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

But is it really?

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

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

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

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

“Idiopathic” failure of this hormone and that hormone.

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

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

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

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

One’s Own Particular Suffering.

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

cryptogenic

“!!

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

Doing the word math thus renders it as

Ones Own Suffering
Of Hidden Origin

You know what I’m a-thinkin, cadets?

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

It would come back exactly the same.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It wasn’t a matter of If.

It was a matter of … How.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Tangent.

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

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

Very similarly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

But not everything can be tested.

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

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

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

Those hypotheses are not testable.

***

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

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

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

However.

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

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

And they are already producing positive results.

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

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

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

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

What Now?

Wait, no, wrong …

***

The Question now, as ever, is

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

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

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

***

The Question now, as ever, is

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

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

But.

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

Pretty good, right?

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

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

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

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

What if they did open a riverwalk?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God bless you all, cow and cowboy alike.

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

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

It all belongs to me.

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

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

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

I’m serious.

I’m seriously whack.

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

Positive.

Results.

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

Who do you thinks gonna hear?

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

Who do you thinks gonna care?

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

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

–Kris Kristofferson, 1970

Source

***

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

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

BREAKING: Iran Nuclear Plant HIT

… on a road narrower than your truck is long.

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

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

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

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

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

I loved her so much for that.

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

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

Or upon consideration maybe I can wait.

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

Israel is allied and then some with the US …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It seems like sausage is made of pig carcasses.

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

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

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

Cosa Nostra means: Our Thing.

“Ours”.

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

You can lead, within our thing, or follow.

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

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

One of Us.

Other choices mean Isolation.

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

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

And oh.

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

Honest. Would I kid you, kid? Nah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To bend it to suit their own Interests.

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

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

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

About democracy.

About capitalism.

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

friþstow

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

friþstōw f : “refuge; sanctuary, asylum

grith

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

útočiště

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

sanctuary

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

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

***

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

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

Sanctuary

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

It was never about exporting freedom and democracy.

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

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

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

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

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

I want sanctuary … from it.

I prefer splendid isolation … to it.

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

***

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

Collect more slivers, of the rotten pie.

The baseline difference between us is this.

You hear Anarchy and think: Chaos!

I say Anarchy and mean: Sanctuary.

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

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

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

I wonder what could be next.

As in: sloe gin

As in: sloe-eyed

What could be the connection?

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

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

Time for a drink and a pair of dark peepers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another rabbit-warren, another distraction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do tell.

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

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

I think it will.

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

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

“Just don’t keep lying to me.”

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

I’m not predicting anything either way.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until I pay my bill.

May heaven help the one who leaves.

Desperados Under The Eaves

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

–the Eagles, most obviously

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

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

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

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

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

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

-30-

***

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

when it was still summer.

***

I know that you love me and want all the best for me, and especially for me to get Well Again so I can finally have a happy, and productive, and … adjusted Life.

Johnny Caveman, pour les grottes, down in the alley, and …

They had all been warned, and the (pure whitegray) walls came down.

Never ever be that horse; it’s not in your

Interests. Yes. That is, where we Were, that one place
where the blacktop ran over the top of the river of thirst and drinking,
toppa the fish, in water of the river
not seeing it because it is the liquid air in which they live every moment of life.

(Whether or not you don’t-treated Margo right, Time itself has been Kind, to the demeanor she wears, this Margo.)

That’ll be as far back as I can reach
on the night before the night before it freezes.

“Not many songs deal with a failed suicide, domestic abuse, and a brush with sadomasochism. I’m a huge Warren Zevon fan”. —via Powerpop, a proper blog

Speaking of that verse:

“She asked me if I’d beat her.”

It happened to me over a half a lifetime ago, way before I ever owned a goat leather daytona beach jacket, at a place named after a Rainbow.

I simply told her No, Babydoll. In what I hoped was a calm and neutral voice.

I did not get into any of the trauma or baggage I had, and have, around the concept of men beating women.

We did go back to the Hyatt anyway, and any further detail on what transpired I cannot provide, and still remain the honorable gentleman I aspire to be.

I’m making it sound far more salacious than it really was, by saying it that way, and I am doing so selectively and strategically. Mindful Cultivation. See?

In the Reality, it could never have been satisfyingly salacious, because I could not give her what she needed.

Not just the beating itself, but that which she was truly craving–the masculine intention to dominate, master, even humiliate. The kind of cruel rainfall that she could absorb, and transform into dewy, fertile feminine wetness, somewhere inside the synapses of her magical brain.

I was incapable of doing her that Kindness.

And for that I will always be sorry.

In the swirling mix of those potent spaghetti-western brews, it is easy to forget:

The Pitiful

Forgetting, in this case, is only a venial sin: deep down no one wants to watch a movie about that shit (and the wise belletrist, ever mindful of cultivating an audience, will always remember that).

Also easy to forget is the fact that this was in the first place another brilliant WZ tune, precisely because that beautiful mestiza* spinster covered it in a way that surpassed** the original.

* “a person of mixed European and Indigenous non-European ancestry in the former Spanish Empire”

Works for me–on me–I (technically but legitimately) qualify and perhaps it would be in my Interests to Identify that way, eh? Eh?

In the end I doubt that. Credit to any gender or not … Woah-oah is Me.

** Surpassed it, that is, in most every way except that she dropped the line (really the whole killer verse) that goes:

“I don’t wanna talk about it”.

Bob Dylan is no folksinger, by his own accounting of things.

In my opinion humble or otherwise, he was (and may still be) closer to a belletrist.

Either way, he was pissed off before you were even born, sunshine.

Mostly for the right reasons, too.

All by itself that’s enough to qualify him as kindred to me. Probably on Daddy’s side, and by that I mean my daddy, that rat bastard, and not anybody else’s.

Whether he (and that might could mean either Father, or Bob) would embrace that familial connection in reverse must necessarily remain a topic for

Distracted Speculation.

May be.

Part Three in the blossoming Splendid Isolation series in Celebration, as it were, of the first day of the cool half of the year.

You may be could take the No Cell Service part of that a couple of different ways. Just like you could take every line of that heartbreakingly beautiful song.

If I was writing that sign I would want it to say No Motels, instead of no ranger station. But an iPhone with a slash through it will have to suffice, and it does, too–I was genuinely shocked at how well, in live-fire real-time exercises.

The second picture is for the logistics squad.

It’s a rental ennit? Shades of Blue, from the other end of the state a mere five weeks ago.

“I don’t want to see their faces
I don’t want to hear their screams“

“Like you said, it is now an atrocity to deny it’s a genocide.”

Thanks for asking,
or thanks for not asking,
either way …
I’m doing exactly precisely

Splendid

painting these cow skulls
releasing these Thrillers
watching, rapt, the TikTok Auschwitzes;
all the small discrete variations on their impossibly durable themes.

Finally I can say it with clarity, that
I am grateful to Him sure, for all that you perceive that he did For you
and yet, in all equal honesty
It’s a very different story in my heart, when viewed from the perspective

Of what he did To you, to the waterfish embrace, his name,
to the potfrog staying in school now, staying all into it in fact to the
Last Syllable of Recorded Time
ever since the nineteen and fifty-nine, or the IGY

and not, just
to the freak and ghoul who grew belatedly tall at long last
only to scribble so, nuts, monk mad, in daily devotion
eh Mr. Gibbon?

“Fallish.”

It’s the last day of summer in this localized micro-geography. A sunny 80 degrees.

Tomorrow the wind ramps up and blows in a front filled with chilly rain.

The afternoon following, the daytime high drops by 20 degrees, so they say, and the night low as well, brushing right up against hard freeze.

This is exactly normal, in my twenty years of experience at dwelling here. The change comes mid-October. The past few years, the heat extended itself toward November. Not this time.

So many things did not get done, in that month of weather that was neither too hot nor cold. Instead of incremental progress, the line was merely held, in the most urgent areas.

In others, it fell apart just like the battlefront at Vulhedar, and concurrently … it turns out that for the most part, text threads are the new hotel california–you can check out of them any time you like, but you can never leave.

Sticking a fork into the notifications is the next best half-measure available.

There’s just the right song for the micro-zeitgeist, meteorological, psychological, interpersonal …

Lock the gates Goofy.

Take my hand. Thank you so much, Lia. Bless your eternal soul, Warren.

(A thing I did not know before:
“Splendid isolation is a term used to describe the 19th-century British diplomatic practice of avoiding permanent alliances from 1815 to 1902”.)

Ah Neutrality, sing of its many virtues once more, but as we wait alone together for peace in our time (whatever peace could mean, livin’ in the heart of the war machine)–please to be sending the lawyers, the guns, and the money–you take up the spill-guitar in the first place precisely because you are an inarticulate person, trying to make it one day at a time

After the Fall.

Black Woman: “This message is for Barack ‘ain’t-never-did-a-fuckass-thing’-for n*****s-in-8-years-he-was-in-the-White-House-ever” Obama.
Keep black men’s name out yo motherfuckin’ mouth.”

Black Man: “Being a young black voter, it feels like the Democrats are constantly trying to gaslight me about my own reality.
We are sick and tired of being expected to Feel Good with Barack Obama or–now–they’re trying to put the ovarian version of Barack Obama up there … ”

Source

Saying these things myself would open me to being called a racist (or by extension a misogynist or an anti-semite or all those legitimately scary things).

But you can’t realistically expect to get away with calling Dr. Gabor a Jew-hater.

Neither can you validly call Ms TONYxTWO prejudiced against black people, without contortions that would shame an Olympic gymnast.

You can, and maybe will, ignore them, though.

If not at your peril, then perhaps merely at that of your Interests.

(updating the next day, just to say: thank you for being the better man and calling–one love)

Okay. I won’t. For now–out of respect for you.

I don’t understand why you’re asking me not to though.

–Not everything is a Celebration, alas.

–Jacking that thread to make it seem like it is … that felt gamey and suss to me honestly.

–There are people who feel differently about how that medium Ought Be Used (the Utah Man doesn’t want ‘politics’ but posting a meme about the KKK somehow strikes him as apolitical and mere Levity).

–I would like to have a place that starts with Everybody, of course, but where the sensitive can feel free to remove themselves by using the “Delete and Block this Conversation” feature at their own discretion, no noses out of joint and no missing out on the non-controversial happy happy joy joy things in the Safe Space.

And where I can get away from the palpable chill and subject-changing hand-waving that happens a majority of the time when I speak what’s in my heart.

Like I do here.

So explain like I’m five to me, please and at your leisure, why I shouldn’t have that.

You decide.

To me … it’s yes or no depending on where you decide to wall off ‘politics’ from … cat memes or whatever.

Elitist Detachment From Reality

There’s plenty of electoral-adjacent politics in it, but IMHO this is a story of the increasingly divergent two Americas.

The America of manicured lawns in Arlington, Virginia, let’s say, and the other, of somebody’s dead couch on the banks of the Puerco a mile from where I sit, or somebody’s ripped-away propane tank on the banks of some river running past Chimney Rock, North Carolina.

If you live in the Arlington-America or some cozy cottage in the Hamptons, then of course you’re much more likely to vote for the person that represents all your life stands for–No Matter Who, or how they even ended up being the nominee.

Most places are not those places. That’s what makes you elite, and why your life is full of Celebrations. You’re glad about it, and maybe you have every right to be. Maybe you feel you’ve Earned it, and … maybe you have indeed. Bootstraps. Beating the odds. Rising up from the humble circumstances of this or that shithole to be a Success according to the logic of the Successful, thanks to the help of this or that Saint.

The shitholes still exist, nevertheless, out there beyond the gate and the guard shack. They are growing, becoming the norm across the fruited plains, and becoming ever-shittier by the month.

It costs ever-more to live in them, and it is ever-harder to figure out a way to do it and break even, much less prosper.

If you do live in them your perspectives are going to diverge sharply from the perspectives taken for granted within the air-conditioned studios of ABC News, or Fox or The Hill or whatever.

You will believe, and act, and vote, in accordance with your Interests as you perceive them, either way.

Thousands Trapped in Jabalia as Israel Bombardment Intensifies

Jabalia, what’s that?

The sanitized Wikipedia version:

“Jabalia Camp is a Palestinian refugee camp established in 1948 by the United Nations to house those displaced by the 1948 Palestinian expulsion”.

Expulsion, what the fuck?

Shhh, don’t fuss. They have it linked for you. Yes, even they.

“In the 1948 Palestine war, more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs – about half of Mandatory Palestine’s predominantly Arab population – were expelled or fled from their homes, at first by Zionist paramilitaries, and after the establishment of Israel, by its military.

Dozens of massacres targeting Arabs were conducted by Israeli military forces and between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were destroyed.

Village wells were poisoned in a biological warfare programme codenamed Operation Cast Thy Bread and properties were looted to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning”.

Oh … yeah.

Go right ahead and think what you want, about the goodness or badness of that little manufactured state down Galilee way.

What I care about here and now is … Us; and Our Interests, naturally.

