The other day I briefly mentioned the mysterious disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH 370 a dozen or so years ago, and by implication got on board with the idea that the pilot disappeared it on purpose.

Now comes a guy named Ashton Forbes, with a very different theory.

The link is to a recent clip from the Jimmy Dore Show, and that interview has a nominally more interesting Part One.

I’m inclined to do the easy thing, which is to note with a smile how Jimmy is turning into Art Bell, and leave it at that.

But …

Although I think the theories on offer here do sound pretty half-baked and bogus, I have to note that the popularized explanations regarding the physics are really every bit as bad.

Zero-Point Energy Demystified (from PBS, 7 years ago)

Is the whack-job conspiracy guy more or less right than the calm polished public television professional?

I don’t know. You don’t know.

And that is true in many, many cases, and by many, many metrics.

Yes, I’m thinking about anything to do with COVID, but also about the wave of assassinations in the Sixties, the Twin Towers and Building Seven, and a whole lot of other things that break down just the same along cultural party lines.

Including the fact that the term “conspiracy theory” was itself a conspiracy promulgated by that one three-letter agency when we were young.

We know so very little about what is Real, in the modern overcivilized world.

And for the most part, the powers that be are quite happy to keep it that way.

As far as I can see, the only way out of this double-bind is to stop listening with credulity to anyone’s version, and sink within to listen to what our best heart and inner cogitational sight tell us.

Mostly, I trust myself.

I can’t say the same for the Experts, no matter how well-credentialed or well-dressed they seem to be.

And as for “trusting Science”, and related cop-outs, I’m sorry, but that’s nothing but a bullshit begging of the question, and a blind appeal to authority, every bit as nonsensical as believing in the word of any god or any holy scripture you care to name.

You shall know the Truth?

Well … er … maybe.

And the Truth will set you Free?

Deeply unlikely.

In my frail human judgment.

Which is all there is to go on ever.

No thanks.

If this plan fails, the next step is to ask them how they feel about the concept of juries being able to nullify unjust laws.

Which is a real and argued thing.

In essence, the goal is formation of a unified, consistent, and coherent theory from which questions from the largest to the smallest can be measured, and at least addressed, if not comprehensively answered.

Largest, as in: What do I do today and why?

Smallest, as in: How do I sleep well and safe tonight no matter where I am?

Science, politics, religion/spirituality, philosophy, art … Bushcraft.

Every commonplace notion which We hold as a given and take for granted is destructively wrong–just look around and that much will be obvious to your heart.

To hell and be damned with the gospel according to Oprah and Donald and Diddy and Joe and every boss or commander that ever lived, and whatever your lovely evil iPhone is telling you right now, including these words.

Rip those wrong notions out by the roots and start over.

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

The Way is a small seed inside you.

The stalk that cracks the shell and reaches for the sun is your spine.

***

no one is united
and all things are untied

perhaps we’re boiling over inside
They’ve been telling lies

Who’s been telling lies?
There are no angels

There are devils in many ways
Take it like a man

…

Drag on the system, drag on my head and body
There are some facts here that refuse to escape

…

Tomorrow night maybe be too late

Both moons are full

By far the oldest piece of this whole thing is Green Anarchy / Anarcho-Primitivism /Rewilding: just go watch PMB, and this gem in particular.

***

Physics and Consciousness

Very briefly …

The guy who got me truly started on this part is Federico Faggin. The guy I’ve studied most is Bernardo Kastrup, who calls his specific variant “Analytic Idealism”, sometimes and rarely also referred to Metaphysical Idealism.

Here are the two of them in conversation with Nobel Laurete in Physics Roger Penrose, via a key channel called the Essentia Foundation.

A third name to know: Donald Hoffman.
See, very briefly: The 2022 Nobel prize was a nail in the coffin for materialism

***

Non-Ownership

Grounding inspiration from Thich Nhat Hanh, but really and practically and happening in the now: Robin Greenfield.

Here is his very latest update as of this writing. (The very most interesting part of this update for me was the last five minutes, where he talks about crazy and losing one’s mind, and also the idea of Earth Code. I tried to find more information about that last part and the best thing so far is here.)

***

Buddhist Anarchism

The concept of linking these two things is at least as old as I am.

Yesterday’s essay by Gary Snyder, linked

So far, I haven’t found a single great video on the subject.

However …
See this one
plus maybe: mr1001nights
and also …
The closest I’ve come to finding Great, and the place I learned about the essay, is this from Peter Coyote.

Though I find Hosho Coyote’s musings here problematic on many levels, there is a total gem at 38:04. It goes:

“The implication of Nirvana is that in the very next instant
you can do something new. That’s what freedom is.”

That is an admonition that has already saved me once, and I think it will again.

***

Slush

Hosho Coyote once more
You Think You Can’t Meditate, But You Can – April 1, 2020

I tried, successfully, to find out who was behind posting Snyder’s essay at “theAnarchistLibrary” and found Ken Knabb
and “Situationism”
and was also reminded about the once and future importance of Carlito, as in:
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda

Searches in progress:

buddhist anarchism and anarcho-buddhism
earth code robin greenfield

No one today can afford to be innocent, or indulge himself in ignorance of the nature of contemporary governments, politics and social orders.

