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

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

Wednesday Addams.

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

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

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

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

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

I ate them and thought about things.

Conspiritually; theoretically.

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

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

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

I can say that having never seen WEDNESDAY.

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

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

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

The meta-message of the Addams franchise is simple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just like Wednesday Addams, professionally cool non-conformist.

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

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

***

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

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

Or it could be.

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

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

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

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

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

What about your glorious Humphrey Bogart, asshole?”

I’m here to testify my lamb.

***

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

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

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

1) No one here gets out alive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe.

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

On that … you can rely.

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

I am sorry for myself, too.

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

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

Where have all the real, righteous cowboys gone?

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

Or the one God sells.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a lie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

amen

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

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

That is NOT it; will you FOCUS

Okay

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

But that’s not it either.

Okay. Here.

On Realising the Political is Personal, with Fiona Robertson

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

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

The Trauma.

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

Yet without uncertainty we can have no experience of mystery.

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

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

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

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

Finally there’s this.

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

are so stupid.

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