Russell Dobular, Jewish man, from the video:

“All moral authority this country has ever had is going out the window.”

A concurring opinion from his cohost Keaton Weiss, Jewish man:

“Like you said, it is now an atrocity to deny it’s a genocide.”

Do you remember our dear friend Dr. Gabor Mate’, Jewish man, survivor of the first holocaust, and brilliant trauma expert?

He’s on board with the same sentiments:

“Zionism will be looked upon as one of the greatest disasters in Jewish history“.

“It’s like we’re watching Auschwitz on TikTok.”

Given that all this is so fundamental to how we live and have always lived in this lifetime, I just can’t get too excited about the blue lady’s free school lunch plan or the fact that the orange man might get in the way of your abortion.

Either the whole country is completely insane and lost, or I am.

I know you’ll make that call in perfect consonance with your own Interests, whatever they may truly be.

I continue to work out my own answer to the question from one trash day to the next.

Well I’m goin’ out west
Where the wind blows tall

‘Cause Tony Franciosa
Used to date my ma

They got some money out there
They’re giving it away

I’m gonna do what I want
And I’m gonna get paid
Do what I want
And I’m gonna get paid

Little brown sausages
Lying in the sand
I ain’t no extra baby
I’m a leading man

Well, my parole officer
Will be proud of me
With my Olds 88
And the devil on a leash

I know karate, Voodoo too
I’m gonna make myself available to you
I don’t need no make up
I got real scars
I got hair on my chest
I look good without a shirt

Well I don’t lose my composure
In a high speed chase
Well my friends think I’m ugly
I got a masculine face
I got some dragstrip courage
I can really drive a bed
I’m gonna change my name to Hannibal
Or maybe just Alex

Gonna drive all night
Take some speed
I’m gonna wait for the sun
To shine down on me

I cut a hole in my roof
the shape of a heart
And I’m goin’ out west
where they’ll appreciate me

Goin’ out west

Goin’ out west

So I wonder if it landed with such a thud because it was Too Soon?

Too on the nose?

Just fell into the sterile soil of an audience who has already had it Up To Here with me for mostly unrelated reasons?

In the spirit of authentic reflection I have to at least allow for the possibility that it simply wasn’t funny.

But … that’s not true. It was.

How do I know it was?

Same way I know that everyone in the government is a reptile from outer space.

This new philosophy is making me feel better about my world in so many ways.

This fresh way of thinking and feeling, it’s … in my interest, yeah, I guess you could say.

Now.

Toward reconciliation, toward racial justice, and toward the embrace of the common weal of every American heedless of Creed or Color or Status, plorable or utterly deplorable, in sickness and in health, here is a song for the expiation or attempted exorcism of our collective original sins.

***

And old Joe did and said as he would
Took all the shopping carts from the mall
And took ’em to Utah
which was Zionism

He built an empire out of the desert
Out of the dust and the sand, just like Las Vegas
But he never took the rap
that the mafia did

And he thought the Indians were some lost 13 dudes
But he didn’t treat ’em any better
And they were never
on his side

They drove their historic pickup trucks out into the desert
Into a ditch along the side of the road
And acted like they were drunk
all the time

— Camper Van Beethoven, “The History Of Utah“

I clean the house, I pet the cats. I stay home and spill, and check the constantly chiming phone and frequently curse. I run out for jug water. I return quickly and order the very best organic beef, online of course.

I stay very informed, though you might say misinformed, malinformed, disinformed; whatever.

I try with mixed success to make progress on becoming Energetic, on organizing, on tackling the bathroom in one last valiant push. On cutting into that last September footage before October ends.

This morning I went over to 270toWin and played the electoral college video game.

My half-ass conclusion after doing so is that it makes no practical difference who you vote for, unless you happen to live in Pennsylvania, which some politi-wit once described as two blue urban cities with a couple of hundred miles of Alabama in between.

As a corollary, I doubt very much we will know the outcome of the stupidest election of our lifetime before we go to bed.

Then, regardless of how long it takes or who the System claims won, a new round of No Practical Difference will commence.

Zelensky will continue to fade, away from Kyiv and toward Miami. The little brown bodies will continue to pile up. The $750 checks will circle the drain toward this or that bit of stopgap consumerism and credit card balances will continue to rise, because there is no other way to Make It, for more and more democrats, republicans, and disenchanted protest voters.

Again I will clean the house.

With a bit of character or luck or both, I may poop in the new toilet at last as the chill descends and the leaves fly until only bare branches reach for the sky.

US forces have not been engaged in combat in Israel. Mr Biden has previously said he had ‘no plans or intentions to put US boots on the ground in combat’…

But the story is only a story because he’s changed his “mind”.

Meanwhile, the madman who runs the nominal democracy down there for US is telling UN peacekeepers to get the fuck out of Lebanon, and beginning a program of actively attacking them to emphasize the request.

Project Ukraine may be winding down but things are just getting really started in Greater Arabia.

And any criticism of hurricane response at home is Misinformation.

Just so you know.

How the Doña Rosa Tortilla Press Is Made

2024’s BEST BOOK For Molding Young Minds

Headlights
pointed
at the dawn
We were sure we’d never see an end to it all

and I don’t even care to shake these zipper blues
and we don’t know just where our bones will rest.
To dust, I guess, forgotten and absorbed into the
Earth below.

I know you better than you fake it.
Faster than we thought we’d go
Beneath the sound of hope, hung down
with the freaks and ghouls

***

Learn all you need to learn, from some other man’s poetry for days, but if you quit there, what are you?

You are that, dear self-appointed belletrist, which tilts at the windmill of trying to awaken ghouls.

Stop. Look. Listen again to the sound of your own headlights
(left foot tapping up the brights)
and re-point them once more
at The Dawn.

It sounds so pure and simple, right?

But to do it means having to leave the babies crying and dying in the collapsed wreckage of the places they lived. It means letting the liars get away with their lies; saying okay without the moving of lips as they make off with the braaiins of those you loved.

Okay? Nah. Not.

***

I will never be okay again.

If I live on it will be addicted

to the remembered dream drug of a pink sunrise that never once comes again, jabbing the needle deep and plunging flooding veins with the question of whether that’s a life worth living at all.

Maybe the roller girl can still Skateaway and god bless her for her young fresh escape.

I am old-painted in pointed by my own hand. The hand of fate.

Fatima also lives with this lesson until she dies.

The hand of fate brings a son to this house.

No one knew what role he would play even he.

I will tell the secret.

In this world ghouls rule sovereign, and so it becomes unfashionable to speak of the link between genius and madness. “It’s quite overstated,” they say, “romantic rubbish, pish tosh”.

You must see that real genius is Nothing at all, except seeing more and around and past the lie.

You must see that the price of such seeing is to be cast out past sane, beyond the beam of one remaining headlight, out of the reach of decorum and politesse, and that then and there

the link does quietly abide.

Knowing the secret truth provides no light of salvation.

Walking on in twilight stumbling over clods is the blood of the lamb.

I am man enough

to watch this

and admit I need mental help; man enough to live with the fact

that none is coming, because I can’t afford the right insurance

and my government spent the money on getting people dead instead.

So hundreds of billions down that rathole, ultimately buying nothing except inflated stock prices for weapons manufacturers and the generous goodwill of the donor class.

Tens of billions more going out the door as we speak to the new and improved kind of Nazis and their carpet-bombing of the southern Sudetenland.

But oh! In the heartland, a hurricane blew your house away and buried Granny under floodwater?

Ain’t that a shame. You have our deepest sympathies.

Here’s a nice crisp form for you to fill out, for $750 in aid. We’ll check it over, means-test your application, and get back to you, either way, promise. Promise!

***

I try my honest best, to translate your indistinct warbling about all this, in my head, on the fly. Not that you’re talking to me, because you’re not … I’m just trying to eavesdrop. To overhear.

Sometimes I catch a phrase or two: “good guys” … “dawn’s early light” … “save democracy” …

And all those snippets make me want to do is stop even trying to understand, where you’re coming from, any more, my dear, because the vague bits are so disheartening and paint you in such an ugly light.

I’ve loved you longtime, and so I know … you can’t possibly be that stupid–what’s the alternative to that, then?

Those god damn lizard people must have got inside your head somehow, in the years I was too busy working to pay you enough mind.

Bad lizards. Bad lizards. The scariest zombie movie I ever saw.

Madness.

Do I choose it, or does it choose me?

U.S. phases out project Ukraine

Just in case you still had any Interest in that other game of misadventure from a few years back.

“The game’s inventor, Elizabeth Magie, would have sent herself straight to jail if she’d lived to know just how influential today’s twisted version of her game turned out to be.”

And we don’t know
just where our bones will rest
To dust, I guess
Forgotten and Absorbed

into the earth below

Axelrod: Rich Dems Will Find a Way to Vote After Helene, MAGA Won’t

That should work out nicely for you, Dave.

“The North Carolina National Guard said a Black Hawk helicopter crew was grounded after an incident in which they flew low over a Hurricane Helene donation and supply area, blowing over three tents and scattering items in the air. Video of the incident surfaced after the copter hovered over the supply area in Burnsville on Sunday”.

That’s the story. But watching the video, it appears that the NCNG is trying to accept the blame for the destruction of aid perpetrated by an unmarked black heli that isn’t theirs.

I don’t know what to believe and I’m not telling you what to believe.

I do know that I’m wasting no more tears on any selfless patriotic heroes for the next little while.

” … a telltale symptom of a dying Empire.”

–Keaton, toward the end of this one:

FEMA Secretary: Relief Fund OUT OF CASH Halfway Through Hurricane Season

Pair that with the spokesLiar KJP’s comments and handwaving, in direct contradiction: “Everything’s Fine!” and then explain to me again how these corrupt tools are what we have to vote for if we want to “save democracy”.

There’s less to save every day going by, under the rule of the very same self-appointed Saviors.

Chappell Roan Pisses Off Libs By Failing To Endorse Kam

I couldn’t name a single song by either Chappell or Taylor. So this is not music criticism.

It is to say that I choose Team C anyway, not only because Fuck The Government, but also because fuck the centrists like this one who went to Georgetown and throw around words like “horrific” and “privileged” without having any earthly clue what real horror looks like or what privilege even consists of.

Exactly like the well-paid White House spokesLiar screeching about “misinformation”, when it is clear to everyone in the room that she doesn’t know what it means, but desperately attempting to use it as a deflector shield anyway moments before hauling ass out of the briefing room, utterly humiliated and yet somehow still stupidly defiant.

America, everybody.

***

While we’re on the vitally important subject of pop stars and their political opinions, I might as well come out and endorse Waylon Jennings over Garth Brooks right now.

And I hope Neil Young will remember, a southern man don’t need him around, anyhow.

(You’ll have to pry my copy of Powderfinger out of my cold dead hands though.

When the time comes.)

Once upon a time it was in your interests and mine to believe in a jehovah.

But interests evolved, sometimes gradually and sometimes abruptly, and we both found new religions.

The Truth, The Truth. Who’s got the truth, and when, and why?

***

A year ago I thought it might be in my interests to make videos and post them on that Platform.

A month ago all faith in that idea was lost.

Today I’m re-considering the proposition with a cold and sober eye.

***

I spill therefore I am. It’s in my interests in the broadest sense, not so much economically as …

It’s central to my new and improved religion, and I have Faith in this Creed.

The Creed is the Creed it is, because … I believe

it is in

my interest to thus believe.

We care a lot, and it is a kind of crazy, finally, after all.

Crazy. Just like Willie told it long ago.

For thinking
that my love could hold you.
Crazy for trying, and crazy for crying
and I’m crazy for loving you.

Follow-up to a story briefly mentioned recently.

Censorship or Tech Glitch: Glenn Diesen Readmitted To YouTube After Channel Deletion

The deletion happened in a wave of clear censorship. Lots of other channels were not “re-admitted”. Does the fact that Prof. Diesen got his channel back mean that there was a tech glitch besides?

No one knows. The Googlebeast ain’t saying and never does and never will. Even Orwell would have to shake his head.

***

So much of what I am trying to say comes down to this.

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

Then beyond that we get slapped with this concept of “our” interests, which doesn’t exist now, if it ever did. For it to exist we would have to believe in an “Us”, and there is no Us; possibly not even a US, viewed from a purely functional standpoint.

Prof. Diesen’s interests (and “freedom”) don’t have anything (or very little) to do with the interests of the Beast of a Platform he is building upon.

Your interests as someone who might need an abortion someday (or feels intense identification or solidarity with those who could) has nothing to do with my interest in seeing the shitty system keep its shitty promises regarding student loan cancellation.

You might see Vlad as an impaler who wants to violate your way of life, or the similar way of life you want for someone dwelling in Lviv or Tblisi.

Whereas I might have more feeling for the Russian-speakers in Sevastopol who were persecuted (sometimes to death) by the western Ukrainian nazi-leaning groups who just happen to have been installed and propped up by people like Nuland and Blinken, professional-managerial ‘democrats’ who live lives that look a lot like yours.