The national polities of the modern world maintain their existence by deliberately fostered craving and fear: monstrous protection rackets.

The “free world” has become economically dependent on a fantastic system of stimulation of greed which cannot be fulfilled, sexual desire which cannot be satiated and hatred which has no outlet except against oneself, the persons one is supposed to love, or the revolutionary aspirations of pitiful, poverty-stricken marginal societies like Cuba or Vietnam.

The conditions of the Cold War have turned all modern societies — Communist included — into vicious distorters of man’s true potential. They create populations of preta–hungry ghosts, with giant appetites and throats no bigger than needles.

The soil, the forests and all animal life are being consumed by these cancerous collectivities; the air and water of the planet is being fouled by them.

There is nothing in human nature or the requirements of human social organization which intrinsically requires that a culture be contradictory, repressive and productive of violent and frustrated personalities.

–Gary Snyder, Journal for the Protection of All Beings #1 (City Lights, 1961, rev. 1969)

The answer to the perennial question of “Where’s my flying car?” is now finally available.

It’s in China.

When the onboard computers go stark raving mad
qantas 72

When the experienced professional human pilot does the same
malaysia 370

Welcome to Civilization.

How I Became Particle Physicists’ Enemy #1

What I like best is the functional symmetry in our backstories, she and I.

Call out their bullshit. Be right about all of it. Fail even harder precisely due to it.

What I like least is the meta-narrative point at the end of her video: So go buy my course at Brilliant, and sign up for their gold plan, because they’re a sponsor too.

Ick.

There must be another way, even if it’s not Better, and: there is.

This is it. I’m here living it.

Add in a little Bernardo, Robin, Peter for the foraging, and this is my physics.

When a plane falls on your house

Death as the result of a sluggish bureaucracy combined with ruthless capitalism

In a world where birds sucked into jet engines is just part of the routine

When your husband the pilot has a heart attack and you have to land it yourself

“There’s nothing like daylight between the ribs to clear a man’s mind.”

Rabun is the northeasternmost county in Georgia.

As of the 2020 census, the population was 16,883.

The film received positive reviews from critics. John J. O’Connor of The New York Times stated, “although the surface of Foxfire is gentle, as basically decent people try to understand each other and themselves, the subtext is far from comforting.”

But comfort isn’t what we came here looking for.

no one is united
and all things are untied

perhaps we’re boiling over inside
They’ve been telling lies

Who’s been telling lies?
There are no angels

There are devils in many ways
Take it like a man

The world’s a mess it’s in my kiss
You can’t take it back, pull it out of the fire

Pull it out: in the bottom of the ninth
Pull it out: in chords of red disease

Drag on the system, drag on my head and body
There are some facts here that refuse to escape

I could say it stronger,
but it’s too much trouble

I was wandering down at the bricks, hectic ennit?
Down we go cradle and all

The world’s a mess it’s in my kiss
Go to hell see if you like it then come home with me

Tomorrow night maybe be too late

Both moons are full

—eXene and John Doe, 1980

The Fall of the American Empire

All ya’ll gonna ‘like’ the tone of this one, because the fall is happening under, and for sure being accelerated by, that orange guy you hate ever so.

Just please don’t be deaf to the rest of what is being said, about those Leaders you prefer, in propagating the collapse, going back for the entirety of our lifetimes.

Owning lots of things and having lots of money while the other Half (consisting of something north of 96% of all sentient apes) starve and explode and die in other colorful ways for our comfort–lord my loves: Blue is no god damnable answer to anything at all, and it never has been, and it never will be, all democratic tailfins and Yankee moxie and thank you for your service aside.

Beginners Guide to Prolonged Fasting | 24-72 Hour Fasting Instructions

Late on a Monday evening, I’m already well past the 72-hour mark on my fast. So far I just haven’t wanted food, but I can feel that starting to change. I’m doing tea, which doesn’t break the fast at all.

After looking at a few videos like the one above, I’m going to try extending it to 96 hours at least, while adding a walk and some low-intensity weightlifting into the mix.

At some point after that, into the fourth or fifth day, the advice is to start the real breaking with good clean fat, and MCT oil will probably be the first thing. Maybe cod liver oil too.

Then I’ll repopulate the cleaned-out microbiome with things like kefir and kraut.

Then a salad heavy on leafy green and avocado, before transitioning back to a more usual place of eggs, cheese, fish, fish and meat, and a more usual five miles a day while getting more serious with the weights.

And also, I’ll get back in touch in ways that aren’t this. Apologies for any cause for anxiety or offense given. I really did do nothing but sleep and heal, for the last three days plus, and it really didn’t feel like a choice or an option, but a simple physiological necessity.

As Friday rolled on my throat got progressively more sore. Historically that’s how being sick has always started for me.

