I worked hard and smart, the last couple of days, sleeping just five or six hours but successfully pushing away the urge to nap in between anyway. As a result, of a Tuesday morning, I am taking my coffee with no MCT oil, and with coconut milk instead of heavy cream, because although it has a trace of carbs it has about a fifth of the calories, and serves the same function.

Out beyond alternative coffee creamer, I also have fresh plans about what else to routinely ingest, in terms of things like tortillas, and the base of protein–more eggs and fish, a fair bit less of red meat and probably being focused on much higher quality, instead of the lowest price.

I’ve come to believe that my main health issue (yours maybe too, statistically) is a cluster of issues collectively called “metabolic syndrome“, in combination with insulin resistance, and that these things are best remediated by continuing to evolve these plans, using strategies that are sometimes in direct conflict with the scientistic ‘prevention’ advice in that link.

These diet and related lifestyle strategies are effecting changes in every other aspect of my living besides, in at least two directions. Upstream of them, my meditations on the lies of Civ are crystallizing into a deeper understanding of the centrality of Class (power, ‘equality’, money, ‘success’) in how the world really works. On the downstream, the overstuffed piles of crap in my house continue to ever so slowly melt–I’m much more inclined in any given moment to just throw shit away. (‘Huh. These last few packets of Emergen-C don’t actually do much for the taste of my electrolyte water, aaand checking the ingredients, they’re mostly maltodextrin anyway, which I definitely don’t want. Trash!’) … like that.

Further and further away from this shit and all it represents.

Down through the rapids and closer and closer to the vain but warming hope of some uncertain thing like this instead.

I’m throwing those images out too, straight into the recycling bin of a kind of art, not because it helps, but because it is the right thing to do in the moment. The right thing is to figure out what a Wagon Farmhand might truly be, moving up the wash, further from the hiss and from slavery and the bad rich corrupt cops that run the society I’ve been born into.

In the midst of working smart and hard I spent a few minutes starting to write a short story about Thoth, who might or might not be my brother.

Tracking the one true Muse down into the Bonfires of the Bronx.

Trampling barefoot these grapes, of wrath.

***

I also listened to a season’s worth of podcast about Peter Bogdanovich, because I’ve never seen a movie he directed that I didn’t like, and because more than one of them I’ve loved dearly. Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show leap immediately to mind.

From that experience and the rabbit holes it led to, I mined out a few more lies drilled into our heads by the rich bad cops until we learned each word of them in our tortured hearts, and believed them without question, becoming accomplices in our own individual enslavements.

Lies such as: pairing off into monogamous heterosexual partnerships is normal (as in, it happens to most people) and correct, and worth aspiring to, and right.

I have been so beaten over the head with that one; with the related ones about what a man is supposed to be and especially in relation to a woman. Christ I’ve been so … warped by it.

Maybe it was true for a moment in Dubuque or some idealized Pocatello for five minutes in the dead center of the 40s or 50s.

Among the creatives, in and around Hollywood and New York and probably most places, none of it was ever the norm for a moment.

Infidelity and Divorce, Bisexuality and the Homo kind too, dozens of sexual partners, vast yawning age gaps (especially older men with younger women), polyamory in the context of both open and supposedly closed marriages. Separate residences, spreading one’s seed across the earth and bearing multiple children with numerous partners (here’s looking at you, my father, my uncle, and at you Clint Eastwood and John Lee Hooker too).

‘Perversions’ of every color.

All of this much closer, to The Norm, to what was the case for most live people most of the time, probably for most times in an oh-so-civilized western society.

I come out of it saying, almost shouting, once more in yet another context: Don’t hold me to your dumb false standard!

And especially don’t try to tell me that I should live up to it (should do anything, be anything) because that’s how people are; good people, ethical people, normal people.

It’s all bullshit my dear.

It’s what they want you to believe about the world, because holding on to dumb beliefs of that kind makes you easier to control, and makes you a slave to them and their shit all over again.