I might choose to have more sympathy for the displaced and bombed people of Palestine.

You might get furious at the notion that “Palestine” even exists, and place your sympathies with the descendants of those interred at Auschwitz no matter what.

We see things the way we see them from the perspective of our Interests, or what we think our interests might be in some abstract or identified version of reality.

Do Lizard People run everything?

You might say: that’s too ridiculous to even treat as if it deserves a real answer.

David Icke might say: I have incontrovertible proof that they do.

I say: striving after the literal answer to the question is irrelevant either way–all I really care about is whether the metaphor fits well with the naked facts.

All three of us come to the question with our economic interests front and center, and if there isn’t a direct connection between the concept of reptile rulers and our wallets, then we approach it with a somewhat more vague idea of how things would look if there was.

So you choose to embrace the particular helicopter in North Carolina that was flown by Guardsmen.

So I choose to embrace the narrative of the particular helicopter flown by the guy who was threatened with arrest if he kept flying it.

Are you one of the good guys or not? Am I?

Goodness, in this sense, doesn’t exist.

Interests always exist.

“Our interests” differ, for pretty stark and practical reasons that are not hard to see …

if you’re choosing to honestly look hard enough.

(once more)

Very smart coverage of the hopelessness of the upcoming exercise in Democracy!

with special attention given this time to

–the hollowness of MAGA, and

–the death throes of valid american masculinity.

Never be that horse, amen.

***

Loosely related addendum: Sh0e has some pretty fresh takes on The Rise Of AI Girlfriends

“words that some of these people have never heard in their entire lives”

***

Source

What Would JC Do?

In the video about Being Tired that I linked the other day, the narrator invented an illustrative character called Johnny Caveman to describe the differences between how we live today and how we lived (throughout 95% of our time as Humanity) as hunter-gatherers.

As a shorthand for one of my core beliefs about primal anarchy, then, I have started to ask myself: What would Johnny Caveman do?

Faced with stark current realities, would Johnny Caveman Get A Job? Probably not.

Faced with modern pressures, would Johnny Caveman take any kind of supplements at all? I doubt it.

But would Johnny Caveman, dumped off in some big city downtown, go insane?

Very possibly. I mean … give me one good reason why he shouldn’t go batshit.

I know that I have felt increasingly less sane, whenever I have lately been forced to be around big crowds of people, even in a nice place like Pike’s Market in Seattle–and being exposed to crowding is only one small facet of the horrors of modernity.

Based on those kinds of experiences and reflections, I think I’m going to make the rational choice to allow myself the luxury of going mad, if and when I need to do so.

I’m going to stand there laughing hysterically and foam at the mouth if that feels like an appropriate response in any given moment to life in this hellscape we call Civilized.

I’m going to soberly and rationally choose to believe that our rulers are secretly lizard people, if that explanation makes more sense than any other–whether or not that much-mocked Lizard Conspiracy is literally true or not. The same with 9-11, what the hell. The same for UFOs and all those assassinations.

Now it’s not the only reason I’m making this choice, but I can see how it might have some advantages for our deal.

Specifically, if I’ve chosen the path of mental illness, then you can’t very well be pissed off every time I open my mouth and say yet another thing you think is outrageous, stupid, or whack.

Because of course it is–it’s nuts because I’m nuts. I’ve studied the way you’ve reacted before, to non-violent head cases like I plan to become, if and when situationally necessary.

You’re not miffed and cold-shouldered.

On the contrary. You’re supportive and sympathetic, maybe even to a fault at times, and I completely related to it too, almost as if I still had a heart and brain that weren’t so sick.

I think that might feel good for me. Better. Which sounds narcissistic, perhaps even a little sociopathic, manipulative … All kinds of Crazy like that, yeah? Perfectly legit.

I can just add those things to my diagnosis, and be grateful for the careful caring insights.

I know that you love me and want all the best for me, and especially for me to get Well Again so I can finally have a happy, and productive, and … adjusted Life.

Now I have to warn you; it could be a real long hard road, for me to get that Well.

I might have to take a few cats to the river and drown them, so I can once more be Normal.

I might need to say yes to orthodontia and therapy and getting my vaccines updated and regular haircuts and commercial flight and staying in resorts and getting back up on Zuckerberg’s platform, from my shiny iPhone and not some retarded retro Linux desktop for fuckssake. I might have to … take your guns away gosh an’ shut up with the mis the dis the ick information already, might hafta wear a mask when they tell me to–not wear a mask when they say masks are now the threat to Security okay yeah okay got it got it

I might have to register as a Democrat again, or at least become a respectable Lincoln Log Republican like that admirably successful businessman Dick Cheney, or his cute reformed little painter friend. I might have to start shrugging dismissively when the subject of genocide comes up, and learn to argue that what looks a lot like ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter is really, in Reality, only good old-fashioned godly self-defense.

Figure out what my pronouns are … Put a blue and yellow flag in my bio–or wait, is that still a thing? I’m so far far out of the loop … loopy … Anyway, a Science placard out in the yard, you know, “in this household we believe these lives matter”, however it goes, whatever. Grow deep in my faith that China capitalists are so much worse than the ones we grew here in the Home of the Brave, and fuck that Putin, to death I tell you!

They had all been warned.

I might have to stop believing that I’m some kind of sage, or artist, or misunderstood genius, or Johnny Caveman, Anachronistic Superhero. I might have to Get Real.

I’m sure it’ll all be worth it though. I Heed The Call.

So very

very sure

it will, i mean …

it must

it must, right

i mean noidea who ancient beardy guy on keyboards is but itsa warm m’heart that he was there,

representin

pour les grottes

The full video I snagged this screenshot from is full of exactly the same kind of good old neighborly country boys as the one with Jefe, posted earlier.

Only these shitkickers, deplorable though you may think them, are rapidly getting pissed off, and starting to become truly radicalized.

For the record, I don’t approve of calling Little Petey a sodomite.

But I approve even less of him holding power and wielding it like a venal selfish top in an abusive relationship.

In which Jefe, the canonical nephew, is appreciated.

Why I Left Matt’s OffRoad Recovery, first vid on his new channel.

***

I slept almost another full night’s worth on top of all that napping.

The Three-Indoor-Cat proposition is beginning to integrate itself.

Out in the yard I need to get on snatching up the LBK and getting him to the showcase in Flagstaff so he can have someone to love him proper.

And there’s the cheaper-internet guy coming on Tuesday and that truck to unload Wednesday.

None of it is Life according to the Plan.

I don’t mind. Every day above ground you know.

My sleep schedule has been far more stable than usual, for longer than normal.

Seven and a half hours, starting around 10 PM, for the last three or four days.

But even so, I spent a lazy Saturday napping off and on all day. It felt natural and right.

(A very interesting video on what might be going on: Why you’re so tired)

During the full siesta I hung around with my pal Max Blumenthal, noted self-hating Jew.

We visited my dreamtime kitchen, which I’d never seen. It was old-fashioned, very tiny and efficient. I fixed the garage door.

Then we went to a farm and surfed on the backs of small squat pigs. Very normal stuff.

Afterwards, Max made a video about it.

Just before I woke up to dusk, he was saying that my wife was the salt of the earth.

Apparently my subconscious thinks so too.

You may well be bored to death by my frequent posting of interviews with this man.

Why Prof. Jeffrey Sachs is NOT Voting for Trump or Kamala

But given the topic, and the fact that we are now within a month of the stupidest “most important election of our lifetime” of our lifetime, I thought it was worth posting one more, in order to say:

Professor Sachs is not some wild-eyed goon with an opinion and a tiktok account.

He has been very much a foreign policy Insider–for decades.

For that reason and others, many on the nominally liberal or progressive left don’t like or trust him. Not because he’s ‘turned into’ a moderate centrist tool of the state, you understand, but because in important ways he always was one, in spite of his fairly consistent dove-ish views on the question of war.

Either way. I believe he’s trying to be a good man and that he’s gotten better at being one over time. (I can relate.) More importantly … he knows a hell of a lot more about how the geopolitical world really works than you or I do, or ever will.

I’d have to dig to be sure, but I believe he voted for not only Obama but Biden too, in the spirit of that old-time lesser-evil religion.

The Dems have lost a lot of votes, among Arabs in Michigan, among black and latino and just young people everywhere, among old white men who bother to read carefully like he, and I–people sick of the bullshit and of the way They can always find an excuse for a war, and of perpetually living in an imperial war State … the routine banal human sacrifice that kills not only little brown kids over there, but all kinds of regular Americans one way and another right here.

And still, they say, it’s very close, “razor-thin margins in the swing states”, lord jesus.

Thus, apparently, things are going to be decided on the basis of issues that barely matter any more compared to that one: identity politics, culture war issues; whether to sacrifice Amendment One to our own fears of ‘misinformation’, whether to sacrifice Amendment Two to our half-rational fear of alienated outsiders living in this insanity being driven to mass shootings.

Amendment Four, of course, is long gone, and though it was deeply threatened under Bush Junior, it was our own dear Barry O who slit its throat for good.

And now we are treated to the horrifying yet predictable spectacle of Cheneys for the Kam, and everything old is new again.

I’m gonna miss that Bill of Rights thing. Nice while it lasted.

***

If you don’t live in a swing state, vote your true conscience, or sit this one out because your vote doesn’t matter anyway.

Following Jeffrey’s example.

If you do live in a swing state, vote your true conscience because duopolist democracy has rigged the game to the point where ‘who wins’ matters only at the furthest and most symbolic margins, when and if it matters at all.

Following mine.

Going Stein.

Not just that, but a 3WMan at the start of a three-day weekend–which is damn rare, when you don’t have a legit job.

Pascal again. Today it’s Neutrality Studies, writ large.

Alrighty. Look, saith he.

You cannot be neutral if you are not first independent. If you’re a puppet or a proxy or a satellite or colonized, you’re going to be pulled in on whatever side your master is on–you’ll Follow him/her.

If you are independent, and also truly neutral, then both parties to a conflict will expend some effort to pull you toward their point of view and position in that conflict.

It’s happened to you more than once, at the interpersonal and familial levels. (I’m sure examples will leap immediately to mind.) It works much the same geopolitically. According to Pascal’s Science.

When I cry Duopoly! and refuse to vote for either half of it, it doesn’t mean that I’m refusing to take a position. Quite the contrary.

I’m just taking my own position rather than that of a ‘party’, a position that happens to be shall we say … Non-Aligned.

To any demand, or coercive or cajoling pressure to move toward this side or that side … I have to say it like the man in the video says it:

“No, ain’t working for us. Over here, we do our own thing.”

The Armenian guy points out how sometimes “non-aligned” becomes a factional entity unto itself. Even a ‘movement’. That’s worth keeping in mind, belletrist. (Also, Pascal, I don’t really see how ‘territorial integrity’ and ‘self-rule’ are de facto contradictory at all, but let’s move on.)

That damn China. It’s the closest thing possible to an autarky within Modernity, and man does that inconvenient truth make the Merkins edgy. The Unipolar moment, ever since ’89, has never been a moment of peace–the Unipole has no damn use at all for peace–and as unipolarity hitches and seizes and dies it’s going to get much worse, before it ever, if it ever, gets better.

Tensions and conflict are nothing more than disguised opportunities for Exploitation. Just ask the Rand Corporation, or any wicked dipshit western think-tank you care to favor with your faith.

“You don’t want to be a tool.” Christ in a bucket what resonance that has, of a Friday evening where we all sit poised on the final brink ennit. Bet your Golden BMW on that little gem, speaking of faith.

We close with a question.

How can setting off exploding pagers in public and private places, killing children and bad guys alike in the process, NOT be an act of state-sponsored terrorism?

It’s rhetorical.

So you’re off the hook.

Maybe even entitled to be neutral, rather than a collaborationist.

That sweet ineffable place!
Where the rubber of cheering for another militarist neo-con
meets the manatee tears on the washed-out interstate road
over to. the asheville

(Happy ninth Spilliversary to us all my loves)

Ohhhhhh

Please her, please him, buy gifts
Don’t steal, don’t lift
–Twenty years of schoolin’
And they put you on the day shift

Look out kid
They keep it all hid

Better jump down a manhole;
Light yourself a candle

It’s been a real productive kind of day.

I got up and reconnected the drain for the kitchen sink and did a big load of dishes.

Then I took a long hot shower.

And then, since that was all going so well, I plugged in the washing machine and trepidatiously ran a load for the first time in a few months. For Science.

There was some gurgling, to be sure, but no flood. Not even a little one. So I ran a second load to be sure, and shitfire, no more laundromats for this folksy Knucklehead. In the short term anyway.

There are still unanswered questions about the plumbing. They will need to be addressed, before I can feel good about going ahead with the install of the new toilet. But it’s just the toilet now. Life is going to be easier, this weekend.