It was hard to believe, because I haven’t had any flu since before the lockdowns started five years ago. Not going out in public several times a week to teach classes was good for me in many ways, including that one.

But now somehow it was happening again. I must have got too close to somebody’s germ at the grocery store.

I oiled the sore throat with whiskey and then broth. Then I quit eating altogether and went to bed and slept straight through for most of the last three days.

In the old days I would have been pounding Dayquil and Nyquil to keep the grift of a job rolling along. This time, there was no pressure or motivation for that kind of thing.

It was interesting. It was even a little bit fun. I’m grateful to the experience for killing my appetite and letting me do a three-day fast without effort. No food of any kind. No coffee even. Just water and lemon juice spiked with my own special electrolyte mix.

Just now, nearing the 72-hour mark, I finally let go of a satisfyingly immense poop. A very good sign. My sinuses are still full of crap and I’m coughing up more, and the fever isn’t quite done with itself.

I still have no desire to eat, but I did start thawing the last big pork roast in the freezer for whenever the hunger does come back.

I’m laying back down for a bit now, and …

It’s all good.

Pro-Israel Group Levels Smears Against Children’s YouTuber

“Eventually, the world turns its attention elsewhere.”

Feeling Left Behind by Age? These 5 Buddhist Truths Will Change Everything

Also, waves. And ripples. Again and again.

Yes, the script and the presentation here are AI garbage.

However, the truth isn’t, and nor is this retelling.

All I really want to say is:

The Ultimate Reality | Thich Nhat Hanh

Oh, why don’t you save all the money you earn?
If I didn’t eat, I’d have money to burn.
…
When springtime it comes, oh, won’t we have fun;
We’ll throw off our jobs, and go on the bum.

—A Folk Song from 1908

There’s a Week-9 update out for The Experiment of Non-Ownership, and I want to point out two things from it.

One

In the physicalist worldview, you imagine that I am not you, I imagine you are not me, and neither of us is the stray cat that limps, or the endangered polar bear.

That all these things are separate, separated, existing in separation.

And this imagining makes it easy to live lives defined by:
exploitation and pillaging and destruction and uglification and unequal accumulation.

“Civilized” lives in a hegemonic capitalist context, yeah?

Two

The intention of the experiment is not to get you to live or believe this way or that.

Rather, it is to get each of us to ask:

Are we happy with the way we’re living; living the lives we want?

Are our lives of separation causing destruction? … and … are we really okay with that?

Are our lives creating equality and harmony in the world
or rather playing into the mass usual consensus trance of Inequality and Disharmony?

We both know the honest answer, right? Right? So …

How exactly do we go about moving in a better direction?

How is it (even in theory) possible, to reverse these horrifying trends: to reverse the trend of civilization?

***

The first step for me and for you is to return home to ourselves and take good care.

And the second is to enjoy every moment of washing the dishes.

That’s what Thich Nhat Hanh said about it last time, and so far I’m on board. Also:

Sometime in “October” there comes an impulse to add artificial heat to the environment by starting to eff with the thermostat and thus the furnace. Then half the year later in “April”, it can be shut off again and ignored for the other six-month.

That is the point we’re at now. Day highs above 80. Night lows above 40. Done and so begin, Alleluia.

***

The Four Noble Truths “are traditionally identified as the first teaching given by the Buddha”, but there is widespread theological disagreement about what exactly they are, or how important.

The Fourth Noble Truth embodies and reveals the 8-fold Path.

The Noble Eightfold Path (Sanskrit: आर्याष्टाङ्गमार्ग, romanized: āryāṣṭāṅgamārga) or Eight Right Paths (Sanskrit: अष्टसम्यङ्मार्ग, romanized: aṣṭasamyaṅmārga) is an early summary of the path of Buddhist practices leading to liberation from samsara … (and) consists of eight practices: right view, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right samadhi (‘meditative absorption or union’; alternatively, equanimous meditative awareness).

Again and broadly speaking, that’s all good. To my eyes, some interpretations of the Path seem vitally necessary and spot-on, while others feel like Rules, or culturally bound suggestions, or even completely optional (are we meant to take the stuff about reincarnation literally, and does it even matter?).

So on this April morning, I am by my own hand shutting down the furnace, and nominally (let’s call it) “converting to Buddhism”, but neither action specifically solves anything.

By Halloween, provided that my consciousness still exists, and in this same environment, I will still feel the shiver of cold, and will still be compelled to address that unique form of suffering, maybe by just turning the damn creaking thing back on again, maybe by lighting the first fire in a brand-new and properly vented wood stove, or maybe by means completely unforeseen here before the beginning in the space called Spring.

Likewise, with the belief systems, and the chosen practices.

Early in the Horse talk, the venerable Thay (god rest his soul) spends a lot of time explaining why there will be no god-damned Facebooking permitted during the upcoming meditation retreat. I agree completely with the rationale.

