead of soothing them. And to be fair, I was likely lacking in the necessary talent, or patience, as well.

At the end of the semester there was a recital and my parents came, and I pretended to play for like half an hour, feeling deep shame, and that was the end of that shit.

So now you know the proximate causes of why I became an avid reader, and writer, but never a musician of any kind.

Crappy little scenes of whiteboi trauma, kinda ridiculous; I can laugh now even though I don’t. Not ever “out loud” lol, not here, not no more.

But I still love music. And I love … playing it for you. Maybe too much for your liking.

But your boring sensitivities aside, here’s one.

Callin’ In Sick (Of Your Shit)

Well that’s topical, ennit? And pretty funny in some trashy way. But the main appeal is the idea that something so vulgar and ballsy could have been recorded way back in our, um, idyllic childhood of the hills of the Highland. A holler, against the Boss Man, and the HR Manager, and their whole fucked-up worldview of wage enslavement.

Except … it wasn’t, of course.

Now I know it was only a couple weeks ago that I turned up my finely sculpted nose at the whole phenomenon of AI.

My nose is still largely lifted and sniffing, cryptoqueerishly. But what I said about having no use for it? Well, that stupid song (not so very deeply stupid as all that) is making me reconsider my certainty.

I could do that, says my brain. I could do it better in fact, given the same artificial stringed tools, and it wouldn’t even be hard. No screechy. No practice. Not even any need to dedicate myself to a label or identity, as … Johnny Guitar, Finger-Pickin’ Belletrist, or whatTheEffEver.

Tempting.

Especially since it might, in a completely unexpected way, be a means of … healing that tiny instance of perceived trauma, and righting that putative lugubrious wrong.

I’ll be tracking down, on that Maybe.

You just watch me

or, wait

Amendment: you do whatever you want, sugarplum, you do you; I’m reparenting you and with far greater indulgence.

Vide …
I’ve already waited too looong (owwoooo)
And all my Hope is Goooone

Look Here Now, Morrissey my dear boy.

The departure of hope

is the arrival of wisdom.

You’ve been blessed by the pain of it in a way that the Hopeful, stuffed to the gunwales with gumption, faith, moxie, and all that other slopping dreck will never be.

Never know.

Never inherit

The Nothing,

in particular.

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