After that I went out for water and avocados. I ran into Steakhouse Jake. We talked about Saint Julian, and Jeffrey Sachs too. Unlike ANY other person in my real life ever, Jake brings the subject of Assange up routinely (I think because I brought him up first, in class, back when Jake was my student). He asked me if I’d quit the YouTubes and I told him no, even though there was no video in September, I wasn’t done. I am admittedly not sure why I’m not done …

But we didn’t get into that, in the checkout line.

On the way back to the bunker I saw a random sign for a Senior Health Fair and so I drove to it.

Things were just about over when I got there. But this one big Christian and/or Mormon guy, older than me I’m guessing, rushed up with a paper he wanted me to fill out. The paper wanted to know if I might be interested in meals, served there at the SeniorCenter/FoodBank, at reasonable prices (I got the impression they were going after some kind of grant for that).

So I told the form that I was strictly organic keto, and unless they were too, I’d probably not make many appearances at dinnertime–once at least though, just to see.

I handed the paper in to the good man and I said Hey Good Man. I got a couple of buckets full of rice and beans and stuff that are more than I can eat. Could you make use of them here?

He said sure, bring ’em. So I did, right away.

As we were stocking his pantry with my dry goods, I asked him what else I could do to help.

He said there was a truck coming Wednesday at 9 AM and I could help unload it.

So I will do that.

That’s the job. Sorry not sorry for the clickbait title.

I’m looking forward to lumping freight, and to seeing where else these mysterious moments might lead.

The Less You Care, The Happier You’ll Be | Taoist Wisdom For An Overly Serious World

A lot of what friend Einzelgänger says in these 13 minutes is obvious truism, and yet there’s still a whole lot to unpack to my eye.

The Less You Care, The Happier You Will Be. Is that true? In essence yes, I think so.

Does that mean that the proper path for a human life is caring less and less until we stop caring at all?

I’m far less certain of that, far less ready to commit to it.

***

One phrase that jumped out at me while watching was “self-exploitation”. That is what we obsessively do most of the time, right?

But what if any one of us were useless, and thus without anything in our selves to exploit, ending the vicious cycle?

I don’t mind being poor nearly as much as I minded having to do all those ugly boring things required in order to be comfortable or ‘middle-class’.

My life is not problem-free.

I am not always (or even often) “happy”.

But this is, still, better.

In a sense I choose when to stop caring and be happy, and when to care passionately and thus be inevitably miserable.

As in the earlier post: going off into a brain-dead bliss while shooting up or snorting an old movie with only token attempts to critically analyze its message …

and then turning around to face the stupidity and evil in the Way we’ve chosen, and in some cases have been forced, to live, and becoming enraged by it, or scared of it, or profoundly sad about it, or all of those things at once.

I wouldn’t have nearly that much flexibility, or that many options if I was trying to hold down a job and be a useful and productive self-exploiting member of that very same broken society.

Or if I had a bunch of kids to raise instead of a few random cats …

Or if I was doing what it takes to be able to afford to drive a shiny new problem-free pickup truck, instead of a lovely old piece of cranky shit.

So I have intuitively (not-rationally) decided to become a lovely old piece of cranky shit myself.

I am living the life of a useless tree.

I am always striving after being honest about how I feel about that fact.

With reasonably authentic self-examined clarity I conclude that in the present moment

I’m fine with it.

It really was a Wednesday, but I don’t think that mattered in a significant way.

I could be wrong. But anyway, in spite of the name of the day of the week, I was not expecting to have spiritual assault and battery committed on me in the supermarket. By Wednesday.

Wednesday Addams.

First thing was, I saw an ancient Navajo man wearing a t-shirt that just said Wednesday, with a picture of Christina Ricci all dressed up in neo-gothic fashions below the letters.

I didn’t give it much thought until I cruised by the clearance rack.

On it, among the expired spices and unsuccessful gadgets, was a shelf of cereal.

WEDNESDAY cereal. For fifty percent off. With exactly the same graphic on the front of the box as the Navajo senior’s shirt.

I clipped a coupon for rib tips and headed out to the van to sit behind the wheel and ingest them.

I ate them and thought about things.

Conspiritually; theoretically.

There’s nothing too evil about either the Wednesday character or Ms. Ricci, as far as we know.

But the message being peddled by the capitalists who made that movie (or whatever it was), and who put that graphic on a t-shirt, and a cereal box–quite possibly a bona fide instance of serious, subtle, demonic influence.

It’s only a theory, but I’m betting it’s right.

I can say that having never seen WEDNESDAY.

I watched the original TV series, and I saw the cartoons in the New Yorker that came out even before it.

I watched the films with Raul and Angelica. I laughed, I cried.

I don’t need to see the latest re-tread to know what it, underneath the slick cardboard, is trying to sell me.

The meta-message of the Addams franchise is simple.

We know you don’t feel like the others. We know you feel different. You are different, darling, to the point of Special, and that’s why your life is so, so very hard.

Come watch this show. Come wear the shirt. Come buy this cereal: ‘for your kids’.

Do these things like a million other consumers will do them, because–and this is a solemn promise–Non-Conformity is, against all appearances, deeply cool. Beyond cool. Non-conformity is deeply human.

Come on aboard, I promise you. You won’t hurt the horse.

Treat him well, we feed him well … where was I? Something flashed in my eyes there a second.

A seventeen-dollar movie ticket and a bucket of stale popcorn will fix you riiiight up. You’ll still feel different, but life won’t seem as hard for a little while, because you will feel special, too.

Just like Wednesday Addams, professionally cool non-conformist.

It’s true that there is less spiritual nutrition in this message than in the popcorn.

But by the time the effect wears off, we will have the next product ready to go, to soothe you all over again.

***

Now I have to say clearly: There is really nothing seriously wrong with the message being sold to you here.

Non-conformity is cool. Non-conformity is a path toward becoming more human.

Or it could be.

If non-conformity genuinely consisted of goth fashions and spooky art-school takes on life, and if being cool dependably happened in a world where the many twisted kinds of humanity always triumphed, after much scripted adversity, over the boring conformists in a conclusive and (briefly) satisfying way …

We wouldn’t just have a movie here. We’d have a spiritual path, maybe even a religion.

I regret to inform you, sorry it’s my job …

It doesn’t. In fact, what this movie and this marketing campaign do is to sell you (through your feeling of being different) on a passive and safe version of non-conformity that changes nothing, either inside your heart, or out there in the real world.

Now you say to me: “Thanks Alex, you buzzkill fuck, for taking all the pitiful little joys out of my life and leaving me hung over like a sugarpoison junkie the day after Ice Cream Month is over.

What about your glorious Humphrey Bogart, asshole?”

I’m here to testify my lamb.

***

The meta-message of a Bogart movie is, believe it or not, pretty much the same, except that the demographic being targeted isn’t those who are angsty teenage girls, either literally or at heart.

I’m thinking in particular of Bogart as Sam Spade, because I watched all those movies, and read the books they were based on (penned by Raymond Chandler) avidly and seriously. But out beyond Chandler, as you know, I still watch Bogart–I posted a link to one the other day and I hadn’t forgotten it.

The message of a Chandler-Bogart movie, and most film noir in general is:

1) No one here gets out alive.

2) It can’t be won, the way the game is run, but if you choose to stay, you end up playing anyway.

3) Crime never pays, but if you’re only looking to get paid, you’re even worse than the criminals.

4) Damned if you can’t look a hell of a lot cooler in a trenchcoat with a cigarette even so. Here’s looking at you, kid. We’ll always have Paris.

Again: not evil. Not even, as far as it goes, “wrong”.

But just as Wednesday, in its portrayal of non-conformity, actually pulls our attention far away from the brutal truth of what it means to be a real non-conformist …

So too does The Maltese Falcon make thinking about any other option besides Staying and Playing Anyway literally unthinkable.

In the world it creates, you are trapped and doomed, to either being gunned down like a petty crook if you’re bad, or (best case scenario) learning to live with the searing pain of alienation, seeing too much, and loneliness … if you’re good.

But what about the non-Spade Bogart, like they did in Key Largo? Sometimes, the hero gets the pretty girl, even if she is, well, unripened, underage like Lauren Bacall was during filming. Surely true love triumphing over the bad men means that all the noir anguish and being Alone can be considered banished for all time?

Maybe.

But so far as the movie being made and sold as concerned, that spiritual triumph is strictly off-camera, and you yourself have to take on faith what happens to the happy couple as the decades unfold. As Time Goes By.

On that … you can rely.

I know it’s not much, and I’m sorry–for us both. I apologize to you.

I am sorry for myself, too.

And for that self-pitying foolishness among many other reasons, you can’t count on my beautiful words and insightful prose–imagine, not even that!– to save you either.

Alas, the real Bogart named names, when called before Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee.

Where have all the real, righteous cowboys gone?

Out to the West there’s a trail that leads … outside the Overton window Hollywood provides.

Or the one God sells.

Or the foul politician you’ll be voting for, regardless of their color, gender, or name.

The very best you can hope for is a frothing Jimmy Dore, or a razor-sharp Glenn Greenwald.

But your heart will still sink, when JD starts doing commercials for owning gold, and bitcoin, and the healing power of reverse mortgages. In this uncertain age.

It will still fall into your boots when GG starts talking about your busy, hectic schedule, in these dreadful modern times, and goes on to inform you in all apparent and credible sincerity that the cure for that is Field of Greens powder–he takes it himself, every day, and you should too with the promo code Glenn20, at checkout.

Do not choose any pale bloodless non-conformity as a basis for your life my love. It may even be far superior to a mortgage and two kids and grinding your nose off at the slave stone and then reversing that mortgage. But it can’t give your soul what your soul hungers for truly.

Fuck dietary supplement powders no matter who preaches about them as the means to secular salvation.

It’s a lie.

You’re up to here. With the Lie. The Lie is the water that is starting to boil now.

On a stove burner in a kitchen owned by the Lizard People.

As black or green helicopters circle overhead, loaded with more of the same water, bottled and clean–they’re giving it away. Selflessly. To those in need.

It doesn’t matter, can’t you see, whether the needy neighbors are frogs, or goths, or black with indian overtones, or orange, or detectives, or pilots of the African Queen.

We are all so in this together, we are, we ARE God pray for me in the midst of this madness.

All dark blessings on you, brothers and sisters, and even upon the undeserving, the belletrists, the heretics, the stateless palestinians both literal and symbolic, on ah fuck i mean

amen

Amen, I got carried away again. Will I ever learn? It doesn’t seem super likely.

Back on topic, I have another cox video for you today. Not one with Nicole, this time. Honestly I haven’t even picked it out yet; please stand by a moment. No goddammit

That is NOT it; will you FOCUS

Okay

Do you remember the day the lizards took their fangs out of the flesh of Assange and the silence roared like thunder, except for a nod from Fletcher? Saint Julian nearly died for your sins, and he finally spoke out today–barns were burned, but

But that’s not it either.

Okay. Here.

On Realising the Political is Personal, with Fiona Robertson

2018, Before the Covid Era. Six years ago. Let’s call it roughly the first appearance of anything on that page having to do with the sociopolitical world outside, as opposed to only the spiritual intra-personal world within.

Self-enquiry is still downstage front and center. We begin this time with defining it, as: Investigating “whatever our experience is in all its layers”. Especially the problematic experiences of our selves.

The Trauma.

Less than perfect certainty about our beliefs make us anxious; being certain (about anything, it hardly matters) provides a sense of security.

Yet without uncertainty we can have no experience of mystery.

Did we lose anything important when self-addressed stamped envelopes stopped being a thing? I think maybe so, but I am, rationally, not sure. If I did believe strongly one way or the other, and then I let go of that strong opinion, would I still continue to exist?

Seems probable. Is there such a thing as a belief you would be willing to die for? Is having one a good thing? Is lacking such a belief a good thing?

She had a moment, upon realizing that several of the most poor areas in all of Europe were in Britain, and that all of those poorest areas voted to leave the European Union. To Brexit. She was compelled by honor to ask herself why that would be.

Which reminds me of the current discussions about how self-identified Democrats now own 70% of all wealth in the USA now, when it used to be, they said, the party of the working class.

Finally there’s this.

It’s a hard thing, to go through life always being right, because you are then not free, but forced by the circumstance to constantly wonder why other people

are so stupid.

I think we can leave it sitting right at the place called word count 1900.

Current events are pushing me towards a particular theory, or way of seeing. Permit me to share.

The more we zoom out and look for clues and patterns in the larger world, the more depressing things get. (A History of Government’s DISDAIN For Free Speech)

Conversely …

… zooming in on the immediate here and now moves us toward flow, sometimes maybe even toward exhilaration, catharsis.

I spent the last part of my evening and the first part of my morning engaged in fulfilling a coffee order. So long as I stayed focused on that work, I was happy, or at minimum, pleasantly distracted by that complex and interesting process.

Much of that working time, though, was spent with headphones on, gathering information about the state of the wider world, where humanity (and especially the empire I live in) is rushing headlong toward complete disaster, contemplating the aphorism that World War III will be fought with nukes, and World War IV will thus be fought with sticks and stones.