However, there’s no email allowed either, and that would and will be a much tougher nut to crack, way over here in this Plum Village brother … not necessarily impossible; still pretty hard, but …

I don’t intend to whine about it.

What I do intend is a question in the process of answering itself

Now.

Tomorrow’s post is already written and will auto-publish just after local midnight.

So, for now, I’m ‘done’ scribbling, but

Not done meditating, and

The practice of spilling and the ritual of meditation are

Converging

Mixing like cream and coffee

Losing Separateness

and i thot you should know it

There is no such thing as a car.

The proof for that assertion is here, specifically between minutes 36 and 37.

The thing I call my consciousness or self chooses to nod assent to that assertion and that proof.

Can you therefore label and/or dismiss me as a metaphysical idealist?

Yes, you can; please go ahead, for all the difference it will make.

Likewise, Pluto will still be a planet over here in the far exurbs miles outside the city where the Lowell Observatory rests.

Also, there is no such thing as the Lowell Observatory.

All of this can be true and even, take a breath, Right, and internally consistent, and a fundamental building block of a worldview that I apprehend and in time adopt.

Next we can move on to the question of whether horses exist.

The Horse is Technology | Dharma Talk by Thich Nhat Hanh, 2013.11.10

Listening to the monk, I laughed aloud a few times, and that is rare. It was repeatedly a laughter of recognition.

Once it was when he spoke of how we, how I, use all this watching and listening and consuming of media to try and avoid the feelings of suffering within us.

And then, again, when these actual words came from his mouth:

“… then he can reverse the trend of civilization”.

***

For months now, this has been called a book called (workin’ title).

For hours now, there has been a private post.

Those two line traces of fact are converging, and when they do, I don’t know what will happen.

It’s even possible that everything could vanish in the fog of their impact, and why not?

I will though let you know, when the time comes.

I looked things back over like I sometimes do, and decided that

1) I felt pretty shy about talking openly about my deepest fears like I did,
2) I was gonna leave that soul-baring stand as it is, and
3) That after 9.5 years of doing this, I was ready to experiment not only with password-protected posts (as I have once in a while in the past), but fully private ones.

Thus, there’s a post you can’t see wedged in between this one and the one called Strength and Security.

I will leave it there, continue to work on it, and maybe post a version of it in the clear at some point.

In the meantime, back to our regularly and daily scheduled programming.

***

Pod Yourself A Gun: Episode 305

In the first three minutes of this pod (which incidentally is as much as I could stand to listen to), the guest expert makes an interesting point.

“The best thing about the Sopranos is that it’s a television show about a bunch of people from New Jersey who don’t feel appreciated … (and)
feeling not-appreciated is a part of Our Culture”.

Yes. Not just a part, but a defining feature.

I also listened briefly to two rich heavy-hitter liberal pundits talk about Attention as the key resource in this world of ours. One of them wrote a whole book on the subject.

I think the mass chronic feeling of under-appreciation and the constant pressures of the modern attention-deficit economy are deeply intertwined. The first has been around for 20+ years (as evidenced it being a theme in the mob show), and the second was made radically worse by the explosion of iPhone culture and social media in the last decade of the 2010s.

In my own mind this clusterfuck is also related to the last few posts here, about feeling strong or fearful, about (in)security, and about how modernist solutions like the Gospel of Believing In Yourself can be so insidiously counterproductive, and so fundamentally illusory.

From 26 to 80 in the space of a long day, and briefly brushing 90 in the next few, so they say. Then the wind brings back something more seasonally apropos in the week to come.
70-something days, 40-something nights; as near to perfect as they come in these parts.

Also, the last of the April money and the first of the May dropped simultaneously.

So I wrapped all that into a day of preparation.

In front of me in the line to pay the water bill, a woman was setting herself up to access the local city fitness center.

So I asked about it. There are no showers or locker rooms. But … you do get 24/7 keyfob access to the weight and cardio machines, for $12.50 a month, which seems really reasonable.

Downsides: I don’t want to sign up for another bill, and I hate the idea of a regular daily place that would be less than perfect in its solitude.

The main reason to consider it is that it would save me a lot of space in the house. I wouldn’t need to allocate 100 or 200 square feet for the weight bench and a place to stretch, and I wouldn’t have to invest in unwieldy heavy items that exist only for being repetitively lifted.

Ultimately it’s a fish to be fried after returning in June, I think.

And, before that tripping, there’s getting ready for the shorter one, over to Bluewater, and that means caring intently about three vehicles. The truck, which I gave a full 25 gallons today. The van, which needs some fluids and a jump. And the e-bike, which requires crafting a long-term solution for the Airing of tires.

That’ll be the focus of the quick hot spell. And then there’s the monthly Azure order.

And the correspondence (my apologies, on that score–I’ve been very mental about it).

Here we go. The warm, and for real.

See also: Why believing in yourself is actually holding you back

It’s been suggested by a patron that I do something nice for myself.

This is roughly what I’m planning in response:

El Morro and El Malpais are both National Monuments.