At the micro level I could as a result share in the happiness that my fellow traveler, almost a brother, came through the disaster of Helene not only unscathed, but as a kind of heroic figure, engaged in helping others affected by the aftermath of the storm. (All that joyful weeping.)

But zoomed out, the mere presence of a military helicopter in one of the shared photos sent me spiraling back down into the abyss of knowing what is happening–what ‘my’ government is using that same kind of advanced killing technology for in parts of the world not so blessed of god, and has used it for, over the whole course of my lifetime and even before.

Choppering in clean water to the middle of flood-stricken carolina: well that’s good.

And yet the very existence of that chopper in the first place, the fact that we chose to build it and maintain it all through these years in preference to more human and humane priorities, brought flashbacks of Vietnam, and Somalia, and Kosovo, and Tripoli, and Mosul, and hundreds of places like these that we never even hear about, unless we actively zoom out and try to see the broader patterns.

Now you might be inclined to say that the moral of this theory is that the Intelligent thing to do is to take off the headphones, shut off the connection to the wider world, and just roast coffee.

Part of me agrees.

A more substantial part of me though says: fuck that, because that’s exactly what They want you to do.

Living the purely inner, spiritual, apolitical ostrich way, grasping after each hopeful beacon might make us feel better in the short term. But in the end it does no good, and cooperates with the evil, letting Them get an ever-better stranglehold on our souls.

Being a leader in the enterprise of hate? Worse than useless.

Following along, doing a job, going along to get along within it? Unthinkable, for those with any trace of spirit left. Both of the main alternatives above leave us Collaborationist at best.

Getting the hell out of the way, then … ?

Hmmm.

It is, no contest, the least of evils, in a three-way race.

Fresh theory.

They–fathers, lords, well-adjusted philosophers-of-the-Real to a man-jack–posited that arriving on this Earth, into this life and this culture, meant that you were faced with a choice of three forks in this corporeal and existential road.

But what if the triple choice was, after all that, just another god damned lie?

I can think of alternatives, within the metaphor.

We might go backward along the road we arrived on, back by choice to the non-existence we came from.

We might study the choice at length, and realize that there’s a fourth way, even if it appears to be nothing but a cowpath.

We might decide to … go off-road. Even if that might well mean abandoning all chance of Recovery.

Even if it meant choosing–embracing–something as awful as Psychological Suffering.

From near the bottom/beginning of the DeepStateConsciousness YT page:

Psychological Suffering as an Invitation to Wholeness

Richard and Nicole, Part Two.

This particular 63rd autumn, this specific 9th anniversary, blossoms in a harvest of turningPoints.

Faced with such emergent points, with these roads or false choices or real choices or these depressions or exhilarations or heroic overcoming or flying machine guns of imperial death, I say unto you truly today:

I’m not crazy (Institution).

You’re the one who’s crazy (Institution).

You’re driving me … no.

No.

You may well insist that the half-breed cow-path I’ve chosen is nothing but ugly badness, Mental Illness, and you shy from it, do your best to avoid it, cluck your tongue, look away quickly.

But I prefer to think Nicole, like R.D. Laing before her, has the better of it.

Getting well off the road is the only sane response to the insanity of what They have offered us.

It’s akin to getting the hell out of the way, only without the opprobrium and moral outrage they tried to load the question down with by using that phrase with such a sneer.

Abandoning roads altogether and wandering into the wilderness of the unknown alone is very surely a radical act, and almost certain to lead to a good deal of psychological suffering.

In the days to come, you’re going to be hearing questions that make you even more uncomfortable than you may be right now.

Was the Queen Mother the matriarch of a brood of conspiritual Lizard People?

Did I mean to type ‘conspiratorial’ just then?

What did Oz give to the Tin Man, and does ‘Oz’ in this context have more than one meaning?

Was that Twin Towers thing an inside job? Did ‘we’ really go to the moon? Who killed the Kennedys, and was Jagger right when he screamed about it being, after all, you and me?

Who are these voices who insist on chanting things I’d rather not hear and living rent-free in my head? Why in the name of all that is holy would I let them do that?

Does the Devil exist, and if so, is he by any chance the least bit, in any way … sympathetic?

Is what I’m saying … ugly? Am I, deep down where it counts?

What, if anything at all, is actually wrong with the sewerline, and is that too some kind of metaphor?

Are we good, in the center of our beings?

Is that all of us, or just some of us?

Was Samantha Stevens, or Elizabeth Montgomery for that matter, a Witch?

And …

Is paying the harsh price for looking deeper a bargain?

Or, as the commonly adopted and accepted wisdom would have it … a sight to be avoided at any cost as we seek to turn our eyes instead toward some heaven and live our best lives?

I did turn it off, sort of. I mean I stopped paying attention to it for a while.

I finished listening to that video I documented and ranted at length about yesterday.

Then after all that I took a shower.

For this post, I’m slacking off and taking it easy, with poetry instead of prose.

***

Went to the workshop
Took off the headphones
Took out a legal pad
and wrote this

The tall brunette mistress I tried hard to avoid
is me.
The tiny blonde woman I embraced once more this time
is me.

They were both rich
and I am not,
was .,.
not.

The lost blind man who was
not actually blind but really
was lost
is me.

I’m not fully convinced that the real people
I know, who also appeared in the dream
were me,
but again so far that is only a theory.

Was the dream a warning?
That my being Lost is Imminent?
Or a warning that your whole structure of living
and thinking means that you are?

Or a tacit acknowledgment
that yes, each one of the real people
who also appeared
is me?

Sometimes I am slapped across the face
by the impression that most of the minor characters
are aneffin’ waste of space
and bandwidth.

But if that impression is valid
and my lectodivine self-enquiry
is authentically performed, then
I am obligated by honor to ask whether I am, too.

Then after all that I took a shower.

If I am calculating correctly, it was the second one I’ve had since Company Left three weeks ago.

The first time, I was hurrying through it because I assumed nothing was different and that the water would quickly reach my ankles again, and threaten to spill over onto the floor. But … that didn’t seem to be happening.

So today, I took a much longer one, about twenty minutes, to idly test the situation. It felt nice.

There was no rising water at all. The shower … is draining.

There is a small chance that it’s draining through some introduced break in the line instead of to the sewer of course. But I strongly doubt it. The only things we messed with were directly related to the old toilet (which is still living out in the yard at the time of this report). As far as I know, the main drainage was unaffected by my wrangling of porcelain …

And yet that would almost certainly mean that the only problem that ever existed was with that old toilet somehow. That there never was a true blockage in the main line.

Or … that the blockage was far downstream, and that it’s been addressed finally by a team of those city workers who have been hanging around more often than usual, for reasons opaque.

Or … something something.

The next step I intend to take about the situation is to paint the ceiling.

I know that statement might worry you further about the current state of my mental health. But I wouldn’t worry, if I were you–which I’m apparently not, so you do as you think best with regard to worrying, and naturally, absolutely, everything else.

I can soothe you by saying that the plan makes perfect (possibly even rational) sense. From …
the perspective of the boots on the ground, which are solely mine, and typically moccasins anyway.

The next step I intend to take not ‘about the situation’ is to put on clean clothes and go for a walk. Right after shutting down the computer for real this time.

(“I have to admit that I’m crying too, but for quite different reasons”.)

I have to admit that I needed to turn off the phones just now.

***

Thus: Lectio Divina is one way of doing self-enquiry–there are others. Perhaps billions of them.

This is Richard Cox. He is the one interviewing Nicole, and the … proprietor? of the channel.

I know pretty much nothing about him, even though I’ve semi-divinely Read tens of thousands of his words in the past few days. (Also in passing, it occurs to me that you might could say the same about me about right now.)

I’ve been struggling much harder than you will ever know with the question of how to introduce his Œuvre to you.

This is Monday.

Which means there are still four days to go before the 9th anniversary of The Spill.

It feels as though The Struggle, the … jihad as they say, will be over by then one way or another.

In a whimsical sense it is already, by which I mean that although his oeuvre may still be an unrevealed mystery, the introduction to it was just completed in the last hour.

Perhaps it is time to turn off the computer as well, for a little while.

I heard her mention it here, in passing, by way of explaining how she first learned to meditate.

A different part of the page says:
240 views
7 years ago

***

I’m not sure I ever learned to meditate.

Maybe I should be interrogating myself as to why
though so far
that is just a theory.

Direct from the Latin and meaning “divine reading”.

In contemplative practice, lectio or reading is the first of four steps.

1) so … read, and preferably aloud.

2) Meditatio: “Allow the words to penetrate your awareness through use of your senses and imagination, your feelings and even visualization. Remain open to receiving a meaning rather than assigning one”.

3) Oratorio: Respond to any meaning that arises, using language of your own. Think of this as prayer if you want to.

4) Contemplatio: Rest in silence and in grace and in love, allowing what you have heard and felt to be absorbed. Let go of reasoning, thinking, and even feeling.

Silence is the ground in which this prayer takes root.

We must also recognize that this is what we are dealing when we engage with other people.

Throwing more and more facts is a useless strategy if our audience is fundamentally unable to receive them.

This is surely the meaning of The Red Pill.

It is symbolic of the aspect of our consciousness that will allow us to question even the most basic aspects of our reality.

To come to doubt the fundamentals.

To break everything down and start again.

To enact a paradigm shift, in our perception.

***

The above are not my words, but a verbatim transcription of the words of one Richard Cox.

According to the number on his page, less than 100 people in all of humanity have ever heard them before.

But now you are among them, even if you only ever hear them in your head as you read.

He’s speaking directly of the tragedy of us–you and me.

Spiller, and spillee.

I’ve been throwing facts at you, day in and year out.

Morpheus says to Neo: “I’m offering you the truth, and nothing more”.

But in our version of the story, Neo says back to Morpheus: “Who in the hell do you think you are, telling me you’ve got the truth, and I don’t?”

Tragedy, and the very essence of it, my One, from the Fishburne perspective, where I sit as I type to you right now and today.

I’ll be in touch again eventually, but first I may need some time to process this.

A little over a year ago, I started doing keto with a waistline of 46 inches.

By late January I had dropped it to 41″. Then progress slowed without ever quite stalling.

Mid-May: 39″.

Yesterday, an honest carefully measured 37″.

My goal in the beginning was 35″, but I’m not obsessed about those last two inches anymore. What I do care about is building up certain muscles (the abdominis transversus in particular), about continuing to eat low-carb but caring less about fat and more about protein, and most of all about having more energy in certain forms.

More motivation. More libido. Cultivating a state, as Mr. DeLauer put it in a video I watched today, where “effort feels good“.

That’s going to involve getting back on my meds too. The first few months of being off them (for financial and psychological reasons) were pretty painless, but the last couple–not so much, and it’s getting worse as time goes by.

Down in the poor skinny hole I’ve dug for myself, I am developing reasons for wanting more energy. Or more precisely, I want to move myself in certain directions that require the projection of greater psychic and libidinal effort (and having that effort feel good)

.,.

There are people in this world, near and far, who disapprove of me.

I have made a kind of sub-career of telling those people, in many elegant and erudite ways, to go fuck themselves. Paradoxically, this practice has sometimes drawn approval to me. I’ve been praised for my integrity, specifically, and for me memorably.

Fair enough. As far as it goes. It might be true that I am a little more integrated than most.

In this time of low energy though, I have reflected upon the disapproval of the majority, and taken their (often implied) criticisms seriously, instead of simply lashing back at them for being wrong in the head–which they still are, mostly–but maybe not entirely.

I think that in spite of the blessings of my real and imagined practices of integrity, I have been … how do I put it? Lazy? No, not quite. A-motivated, might be closer. Lacking in ‘moxie’, as one well-meaning critic once tried to suggest.

Yes. I can be fairly criticized, for being relatively low-moxie. I have, routinely, failed to take the initiative, to grasp destiny in both hands like the horns of a proverbial bull.

What I want you to understand today is that this failure is not entirely attributable to a lack of character over here on my side of the world, as some theatrically disappointed people would have it.

It has a scientific biological basis. It is rooted in the major medical condition that fell on me like a deeply mixed blessing, even before I left the womb.

I didn’t even start becoming a man until my mid-twenties.

It took at least ten years after that for my Maleness to become an accepted and acceptably real fact, to me and to the people closest to me.

In the decades between 16 and 36, it suffered a lot of neglect, from people who really should have paid more attention, cared more; and a fair amount of active damaging abuse (particularly from fathers, and would-be fathers, which may explain a lot to you about my attitudes toward paternalism, and authority, and those who would ‘rule’).

All during that time, almost every bit of the progress I made toward manhood I made solely and painstakingly on my own. Without help. Almost. I went to the doctor and admitted my shame. I kept the subsequent appointments, and paid for them. I crawled up out of the gutter of a long-delayed puberty, and I scratched up the cliff of trying, against the odds, to be a real man (sometimes to even know what one was).

All the while the casually interested crowd looked on, wondering what the hell was wrong with me and once in a while daring to mutter the question in coded language to my very face.

I can credit some of the women I was sexually linked to with helping in some small ways.

I can credit the career counselor who told me, at a risk to his own position: “Kid–somebody told you you were shit, and you believed them“. Thank you for telling me the truth you saw, you meddling jewish socialworking fuck. You were right, and it helped more than you will ever know.

But mostly, I got as far as I did toward becoming a man at all, and then my own man, all on my fucking lonesome.

The broken biology did not stop me. But it did slow me down, and it will always make it harder, every day until the end of my life.

I will keep on keeping on. (‘The only thing I knew how to do. Like a bird that flew.’)

I will keep on telling you to go fuck yourself, when you deserve it, which is regrettably often, and maybe now you will have a little more insight into why I say it, when I say it.

Maybe. In the meantime, just know that when you find yourself thinking sometimes that I’m a whiny little bitch, you’re not entirely, physiologically, wrong about that, either–congratulations on your perspicacity.

This is in large part why I am focused with such singular intention right now on having more energy.

Biohacking, diet magic, the new weight bench, getting back on the meds at any cost–all a part of this grasping, after having more. Not more fame, or money, or social credibility, and for godssake above all not more power, in the way very civilized people use the word.

Just more soul fuel–that’s all–and directing the jets of that newly amplified engine toward the right path, the road not ever taken, but taken now at last.

I only have the dimmest notion of where, if anywhere, it leads.

***

But if you invest in staying close to me
if you keep your faith in me alive
for whatever bent reasons of your own–

then we will find out together.

This is, in my opinion, a huge breaking story, which you will naturally hear nothing about from mainstream sources.

The head of the Centers for Disease Control from 2018-2021 was a man named Robert Ray Redfield Junior.

Being in that position naturally meant that he was routinely savaged by RFKJr. and other people you’ve been instructed to regard as lunatics, all through the Covid years.

Even so.

Two days ago, three years after he left that lofty position, he wrote an opinion piece which I will quote at some length:

“Across a century-plus of cozy courtship, the federal regulators have nearly married the regulated, especially in health care. Today, private industry uses its political influence to control decision-making at regulatory agencies, law enforcement entities, and legislatures. (RFK) is right: All three of the principal health agencies suffer from agency capture. A large portion of the FDA’s budget is provided by pharmaceutical companies.

…

But it doesn’t stop in the health agencies: the U.S. Department of Agriculture is a captive of industry, too … the agency often favors large corporations over the interests of small farmers and the public’s health.

If we do not discover the depth of our corporate capture problem and fix it, we cannot truly address chronic disease in this country.”

I know that all you smart people I love already understood this, and that this actual fascism-by-definition, this merger of the corporation and the state in the words of Mussolini, infects and makes worse every aspect of our modern lives within the Empire, and far out beyond its borders besides.

As the piece was being published, Redfield went to lunch with RFKJr and said this to him:

The former CDC head, a noted virologist, doesn’t think Bobby is nuts, at all. Quite the contrary.

So if you’d like to cling still, to the belief that he is …

The burden of proof ball is now in your court.

***

Out beyond this smarmy victory lap I still can differ with Dr. Redfield, not because he’s wrong, but because his view of the problem remains professionally parochial.

Regulatory capture in the realm of food and drugs is a problem sure.

But only a symptomatic problem, not the cause of the disease.

The entire apparatus, here in the Land of the Free, is compromised in much the same way.

BOMBSHELL Report: Blinken CAUGHT in COVERUP of Israel Blocking Aid

This isn’t just about the Jab, or your Job.

This isn’t even about our complicity in genocide, per se.

The whole Pax-American project that you were sworn into as a devoted acolyte, when your teenage brain was soft, pliable, and desperate to trust again, the project that plucked you from the gutter and paid your mortgage …

It’s lies and bullshit, smoke and mirrors, baby.

It’s a bill of goods that you were sold hard, and you bought. You paid.

Everybody’s paying and paying, whether they bought or not. I’m here to testify.

And everybody will continue to pay until they’re rolled into their graves at last, declaring their nominally undying allegiance, and the pennies on their eyes.

Is that how you want it?

No. Not in the beating heart of your best self.

We need to figure out a better way.

For everyone and not just ourselves.

Good on Robert Redfield for at least learning that much in seventy-odd years on the planet.

And I thank him for his service–I forgot to mention that he too is a retired Colonel, even if that’s not the service I had in mind.

PMB’s greatest rhetorical/theoretical hits boiled down into a fast hour, via a conference in Portland a couple of weeks ago.

Subsistence as Resistance with Peter Michael Bauer

I didn’t know the sweet little nugget about the etymology of ‘colony’.

Gerald Celente is an Italian guy from the Bronx. He was born in 1946, and like me, after doing hard time inside the System, the best he could come up with was to become his own publisher.

I really enjoyed his takes, one of which was (deep paraphrase ahead):

They told your dad he needed to build a bomb shelter, and they told you to practice hiding under your desk, from Russian bombs.

They didn’t do it because they thought these techniques would save your precious life (because in hindsight that was some seriously foolish crap, and you’d be dead anyway).

They did it to scare the everliving fuck out of you and thus make you a slave to fear.

And thence, to them.

It was no different with those masks we wore for a while to protect us from Chinese bugs.

It is no different right now when they tell you who you have to vote for. From fear.

It will not be any different during the next real or imagined crisis they come up with.

This is the truth of it, and that truth has ramifications.

Can you see what they are?

***

Another, ’cause it’s just too good not to repeat.

Anti-semitic??

The Palestinians are the Semites, brah.

The ethnic cleansers in this case, since 1917, are Ashkenazis from Europe.

Where all the best colonizers come from, right? Ennit?

***

One more. See the vid for the context.

“Ya little bastid. You think I’m telling you what I’m telling you because I want you to be like me? I want you to become Yourself“.

I had a father once.

I just wish to hell I’d had one who could say a thing like that, and mean it.

Who Is Sending More U.S. Troops To The Middle East?

It ain’t Joe.

Is it his wife?

Why isn’t it the elected representatives of the people’s house as the founders intended?

Do questions like these even matter any more?

(And since there are no answers to them, here is some further speculation about what ‘your’ government is doing and why, instead.)

***

“Leon Edward Panetta is an American retired politician and government official who has served under several Democratic administrations as secretary of defense (2011–2013), director of the CIA (2009–2011) ...”

Panetta Calls Israel Terrorists

“No question,” he says.

Do you think he’s wrong?

What possible evidence would you have for thinking that?

Do what you like, doing it naturally. But if it’s too easy–they’re going to disagree.

It’s your life, and isn’t it a mystery?
If it’s nobody’s business, then (paradoxically) … It’s everybody’s game.

Who do you want? Who you be today?
And who is it really, making up your mind?

You want to listen to the man?
Pay attention to the magistrate
And while I got you in the mood
Listen to your own heart beatin’

Own heart beatin’

I’m alright; nobody worry ’bout me
Why you got to gimme a fight?
Why can’t you just let it be?
I’m alright

I’m alright

“.,. that although I am very far from infallible I am so close to always being right as rain.”

Inventation of a new punctuation variant. The parallipsis. With two ells, both because ‘ellipsis’ has two, and because the one-El version is already taken for something else by those damn literati.

***

I had another thought, about expanding my product line. I need to be able to leverage my credit while I still have it, investing wisely in stock that I can turn around for a profit, exactly like the coffee. Ghee that is both organic and grass-fed comes to mind.

But also, just transport. Living out here there is a regular list of things that I can get in a bigger town, but don’t often, because of the gas.

I can’t be the only one.

You could let me be the one to pickup and dropoff your dry cleaning, the vinegar that this Safeway would otherwise gouge you on anyway, the sink clips that are far too expensive at Walt’s from the ShowLowe’s instead.

Take your sick cat to the vet?

This may well turn out to be just another one of those ideas, plans, that seems shiny but turns out to lack sanity and the potential for actual success.

But another viable and realistic way does not exist, that I know of yet.

I need to keep trying anyway, and to keep trying without turning into a penguin.

***

Maybe you recall that time that 50 spooks signed on to a letter claiming that the Hunter-laptop story was Russian disinformation, and it turned out they all knew it was a lie in real time.

They wanted Biden and they got him.

Well now.

700+ War Machine Agents Endorse Kamala Harris (Dore)

The Security State WANTS KAMALA To Win (Greenwald)

… and …

Trump Shooter Ryan Wesley Routh Wrote a Letter. ‘150k to Finish The Job’

I wonder where this drifter would have got his hands on that kind of money. Hmmm.

Listen darlings.

You be you, even if that means voting for her. I’ve declined to disown you for worse.

All I’m asking is that you be fully aware, when you do, of the true nature of the side you are choosing.

The side that killed President John and Patrice Lumumba and Martin King and so many others, all the days of our lives.

It’s true that Trump isn’t better in any significant way.

Even so, I propose once more that he is looking more and more like the lesser, among grimy evils.

***

Related.

JD has a story on AOC coming out guns blazing against “disinformation”.

And then he plays a long series of clips of The Good People disinforming you over and over.

You’ve already seen many of these clips, whether you knew then that they were knowing, malicious, professional lies or not.

You know now.

Does your knowledge not change anything at all, my doves?

Deadline USA Humphrey Bogart 1952 Film in English, Ethel Barrymore, Kim Hunter

I told you about FreeTube a while back. One of the nice things it does is aggregate the community tab postings on YT as well as the videos. I never would have seen this, if I were not using it.

The censorship of alternative voices is very real and getting more extreme by the day. The Good People all calling for an end to ‘malinformation’ and the like is having an effect out here. How you feel about that defines you categorically on a political level, even more than which bad choice you make at the ballot box in a few weeks.

(Don’t think for one second that this crackdown coming just before the elections is coincidental. That would be foolish, and that kind of foolishness is worse than being smeared as a ‘conspiracy theorist’, if you ask me.)

See also Kim Iversen’s take on the subject and please pray for freedom to ring, on the off chance that you value it.

“It would have collapsed on schedule if I’d lowered the temperature by forty degrees.”

English Drama Thriller 1951 – James Stewart, Marlene Dietrich, Glynis Johns

If Mr. Smith was a boffin scientist working in aeronautical safety 70 years ago, long before Boeing broke bad.

The book on which this was based was written by an interesting man named Nevil Shute, who also wrote the true classic On The Beach, which was made into a film at the end of the same decade just before Shute’s death, and just before I incarnated into this vale.

Calley Means says that the heart of the problem is Industrial Agriculture.

Here’s What’s So Messed Up About Bill Gates

That’s not wrong. It just doesn’t go nearly far enough.

The heart of the problem is: industrial anything.

And most especially: military-industrial anything.

No rulers for me, thanks. No industrialist, no bosses, no capitalists. No lieutenants and no commanders, to the extent such things are even possible in this shithole we laud as modern civilization.

Whether we’re talking about the damaged soil or damaged brains, the serious issues are all of a piece.

***

In New York City, a man is gunned down, by a cop, for jumping a subway turnstile without paying the three-dollar fare. That was “against the policy”, but the Officer did it anyway.

His wild shots entered the bodies of not only the suspect, but of a hospital administrator as well, and–irony of ironies–of a fellow policeman to boot.

Yes, he shot another cop over this three dollar bullshit.

And then claimed there was “a knife”.

Quelle surprise: They can’t find a knife.

The DEI hire of a mayor is lauding him for being A Protector. Really.

The subways are now full of Brooklyn protestors protesting, and being arrested for it.

And to put the cherry on top of it all … NYC paid out 1.5 Billion last year in damages for shit like this.

And they never did get their three dollars back on it.

Please explain to me how your lovely Free Democracy is not totally, off-the-rails insane.

The query is purely rhetorical.

This is a film noir.

But there was never filmed one lighter, in its dark heart.

Deported
1950 Film in English
Märta Torén (an Italian Contessa this time), Jeff Chandler (the antihero), Claude Dauphin

***

Losing Your Job For The Crime Of Doing It Right

Resonates here, Mick. The same axe fell here on the other side of the world.

I’d do it again and I know you would too. How else can a body play it, and still hold on to its vaunted integrity? This is the question of our modern times.

***

How Seed Oils Hack Our Brains & Poison Our Bodies

There are all kinds of food deserts.

Another present for you.

I’m not going to stop giving a small additional voice to people like Ray McGovern and Glenn Greenwald here, because what they’re saying is often crucially important, and I agree with the general thrust of their View of the World.

But I realize that listening to crusty old fucks like them and me can get to be a chore sometimes.

So here is a bright and photogenic young Asian-American man, in conversation with a pleasant Scandinavian interviewer, saying many of the same things in a condensed hour.

The US Empire Cannot Recover From This | Danny Haiphong

No rush, on thanking me, particularly if you find yourself gazing upon this present with a crinkled nose like a regifted fruitcake–I know many of you will; alas and apologies in advance for shitting in the punchbowl, as one does.