The volcano and ice caves are a private concession: Introduction to the Ice Caves Trading Post

Not listed on this sign is the State Park at Bluewater Lake, which I will also check out. But there’s bad news about the old deal with NM State Parks. As of the start of the year, the great deals once available on state park camping are no longer a thing–they’ve jacked the rates radically. The non-resident yearly pass of $225 is now $600. Electrical hookups went from $4 to $10 a night, dump stations from $5 to $10, and water from free to five more dollars.

It won’t be feasible again as any kind of long-term strategy unless and until I am at least a New Mexico resident. And even then, the motivations will consistently evolve toward boondocking, and carrying more water on board (at eight pounds to the gallon), and generating my own electric.

Which honestly is not so much of a bad thing.

Because it’s closer to simplicity and self-sufficiency, which is sort of the whole point.

***

In the meantime I am nursing a summers-only Plan B centered around the North Platte River and the Wind River Range up north.

But of course all of it is just high theory until there is a well-designed and dependable rig to drive/haul anywhere. So that rolling home, alongside the fixed abode(s), and reductions in monthly costs, will be the primary focus, starting now on the cusp of the improving weather. Below-freezing nighttime temps are once again in the rearview mirror, probably and perhaps for the next six months this time. With the blessing.

Way down deep past anything rational, it seems my deepest fears are about not being able to meet my (let’s call them) Obligations.

I just had a shallow nightmare in which the worst happened on several levels at once.

I learned that my job was over and done with; that I would not be Renewed at the end of the contract year and that somehow there were no other jobs. (I’ve already lived through this exact dread in real life, and survived it, but the fear is still inside me anyway, and that might be the most troubling part.)

Then out beyond that, I couldn’t remember when I was supposed to show up at work, at the job that was ending anyway. It seemed likely that I had already missed at least one shift, or class I was supposed to teach, but I just didn’t know for certain.

Then, on top, it seemed like I had rented multiple places, but hadn’t been to them for a while, and wasn’t clear about when the rents were due or if they were current.

Finally, my important stuff was vulnerably scattered in a public place, and when I got it all stuffed back into bags I could manage to carry, I realized my wallet was missing and probably swiped. There was only a little bit of cash in it, and no money cards, but I no longer had possession of a driving license and was trying to remember what other papers had now gone missing.

“Making” money. Paying bills. Externalized memory and lists as compensatory behavior. Being owned by stuff at least as much as owning it.

These are the exact issues I spend most of my waking time working on, and the exact strategies I use to manage them.

And: almost none of it is real.

Donald David Hoffman is … a professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, with joint appointments in the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and the School of Computer Science.

And, in spite of all those things, he still manages to be a brilliant and compelling speaker, to my ear. You could decide for yourself, but that’s not why I’m writing to you, either.

I’m writing to give a proper answer to that question about what The Matrix is, and is-saying.

Why am I doing that?

Clearly, I am motivated in large part by irrational fears.

But also …

The desire to transcend them, and the civilized matrix itself, in some definitive way, before my time is up.

This is the point where what looks like Physics starts to look a lot more like what the Buddha was laying down.

Not because any flavor of either science or religion matters, but because if there is any solution, it has to involve traveling a path up out of the illusion, and past the nightmare.

Transcending it.

I would and will do it differently.

But …

In many ways this rig checks many more boxes on the list of ideals for a home away from home than anything I’ve got in the works currently.

The root motivating evil of Insidious Cultural Sickness is: Archons and their Arkheins.
(Greek arkhon “ruler”, present participle of arkhein “be the first”)

It doesn’t really matter why an alleged human being sets themselves and their intimates up as First over others (or anything else).

The setting-up itself is the original sin, and the source of the uglification and sickness and evil in this world of Ours.

Sometimes this is obvious to the meanest understanding. Anyone white and christian setting themselves up as de facto better than someone black or jewish is a racist.

More often it’s not nearly so obvious, as in the case of ‘meritocracy’. “I have more money than that homeless person because I’m smarter, and/or more hardworking, and not as dumb and lazy.” (Variation on the theme: “Thank God for Daddy positioning me to go to a good college and expanding my opportunities [which I then took advantage of, naturally, by being more bright and diligent].”)

***

For now let’s break it off there and just restate/reframe.

To ‘rule’ is to “be” ‘first’.

Which: I don’t want to “be”
–nor second
–nor forty-third
–nor last.

I am, rather, aiming to live UNRANKED
and outside the Higher-Archy: an arrangement of (Anything) represented as being “above” or “below”

ta hiera “the sacred rites”
hierarkhes “high priest, leader of sacred rites”

Thus:
the biggest problem with Caring What Anyone Thinks
is that it’s the same as putting concern and life energy into how anyone
might theoretically be ranking you
on any scale.

(as a man
as a writer
as anything)

“Taking a compliment” is hard and even counterproductive
… because …
“You’re great” is very nearly as insidious (and maybe moreso) than “You suck”.

***

The development of agriculture and sedentism (quitting hunting-gathering) seems very much like the Original Sin …
but whether these are, or not, is a matter of semantics.

These things just (automatically?) lead to hierarchy via granaries and surplus and accumulated wealth, and thus inequality and the divine right of kings, and thence to the Sickness called Civilization.

***

Notes.

The Secret History of Israel/Palestine, part I: The Jews of Europe and the rise of Zionism

… and …

Do you believe that clouds are Real?
Do you believe that you are smarter than an octopus?
What about … a rock?

The Hidden Flaws In Our Common Worldview | COURSE (1/7) | Dr. Bernardo Kastrup

***

The what-is-politics guy, and Bernardo, and my own musings about an-arch-ism, and a lot of other pieces besides
are all trying to sort themselves within the figment I call my self into a

coherent theory

or something.

(Completely unrelated? The actress who played Adriana on the Sopranos. Yes, Again. I know.)

I walked to the store and dropped my last remaining $20 for a while on eggs, berries and guac. There was big wind, and blowing snow, but I got that minimum hikemile in, and while I was out the crockpot was doing its thing to a chuck roast. That’s a Wednesday.

They-say it will remain grey and cold through the weekend and then go back to hot spring with temps at or above 80 and plenty of sun, and enough of a cash trickle to refill my gas tank, which is as close to dead empty as it has ever been.

A week out from that, the May cash cycle finally cycles. Then things are more or less set up (I guess) for some road-tripping in early June.

I’m thinking about what can be done in two months, and why.

The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman

Hours and hours of podcast on the subject of a relationship that began barely over three years ago in real time, and which is now in the hands of lawyers, judges, and assorted other Authorities.

Some interesting facts that might or might not shed additional light on the story.

–Gaiman by his own account has been a promoter of classically liberal ideas, including feminism, for decades.

–The primary creator of the podcast is the sister of Boris Johnson, very much a conservative and former Prime Minister of the UK.

–The concept of ‘neurodivergence’ comes up more than once here in connection to both the author and his accusers.

–Gaiman’s parents were high-ranking Scientologists when he was growing up. He himself got through several of their levels or grades at an early age, and worked for the organization as a young adult before he became a well-known writer and apparently quit.

–Not only is he an extremely talented creative artist with tons of hip cred, but married one as well, namely Amanda F- Palmer of the Dresden Dolls.

Palmer is named in the lawsuit as well, but is only mentioned briefly a few times in the reporting of these episodes. She did manage, in my view, to sum everything up neatly in a single bright and characteristically poetical phrase:

“Insidious Cultural Sickness”

To be fair, she was using it in a very limited sense in the days of Me-Too, to describe the horrifying state of the relationship between the genders.

But her intentions in the moment aside, she couldn’t be more right, about everything in civilized modernity.

From our food supply to our economics to our sex to our politics and to the finest works of our best and brightest and beyond …

It’s insidious sickness as far as the eye can see.

***

When I look back over the choices I’ve made and the paths I’ve taken in this life, and compare them to those made by anyone and everyone else I have known or admired or loved or hated or heard of …

I see, or feel, a pattern.

I am inevitably and deeply a product of the Sickness.

I have pretty consistently, though not always effectively, fought bitterly against it.

So there are days when habitually doing that helps me feel like a true noble warrior.

Then there are other days when I am sick as a dog, and completely overwhelmed by that very omnipresent and insidious sickness, and do nothing but shiver under the covers.

The nature of the battle has shifted considerably.

I no longer harbor any ambition about curing the disease, or imagine that such a thing is even possible.

All I know how to do, can do on the bad days, is to rip sweat-soaked sheets from my body, fling them to the corner, go make another pot of coffee, and maybe just maybe fight back hard enough to get them laundered and made back into a proper bed before the moon returns and night falls once more.

On a few rare days when there is enough sun and not too much wind, I can walk five miles.

I can speak out and tell the you that isn’t there about what I see, probably spitting through the narrative in frustration because it seems so fucking obvious, thus rendering the attempted communication from consciousness to consciousness intermittent and broken.

This is the life and world we’ve collectively chosen.

The best we can do.

Under the circumstances.

We are American Gods.

That is the pattern.

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

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

The 74,963 Kinds of Ice

Why no two people see the same rainbow

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

There is some fundamental difference between matter and consciousness.

But none between success and failure.

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

South

Why the Americas Still Aren’t Connected by a Road

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

North

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

1961: First Year of the Minnesota Vikings

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

Tua Taga-Viola.

Ashton Je-auntie.

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

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

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

War never changes.

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

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

My beliefs.

My hat, no cattle.

Stagecoach (1939)

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

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

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

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

One more from the front lines of the civil war.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An aspirational lunar Wyoming.

I want my rooms to look like that.

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

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

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

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

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

A purely rhetorical question, of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I started free-falling in time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The moon though abides, rising above it all.

Meanwhile …

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

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

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

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

And yes of course, the one about the shell.

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

But in the scale of a brief primate life …

The moon never changes.

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

But Selene she is always there.