***

A bonus Western: South of St Louis (1949)

This is a very early ancestor of the trope of the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s a rare film in which Joel Macrea plays a less than totally likeable character.

And Alexis Smith gives a brilliantly advanced portrait of real and admirable womanhood, at least for 75 years ago, around the time of the blossoming of the Unipolar Hegemony.

***

Kansas City Confidential (Classic Film-Noir, 1952) John Payne, Lee Van Cleef

Crime and Punishment | English Full Movie | Crime Drama (for my fellow Raskolniks)

***

Scott Ritter is of the opinion that we almost all died last week. It may comfort you to know that he is just another crusty old fuck. But I bring it up because that’s what the Cassandra post was all about, way back then on the 15th of this lovely month.

***

People don’t change, and as for me, I change even less than most. I’m a little healthier now in my bodymind, but not much, and anyway you know that’s not what I’m talking about.

If you thought I was a cool guy when you were six, but you don’t now, well, what changed was, in the main, your perspective. If you worshiped the ground I walked on when you were twenty-five, but now profess agnosticism on the subject of my relative divinity, that’s due to some twists and turns in your spiritual path, and not because I’m much different than I was then.

The same is true on the subject of initiation, and … being ‘right’ in general, in my humble opinion. Which further is, these days, that I’m not anywhere near infallible, and yet most of the time I am, nevertheless, every bit as Right as Rain.

***

Kim Iversen on the practical mechanics of how the oligarchs use distraction to manipulate your mind. It’s perhaps pointless to mention it, but in this short clip she identifies herself as both post-Bernie and post-progressive. (So say we all. Or … I, at least.)

If you need more Kim, she’s on a tear and tour right now.

***

A nice example of how little ‘democratic freedoms’ mean any more these days, just in case the fact that both opposition media and elections are both banned in the Ukraine at present, and that our little friends over there maintain an active kill list for people whose speech they don’t like managed to elude your notice.
Rest in peace, Gonzalo Lira. Source

***

A Rising Young Star Inside The Democratic Party Firmament Quits It, In Despair

My favorite part is that her psychiatrist tried to talk her out of it.

My second favorite part is that her quit video got 30 million views.

Which leads right into my third favorite part: Ms. Barker giving up is proof positive that you don’t have consider yourself a loser or a social misfit to be on this path of honest reflection, nor to throw up your hands and then wash them, of these shitlibs pretending to care about the working class, for once and for all.

***

Besides watching pieces of all these things, I spent Sunday afternoon in serious meal prep. The process of basing a week’s worth of meals on a roast, and refining the recipe, is approaching a state of perfection.

The main thing I learned today was that a nine-pounder is just a little too big for both my needs and my kitchen.

It seems to me that Seven, or a pound a day for every day, would be the ideal thing for the present solo-flying circumstance.

Most of all I wish I could find grass-fed or organic meat in such quantities at any price. I can’t, locally, and it’s rare even with driving into Prettytown or Albuquerque. The time for turning again with hopefulness to ButcherBox or a similar remotely shipped solution is approaching fast.

Lord knows I tried.

You don’t need Netflix to chill in style. Most of that stuff is sugarpoison for the brain anyway.

There’s plenty of subtle propaganda in many (most) old movies too. But it’s much easier to see, and consider, and to piss out if it doesn’t suit you.

I especially loved the first one here for reasons not entirely clear to me. The characters are poor, and maybe you could call it a kitchen-sink drama.

That’s probably got something to do with it.

Jean Gabin, Ida Lupino & Claude Rains in “Moontide” (1942)

Sirocco FULL MOVIE | (Humphrey Bogart, Marta Toren, Lee J. Cobb)

Humphrey Bogart, Gina Lollobrigida in John Huston & Truman Capote’s “Beat the Devil” (1953)

Affair in Trinidad | Rita Hayworth | Glenn Ford

Gene Tierney & George Montgomery in Henry Hathaway’s “China Girl” (1942)

William Holden, Nina Foch & Lee J. Cobb in “The Dark Past” (1948)

Sci-Fi Adventure Movie – Unknown World (1951)

This last is a good movie, but I especially enjoyed the first few minutes, on the state of Civilization as it was typically seen then. You get to follow the science for real this time, or decline to, as it were. I know you’ll make the right choices, and look both ways before crossing the street on rainy nights.

James Mason & Dan Duryea in “One Way Street” (1950) -feat. William Conrad & Rock Hudson (uncredited)

It happened here in a stylized version of this town that I visit often while sleeping. This time it was overcrowded, probably for the fair.

Apparently I spoke too sharply to a small rich Asian boychild who only wanted to talk my ear off and be friends or something.

His father dragged in a reporter for the local paper. But all I had to say was No Story and they all went away. I was shocked by how easy it was.

Later after the danger had passed I went back to make things right on my own.

It turned out that the mechanism for doing that was making sure he got the toy he wanted.

It was a bag, of bright colors, which said on it in big letters: Basura.

Which means Trash.

We all lived happily ever after, and when I woke up it was somewhat unexpectedly raining.

More coffee.

Hmm. Alright.

To get there and back is 3500 miles via Denver, which would run about $1400 in gas, but zero for motels doing it My Way.

At least one set of new tires and an oil change; figure another $800.

Twentyfive hundreds, with a tight budget for incidentals.

However …

If I’m transporting any passengers I’d likely need to bring the trailer for the extra sleeping berth. Tires for that beast, well I’d be guessing, but another $500 might cover it.

I’m willing to risk any breakdowns and just charge them to my groaning cards. I’m willing to cover a parking place if no safe free ones can be found within 100 miles of the Lake Michigan coast. That seems fair. Perhaps even magnanimous.

I will begin thinking seriously about a GoFundMe around Christmastime.

In the meantime, potential co-pilots are encouraged to apply early, so I can know what to ask for when the time comes–I mean, some might want a shower and a continental breakfast along the way too–and what names to ask for it under.

The civilized will say: Just fly for fuckssake! but those people are the same ones that heard about my keto journey and just told me to get on board with Ozempic, which demonstrated a rather total lack of understanding of who I am and what I’m becoming.

It’s come to the point where I feel the same regarding car rentals too I’m afraid.

You are of course always welcome to engage in honest dialogue (about anything anytime)–and even try to change my mind–but on that latter score I don’t feel sanguine about your chances, and my apologies for any character flaws or intransigence in advance.

As ever, god bless us.

Every one.

I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to Ray.

He was born the same year WWII started.

From 1963 to 1990, he served in the belly of the beast as an Intelligence Analyst for an agency whose name you would recognize.

The information and experience he gained from that led him to later form a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

He knows who killed John Kennedy.

He knows what these fools we call our leaders and leader-wannabes are really up to right down to today, and next week.

Don’t listen to me. I know it’s painful for you sometimes to even think about it.

Do listen to him, if you really and actually care about Knowing.

Or roll over and slumber.

Let do what thou wilt be the whole of the law.

Crime and Punishment | English Full Movie | Crime Drama

“There’s people I like
that are smart
that are saying this drivel to me
and then when you bring up a lie that is way more important …”

Yes. Resonance. That is how I feel. Too. ABC Finally Fact Checks A Lie. ‘So where the fuck are we right now?’ …

We are back, on a healthy circadian rhythm, for a hot minute. I celebrated the harvest moon eclipse and seasonal transition with a rare 10.5 hours of honest sleep all at once.

What I’m struggling to say again and still is that while I don’t consider myself a single-issue voter, The War Machine of empire is very centrally my most important issue.

It directly connects (in this one fevered mind at least) with why you are struggling with affordable housing, and why so many people are living under bridges, and why none of us have real health care (whether or not we have the fake insurance).

A cancer diagnosis is not an immediate death sentence in this modern day of Progress.

But the odds are overwhelming that if you get one, you will be utterly broke and cast down into poverty and debt within two years.

Not death. Just destitution.

That is the how ‘we’ choose to run things here.

You can say the same, about the destruction of the Bill of Rights, piecemeal, over the last 20 years, culminating in the current efforts to totally gut Amendment One.

It all circles back to the fact that we choose the Machine, and Death, over Life and Living, even as we dance to the lying tune of her Joy while stuffing the creamy sugarpoison into our mouths in ecstasy and celebration.

Those who scream loudest about spreading democracy scream in that same immoral ecstasy each time Power comes close again to assassinating a candidate and narrowing their own choice.

Before I was even quite born, President Eisenhower issued that warning, about the Military-Industrial Complex.

None of us heeded it.

A couple of years later they murdered the one man who could have heeded it effectively.

And then Martin, and Bobby, and Malcolm, and all the lesser lights too. Bang bang.

***

The whole basis of a modern State is maintaining a Monopoly on Violence.

It’s okay for them to exercise that monopoly and kill George Floyd and Palestinian babies by the truckload and the people of Flint in Michigan and any so-called President that gets in their way.

It’s not okay for you to even own this gun or that gun, because that violates the monopoly. Maybe you don’t have the right to an abortion either, but honestly: so what?

If you want one, you will get one. I mean by that an abortion, but the same applies to the guns.

Shouting yourself hoarse about either is exactly and precisely what they want you to do.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Keep your attention focused on the black woman puppet now, and Saving Democracy.

That’s what matters.

That’s right.

Be soothed.

Sleep well.

He believes with all his goofy heart, that so much could be solved by simply murdering Vladimir and Donald, no doubt very ‘democratically’.

He believes we are morally obligated to Help Ukraine. It’s not open to question. It’s simple good and evil in black and white.

In essence he believes exactly as you believe (not guessing here: I’ve read you say it more than once).

The difference being, he actually, apparently, allegedly had the courage of those particular convictions.

Who is Ryan Routh and What Are His Political Beliefs?

He believes exactly as the Most Respected Journalists you watch believe; as the Most Respected Politicians you embrace believe.

What Caused the Second Trump Assassination Attempt?

He believes in the blue and yellow flag of The Oh-So Free State of Ukraine, and although he thinks Trump is a fascist (whether or not he knows what the word means), he is totally comfortable getting in bed with real Nazis–people that every mainstream outlet openly called Nazis until it turned out they were on Team America, and therefore actually the good guys, see?

Sort of like when it turned out We could do business with Muslim Extremists in Syria and Iraq and all those other places. As Barry O said about the Bush war crimes, well, you know, all that bad stuff, it happened In The Past.

Second Trump Assassination Attempt Tied to Pro-Ukraine Extremism?

***

Thus far, there’s no conspiracy theory, just fact-based observations.

Did you know that the term “conspiracy theorist” was invented by the three-letter agencies to discredit those who suspected the truth about JFK in the Sixties?

Forgive the digression.

Forgive too the linking of … let’s call it sharp-edged speculation, below. Personally, I am more or less of the same mind as Mr. Metzger here.

Trump Assassin Connections To The C and the I and the A

Trump Assassin Was Radicalized By Corporate Press

It’s not all really even speculative, to my eye.

Enjoy.

Tonight after the partial eclipse of the moon (thanks for the alert, R), the nighttime temperature is set to plunge by 15 degrees over last night.

It won’t stay quite that cool for long of course. But it clearly marks the change of the season anyway.

***

This: Russia REVEALS Details About BRICS Future: New Membership Category

led me here

All I will say is that the season is changing in more than one way. I know it more or less worries you. Maybe it should, but I doubt it. I believe the things that should properly scare you are much closer to home. Which is, perhaps, just like my opinion man.

***

Closer to home.

What is this now?

Answers here and to be clear the arrows and the concrete pads scattered across the country are not the scary part either. Look even closer.

Perhaps even inside.

“Follow The Science”.

Okay. I’m willing. Because those words say: “Adhere to this rational abstract ideal.”

But that’s not what they mean, when you say them.

What you mean, as a practical matter, is much more like: Follow The Scientists.

Who are very human, and also often buried to their necks in conflicted interests that you can’t see, and that sometimes even they can’t (or won’t) see too.

They were wrong about almost everything, and a lot of them were corrupt besides, overtly or covertly.

How will that truth affect you the next time they try to scare you into compliant helplessness?

(Protip: the next time might have already happened.)

Sopranos Star Refused Covid Jab & Paid The Price! w/Drea de Matteo

Okay. Enough of that for now, Mr. Belletrisms. And as for you, dear reader, Ms. de Matteo is featured in several clips currently on JD’s channel, and they’re all worth watching–you do whatever you like. You be you. Always.

***

It’s three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon and the post-Fair quiet seems luminous and preternatural. I’ve been up a long time.

All the laundry is done, except the shirt I was wearing while doing it.

All the water receptacles are full again, although under current conditions they will be empty in about 48 hours.

I just ate a whole watermelon because it was the last thing in the pantryfridge that was in danger of going bad.

Except for the knife and cutting board I used for that job, all the dishes are done and so I unbuilt the sink again. No more dishes will get done until I build it back.