And waking to her is the only trauma cure.

According to the scriptures of the new cult.

I believe.

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

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

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

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

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

On several dozen levels at once.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The words: Mint. Or red. Or rabbit.

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

The words are nothing

but an attempt

to point at a something.

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

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

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

occurs

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

Does it grow a fresh branch?

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

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

So you

do whatever the hell you wanna do
now is the time where you can do anything
everything
you do, anything still gonna turn out

great:

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

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

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

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

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

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

No need to thank me.

I do it for love.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I want ’em if they want me.

I found myself alone.

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

nothing left to prove

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

Consciousness Is.

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

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

Sorry about that.

***

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

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

It Is, and I Am.

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

We are.

***

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

Nevertheless, the evidence appears fairly incontrovertible that

We are

Monkeys, on a Rock, hurtling through Space.

Cogitatin’ away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

–such shocking innocence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two more days of it, we agreed.

And then comes the Spring?

The nighttime lows crawling back above freezing.

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

Mirabile dictu.

And god bless us every one.

***

Late breaking news.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commentary En Passant:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

Good medicine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For whatever reason, I prefer this version.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every single bit of it is optional.

And for the most part I am choosing …

to opt out of it

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

Brainwashed By Your Manipulative Yoga Instructor [ASMR Hypnosis Rp]

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

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

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

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

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

Necessarily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nor the Israel thing either.

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

Right.

Brazilian Rainforest Cleared To Prepare For A Climate Conference

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t cry, though.

Instead I just spill.

Therefore I am.

And so what?

Yes.

So what now.

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

There was a big order fulfilled expeditiously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ian Carroll Tells Pam Bondi EXACTLY Where To Find Epstein List

Not just tells her–shows her.

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

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

Crazy Joe (1974)

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

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

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

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

The Conversation (1974)

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

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

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

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

***

The Bridge Cannot Burn Down

If it was never put up

and the same is true
if it was put up

but is not up now
for reasons known

or not known

Report:

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

You are the Ripple.

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

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

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

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

you knowhatta mean.

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

There’s no way for me to get over it.

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

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

Before that, it didn’t exist.

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

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

But I don’t want to be sick any more.

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

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

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

Journey to Andromeda

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

Among the animals that think they know things.

Seen here through glass he speckled himself …

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

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

RNGeezus/christ

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

He was born
in
Oklahoma

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know nothing, am nothing.

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

-30-

“Trump Gaza” Video Angers His Own Voters

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

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

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

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

Losing “it”.

In the most felicitous possible way?

Or thereabouts.

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

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

So what?

***

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

The spir- at the center.

***

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

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

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

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

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

Those buffalo were doing absolutely everything right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Set all that aside and start over.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Beyond here, there are no actual Highlights per se.

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

December

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

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

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

6th: “To live sanely per society’s norms is to worship cheating and the big lie. To prosper, in this context of insanity, is no kind of success worth the name.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also, the Monica phase begins.

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

31st: Pome. Decent.

January

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

3rd: olvidé ser claro, dulces sueños mi querida

5th: More discomfortable crap about whatever this is.

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

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

20th: “Until then I practice my own religion as it evolves from Anarchy! to the quiet phases of the day in this town that is neither here nor there.” That fell out again of another spitfire tree and god I wish there were some other way.

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

29th:AI is handwaved away dismissively.

February

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11th: How Soon Is Now? Real soon.

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

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

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

That’s enough. Outta me.

No god.

No master.

No nothin’.

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

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

Renouncen: “give up (something), resign, surrender”
PIE root *neu- “to shout”)
(Reportagin. Yes. To bring back the-word-against, and holler it. To the Void?)

***

The sense of “abandon, discontinue” (a habit, practice, etc.) is from late 15c.

Stories. And every one of them optional.

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

Or something. Gonna straighten it out, somehow.

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

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

Connections, like:

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

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

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

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

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

Will I ever learn?

Will I ever not learn? Unlearn?

On the other hand,

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

It was called Charlotte’s Web.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But your boring sensitivities aside, here’s one.

Callin’ In Sick (Of Your Shit)

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

Except … it wasn’t, of course.

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

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

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

Tempting.

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

I’ll be tracking down, on that Maybe.

You just watch me

or, wait

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

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

Look Here Now, Morrissey my dear boy.

The departure of hope

is the arrival of wisdom.

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

Never know.

Never inherit

The Nothing,

in particular.

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

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

There seems to be broad agreement on two things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do science. Man, or woman, up.

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

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

The Author Is Not “In” The Book

***

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

Try this on.

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

Why is that?

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

For many reasons.

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

Career suicide.

but but but why?

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

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

That’s how we do, ennit?

That’s fuckin’ why.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How were these documents supposed to be linked?

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

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

Thus we eventually got the formulation:

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

Linkage, of documents.

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

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

We have liftoff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Friars Minor Capuchin were founded.

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

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

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

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

Including a sage; including a belletrist.

Peace.

A calm, confident state of mind.

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

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

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

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

But now, afterwards: every reason.

Eleven dollars is a substantial splurge, right now.

Was it worth it?

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

More stuff

no matter how beautifully artisanal

is the wrong direction entirely

at every turn.

***

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

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

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

By morning it may dawn.

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

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

***

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

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

Lion Man.

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

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

Tangent.

***

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

The Magdalenian Culture

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

Doggerland

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

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

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

***

Proxima Centauri is still about 25 trillion miles from here.

A gentle reminder.

No god.

No master.

No nothin’.

***

Dead end notes.

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

But really, they’re all Popular Opinion.

unpop

antisocial media

poverty and unpopularity

pouty bitch why won’t anybody come see?

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

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

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

here’s my email

madness

yeah

***

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

Theoretically making slightly more sense than the time you read this

or left it to slide.

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

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

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

***

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

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

And there you have it.

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

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

The Settlement of the Americas: New Discoveries

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

That’s so.

Apparently, they went … around it.

Pretty cool.

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

Footprints.

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

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

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

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

Well that’s good to know.

Thanks, Pete.

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

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

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

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

And other cults and religions …

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

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

***

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

So: pretty much everybody we know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was asked to keep this confidential

My title above does not consist of my words.

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

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

This is how the System works.

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

And …

You do.

Or to put it a different way:

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

–Epictetus

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

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

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

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

No god.

No master.

No nothin’.

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

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

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

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

No rules

neither.

***

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

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

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

How many miles to the next closest star?

Proxima Centauri is about 25 trillion miles from here.

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

And that’s just the closest one.

According to the esteemed NPR itself …

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

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

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

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

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

And every other day of the year too.

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

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

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

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

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

He’s certainly not America!

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

No, America is you and me.

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

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

And feeling all Right about that.

***

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

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

And yeah, about me too.

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

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

I have done all that I could?

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

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

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

People go just where they will.

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

***

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

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

Crystallizing for me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But: No Guru.

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

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

The Uglification of the World

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

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

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

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

Modernism. Colonialism. Globalization.

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

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

Capitalism, perhaps most of all.

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

Notions of Property and Ownership themselves.

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

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

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

How The USA Is Destroying Itself From Within

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

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

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

What we label it doesn’t matter much.

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

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

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

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

To join you in your addictions to prosperity and optimism.

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

Well you shut your bloody mouth

How can you say?

I go about things the wrong way

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

I am, arguably, human

and I need to be loved just like

everybody else does.

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

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

Or the plumbing.

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

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

Too shameful, yeah buddy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

and

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

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

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

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

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

Congratulate me.

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

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

The Experiment of Non-Ownership – Week 1 Update

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

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

that will not do what you want it to do

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

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

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

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

preferably without using the word ‘Trump’.

Please

and thank you.

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

The current answer:

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

Peruvian Perfiles, quantity 4

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

Peruvian Water-Process Decaf, quantity 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for the notions, good ol’ Bob.

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

And the rest of you too.

Bed: A ‘cot’ and layers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ultimately the point is to distract us.

From the perpetual fact that they own it all.

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

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

The Experiment of Complete Non-Ownership

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

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

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

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

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

Own me. Enslave me.

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

It seems right, but it is not.

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

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

You could too.

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

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

It feels like I might start trying anyway.

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

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

To rewild in some hard non-fluffy sense.

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

To live like a saint without being one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

can I?

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

jail exactly. Alas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were murdered, for your comfort and privacy.

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

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

But … but … I worked hard for it!

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

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

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

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

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

***

About this monk.

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

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

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

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

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

And that I am now one of them.

The Experiment of Complete Non-Ownership

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

My Natural Personal Hygiene and Preventative Healthcare Practice

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

Am I Losing My Mind?

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

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

The February bills are paid.

Even if the dues are not.

Could be worse.

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

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

But oh, Saturday, and its promise of 67.

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Sanctuary.

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

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

Another, nominally better:

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

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

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

Yeah.

I don’t care.

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

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

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

And of course, there is a downside.

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

I refuse to be terrified. About that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not just from the Digital either.

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

If I need to shit I squat over a pit.

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

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

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

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

But mostly, that’s a junkie’s fear.

That time Theia crashed into Gaia and bore Selene.

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

Please honey don’t break my heart

The video in question

Just … thanks again, Brian.

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

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

who (nevertheless) goes on to note:

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

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

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

within the capitalist

Anthropocene.

***

Maybe you know the names, or maybe not.

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

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

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

Whitney Webb Triggers Weinstein Tantrum With Facts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is enough for me, six days out of seven.

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

i’m gonna straighten it out
somehow

yeah
I want to do right

but not right
now

***

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

–the character portraying the real-life woman called Maimiti

Mutiny on the Bounty, 1962

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

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

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

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

I opted once more for silence instead.

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

; )

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

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

The Imperial Dilemma of Civilization

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

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

Progress.

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

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

Alpha Centauri is NOT Civilization in space

And that, for now,
is all I gotta say

about that.