Is there gas in the car? Yes there’s gas in the car. The people down the hall don’t know who I am, partly because there is no hall, and that makes me happy.

While I was out running around I had a thought, as sometimes happens.

I suddenly thought: This art you do is largely about the process of justifying your own existence.

I didn’t tell my brain to shut up. I thought about the thought, and concluded that there was truth in it, and that I didn’t actually even mind if it was completely true.

But.

I am bothered by the underlying premise, by the proto-thought, which is that some big part of me must believe that my existence needs justifying.

What would it look like to live life without the need for such a justification?

Would I still do art, and if I did, how would it look differently?

Would I still want so much to save your brain from the bad people? Would I stop caring about being that kind of savior?

Maybe I should try it for a while and see.

Maybe I should experiment, and follow … the science.

A fascinating discussion of why yesterday’s Cassandra warnings might yet turn out to be premature, from the standpoint of geopolitics:

UK Shocked US Missile Strike No; Blames Sullivan

On the MilitarySummary channel, there’s another bit of speculation on why the Atlanticists seem to be choosing to back down from hitting Russia deep at the last minute. It seems that the Houthi rebels down in Yemen flew a couple of Very Sophisticated Missiles right over the heads of two American destroyer ships and hit an airfield in Tel Aviv, the capital of the nominal state of Israel.

No one is sure who gave the rebels such advanced technology, but there are very few countries in the world who have it to give, and Russia is certainly one of them.

So, the theory goes, Biden is blinking and maybe even reversing promises to the hawkish Brits, precisely because he got Putin’s theoretical message: You wanna play hardball Joe? You wanna blow up my people? Well that’s a very nice puppet state you have down there on the Mediterranean … in fact you seem to be swimming in nice puppet states all over the world …

Wouldn’t it be a shame if anything happened to them?

You and I know so very little of the real dangers of modernity, or how many times we’ve come this close to wiping ourselves out by such escalatory bluster and bullfrog puffery.

Of course this isn’t nearly over yet, and this is just one little crisis.

But it seems as though we might have time to take another breath.

Don’t waste it.

I will try not to either.

***
PS: For the record, I wrote all of the above just before learning that the second would-be Trump assassin was a Russophobic whack job. It makes me wonder how many more Lee Harveys the Empire has in the chamber, and how many of them they’ll activate before November.

It’s interesting to me that the concept of a kitchen sink has been used in so many ways.

I ripped mine out last week and have been using the basin in an inefficient way. To me, it’s more important that a shower, a laundry system, or even a toilet when it comes to basic utility infrastructure. The first job now is to re-establish its viability using a brand-new faucet, all the old parts, and some fresh caulk.

This I will do in a much quieter neighborhood, because officially the fair is over, and that is a blessing.

Source, from this sad Friday afternoon just past

Meanwhile

UK missiles ready to strike Russia

U.S. Set To Allow Ukraine To Use European Missiles to Strike Deep Inside Russia

Slap my ass and call me Cassandra, but it’s not looking good out there in WWIII land.

Who was supposed to be the expansionist empire again?

Another young American woman activist has been murdered in cold blood by an Israeli sniper for the crime of protesting. Her name was Aysenur Eygi.

Short version of the story

Long version of the story

Your Biden-Harris administration has already signaled that they won’t do a damn thing about it.

***

With an effort, the house is nearly refugee-livable again, and I can start to think about getting on toward fixing it for real. The outdoor cats are freaked out, edgy, and scarce, because this is the week of the county fair and I live a block from the fairgrounds. In two days that annual hell will be done with for 2024. Spilling daily means never having to take questions about how I’m a-doing seriously, because if you wanted to know, you already would.

Richard D. Wolff & Michael Hudson (Two Very Smart Economists): Is the US Rapidly Approaching Bankruptcy?

‘The answer may surprise you’.

You cannot listen to and understand what these people are telling you clearly, and then come back around to the question of elections still believing that it matters, even a little bit, whether the reddish-orange guy or the blue lady wins.

All the little cultural hot-button signaling issues that you pray to and hinge everything on, like abortion and gun control and prayer in schools, are revealed as ridiculous distractions from the fact that you and I, We The People, are being systematically fucked, and don’t even notice because we’ve been taking that rape and exploitation all our lives.

This is the truth about what we call Capitalist Democracy.

Read it and weep, or just go on with your lives blind to it.

I’m sure it’ll be fine either way.

Candace Owens Calls Out Rabbi Shmuley in Epic Debate Rant

Wall Street Journal Peddles Phony Story About Nord Stream

How Democrats Lost Their Way
(A second piece of the Dore-Taibbi interview)
and on a related note

How Anti-War Democrats Became Bush/Cheney NeoCons
(The first thing posted by PrimoRadical this year)

For Those I Love Who Think Bobby Is ‘Weird’

Dick Cheney’s Endorsement Of Kamala Signals End Of Democratic Party

Dems Applaud Dick Cheney’s Endorsement of Kamala (Greenwald with the historical perspective; probably the most important video on this list)

Over to the Duke City. A night there. Another day getting back to the base.

That base and core is in a sad way. The surface layer is a tornado of neglected piles. The deeper layer is a tangle of deeper problems, laid bare now but still unaddressed.

I have a lot of work to do and it starts tonight.

Even though that’s important, it’s more important that I become a serious and attentive artist again here (and over there too).

We’ll start with cleaning up and cleaning out. There are of course a couple hundred unwatched videos and I’ll have the headphones on as I make all the things better. Here’s the first really good one, in reverse chronological order, to get things rolling

Jimmy Dore: Kyle Kulinski’s Transition to Shitlib Is 100% Complete (with Matt Taibbi)

On the first, which was the 6th, we mainly ran into Flag and shopped in a very focused way. I got a couple pairs of pants that fit well. But the star purchase, eighty dollars on clearance, was a really nice weight bench.

Also got the water turned off. Mostly. Long and opaque story.

Yesterday on the seventh was a very hardworking and somewhat depressing day.

I completely pulled apart the kitchen sink in preparation for replacing the leaking faucet–success.

I also removed the toilet, and found problems underneath it that I cannot easily solve on my own. I’m gonna need a plumber, at least for an hour or two.

Today was recovery mode. Laundry, and a whole lot of dishes cleaned very well, but without the aid of running tap water.

Tomorrow evening is Albuquerque, and the day after I come back here alone to try to rebuild my drainage utility from scratch, with a dose of professional help, and eventually get the new toilet installed, the water turned back on, and essentially resume some semblance of a normal-looking life.

Plus weight training.

May it all be as simple as finally typing it, and may typing it flow more easily and naturally than it has during this serious time; amen.

All things being equal, I too would prefer a woman President.

But things aren’t equal.

Every single last one of them that the System has offered up has been a bloodlust-crazed neo-con warhawk: Palin, Clinton, dear Nikki and now The Kam.

Trump’s record on this issue that matters most is better than any of them. Not great at all, just better. And Vance actually gets it. He is pretty close to an isolationist, and that is a better start than we’ve had in my entire lifetime and then some.

Do I care that he thinks I’m a childless soyboy cat lady? No I do not. I am one, and relatively proud of it, and he’s entitled to his dumb opinion on the issue. He earned it, by being an almost anti-war candidate.

In essence, the great orange satan is now the new lesser evil by a nose.

I don’t need to bother voting for him–he’s going to take my state’s electoral votes easily. I am once more ‘free’ to toss away my vote on Green Jill or the young soldier who burned himself to death protesting genocide. Rest his soul.

So …

Democracy, fuck yeah.

Technology has bypassed Roe v. Wade and if your concern is poor women having cheap, easy, and effective access to abortion, then fund purchases of those two new pills for them. They work and are not yet illegal even in the reddest states.

The answer to gun violence has nothing to do with banning more things, any more than the answer to hateful speech is censorship.

If you actually believe in ‘Democracy’, then work on bringing it back. You’ll have to account for the 50% of your fellow citizens who take stances at the polar opposite of yours on all these non-issues, instead of writing them all off as hicks and deplorables who are just ruining everything for everybody.

These boutique issues you cling ever-tighter to now don’t amount to anything practical any more. They’re only signals of a deprecated form of virtue.

And wacky old RFKJr is neither your enemy nor a real problem either.

If you want things to actually get better inside this evil empire and elsewhere in this sad world, work to stop the endless wars and the people who profit from them most.

For starters.

In the meantime we can work on deciding whether Property really equals Theft, definitely a topic for some later show.

Thanks for being there to listen. God bless us every one.

To the darling giftcarders–the umbrella is on the way and so are pics of it. Thank you!

I appreciate the wishes for a happy birthday. Please also wish for me the view above, every morning with my own coffee, french-pressed or poured over with care. That is what I’ll be wishing for, if not in the year to come precisely, at least soon.

The air in Silver

is very

very

clear.

American Settler (in Israel this time) Explains Why Colonialism Isn’t A Bad Thing

I’ll let Russ and Keaton (both also American Jews), do the talking about brainwashing this time, to spare myself the taint of ranting.

***

As for me on the homefront, the Albuquerque piece of the trip is done and the longer southern loop needs to start in an hour or two or three. Yesterday’s experience of going to the big city and dealing with people again was not a pleasant one. But it did feel rather revelatory and clarifying. There’s video for that. Eventually.

Four scoops and four minutes

Petrified Minerals

Sometimes upon waking I am struck with these fragments of crystallized imagery that don’t really fit in neatly anywhere.

A while back, somebody asked me if I ‘wouldn’t rather have a nice new truck’.

I answered. In real time and then again here, a bit sharply both times, defensively, as it were, on behalf of my ancient pickup.

But I have a fresh answer.

It is: yeahhh … sorta.

It would be great to go back to the days of a vehicle so nice and new that all I ever have to do to it is stick assiduously to the maintenance schedule and otherwise just jump in and go, without thinking (at least for the first 100K miles. And I think it would almost certainly be a Tundra.)

But.

I am absolutely unwilling to go back to doing what I was doing, in order to be able to afford such unthinking luxury, which consisted mainly of enslaving myself to some pile of bosses, and their schedule for my days.

So … my critics near and dear are right in a sense. I don’t deserve a nice new truck–I am completely unwilling to make the sort of devil’s bargains that would make me that kind of deserving.

Here’s what I’d do if I was.

Very first thing, wipe all traces of consumer debt, about 20K worth. Second thing, wipe out what’s left on my mortgage, another 50. Third thing: stoop so low as to kill the last ten thousand of student loan debt that Joe promised to pay off and never will. Not because I think I owe it–I don’t–I worked it off just the way they also promised I could. But just to never have to think about it again.

Then I’d be even, and I could start thinking instead about ‘what to buy’, and a new truck would not be near the top of that list.

A habitation for the land in Silver. Maybe 70 thousands worth of doublewide at minimum.

A brand-new cargo trailer, ten or twelve maybe (I already have all the stuff to make it habitable as well, and possess an old trailer besides, which even still would need a lot of work).

A brand-new engine for my lovely old Lariat, and a transmission to match. A few enhancements to the suspension; a transfer case … I don’t know how much that would all come to in today’s dollars. But that would bring me most of the advantages I would care about in a new truck, while maintaining the old-school cool, complete with a copper plate.

Would 200 thousand, or a quarter of a million dollars I didn’t earn thus make my life perfect?

It would, technically.

Would it make me free?

That is exactly the kind of great question I insist on having the time to ponder.

Instead of giving that very time away to a Massa, no matter how nice or kind or undemanding a Massa it might be, and no matter how many dollars self-enslavement brought in.

***

This is the theory part:

My Work is what I rather pretentiously proclaim to be my art.

But my job, I reckon, is to get as close to the kind of perfection described above as I can, on a budget of maybe half that much money at best. Even that would likely mean selling off this house, which is not quite a devil’s bargain, but maybe a kind of gambling at a casino owned by a lesser demon.

***

Today, I stand in the place where I live.

Tomorrow, I turn eighteen again.

I’m looking forward to a life well lived.

A short and sweet take on why this is a true duopoly (sorry Colonel), from a black man being persecuted by it actively right now.

The same point is reinforced by 200 High-Profile Republicans Just Endorsed Kamala!

Chris Hedges takes on Zion: ‘The Project Has Failed’

And Chris one more time. An Israeli airstrike kills two hostages and hundreds of Palestinians, without laying a scratch on the two diplomats it was supposedly targeting. Then, as the sole surviving hostage reports, they lie about it and try to use her story as self-fluffing propaganda.

She’s not having what you’re having.

This is not the first time this very thing has happened, with bombs your tax money paid for. It will not be the last, no matter who ‘wins’ in November. We all lose.

Because this is a colonial project birthed in genocide just exactly like America was.

It’s a shame, isn’t it, that we can’t see Palestinians as noble savages in feathered headdresses desperately fighting the inexorable forces of modernity?

Your bombs and your anchorpeople both make that impossible.

This is what we think of as Spreading Democracy and Freedom.

And it has been happening all over the world for your whole life.