Images. Left to speak for themselves while I take care of some bidness.
Jefe says: Nobody goes hungry, not in my camp, and that feel should, in my tergiversating opinion, grant a blessing of a lesson to us all.
A Conscientious Observer says:
One day, Jimmy Carter’s mother Lillian, was being interviewed by a reporter.
Hoping for a gotcha, the reporter asked Does your son ever tell a lie?
Lil replied Well, I imagine sometimes he’ll tell a little white lie.
The reporter pressed on. ‘ What’s your definition of a white lie?’
Mrs. Carter replied Well, when I answered the door, I said it was nice to meet you.
Because I have eyes that only see colors, I don’t know if that’s a bit, or a true story.
Why yes, often, I am angry, at your complacency and the unthinking stream of cliché falling heedless from your lips, trying to pass itself off as informed and productive conversation, or as enlightened, or simply as the happy banter of a kind of … celebratory intimacy.
It’s stupid to let it enrage me. But I embrace that stupidity. Stupidly.
Over and over I swallow my anger, and spit it out here instead of in your face, in this place where you can and do safely ignore it–not all of you, and not every week, but (by the cold hard numbers): Mostly. It’s quarantined.
I don’t have that luxury, face to face. So the rage comes a-spillin’ forth, over turkey …
When am I coming to see you?
When I feel my way to a solution, for all that, one that doesn’t do more harm than good.
Until then I practice my own religion as it evolves from Anarchy! to the quiet phases of the day in this town that is neither here nor there.
***
Just before that day of stuffing, your gal lost big at the polls.
Mostly: I refrained from any gloating, even here. I did do my best, to understand why.
There is new evidence that tries to address that question.
So the masses abandoned, in droves, the project of senile evil you championed and clapped for, and the number one reason for that was the genocide you cheered, and dismissed as self-defense.
You don’t have to take shit from me for that. The electorate gave you a full mouthful, and months later I’m still wondering what you will have to say about that once your throat is again cleared up from it. If … you know … that ever happens.
***
All these months on, roughly the same electorate is trying to find ways around the ignorant TikTok ban, and that is having the unexpected effect of deepening their disaffection with both cheeks of the same saggy ass.
The tldr; is that even after “winning”, the next phase in the evolution of the Zeitgeist involves their sudden realization that this isn’t a First World country any more.
A year ago, 50 percent of Murka supported the ban. Now it’s dropped to a third. So pols on either cheek are rushing to revise their public positions. None of it matters, to the lived reality of We, The People.
But maybe just maybe it will provide a further cause, for a reflective pause.
Meanwhile, forgive me if I decline to hold my breath for that.
***
Late breaking news.
Overnight, the prediction of 3 degrees above zero (likely the coldest night of the winter) has been revised to -4 below–the coldest night in many a winter.
The cats, outdoor especially, have been shoveled full of quality calories, and have shelter enough to live until dawn, with luck. Plus prayers.
As the sun sets I have three days and an evening to complete that application if I actually and truly want to complete it. Which at the moment I do, feels like.
A couple days after that deadline, there is a 50% chance of the first snow here. The weekend will be gray and an exercise in Live Through This. But if we all do, or even if not, the middle of next week is expected to herald a return to at least Mostly sunny, highs of 50, and only modest winds.
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
If the whole electromagnetic spectrum were the size of the space between New York and LA …
then the part of the Spectrum we can see with our eyes, as colors, would be the thickness of a thread.
As the basic meat creatures we always have been, we see almost nothing, and thus, even if we religiously follow the homily about believing the evidence of our own eyes, we still know next to nothing, about the realities of our world and the universe.
There are two commonplace rejoinders to this truth.
One is the retort of the crystal-packing mamas: “Oh, but it’s not just about vision, or hearing. Secretly, we’ve got dozens of senses, including ones that are completely paranormal!”
Not a bad argument, and even right, to a point. But still.
Even granting that all those spooky senses exist … prove to me somehow that even one of them isn’t just as limited and narrow as our eyes and vision, please. Then we can talk about this … rationally.
Rejoinder two comes from … everyone. All the normies anyway. And that goes: But Science! But Progress!
And again, this is not completely without merit and validity. Radio telescopes and electron microscopes and lots of other technologies do extend the range of our ability to see, along the Spectrum.
But, but still.
I don’t have much faith in either of those abstractions, and faith is required for both, at least if they are going to be used as the basis for a system of Belief, and values, and morality, and judgments about non-concrete things like human beings and their emotions, much less what the Right Way is for them–us–to live their (our) lives.
Like whether getting a Covid shot, or not getting one, is moral or immoral.
I’ve been working in this factory
for nigh on fifteen years
All this time I watched my woman
drowning in a pool of tears
I’ve seen a lot of good folks die
that had a lot of bills to pay
And I’d give the shirt right off my back
if I had the guts to say
Take this job and shove it
I ain’t working here no more
The narrator never does get the nerve to say those iconic words out loud to the evil bosses. He dreams of it day and night. But it remains a silent howl of pain, and a fantasy.
It was for me too.
It’s too late for me to say them now. My wish for you is the youth, resources, and towering moral strength to actually say them out loud.
Some a’you will say something along the lines of: But … but I like my job.
And I would reply: It’s not technically impossible for that to be true.
Statistically speaking, however, you’re lying to me, and yourself, and have been taught, and then taught yourself, how to go along and get along as a happy house negro.
To look down on your brothers and sisters who work in the fields, and factories.
And to look down most of all on those who would rather live the hell out of the way and on the run, under a highway bridge, than to live your life of enslavement.
To damn them as lazy moral defectives, from the comfort of your Master’s warm kitchen, from the lofty heights of your Commander’s horse.
To me, an outlaw is a man that did things his own way, whether you like him or not.
— Johnny Paycheck
Which sounds exactly the same as the sentiments in the lyrics to “My Way” …
But honey, I’m here to testify.
It’s just not, no matter how pretty and tempting it might be to think so.
I went to my first “meeting” of any kind in years.
It was the first meeting, of a very local ‘Alliance of Charities’ that doesn’t have a real name yet. About 50 people showed up, and as you might expect, every single one of them (of .. us) was a well-meaning do-gooder of one arcane kind or another.
Afterwards, I went up to the only person I knew there, a former boss at a part-time job from 20 years ago, to get re-acquainted. (I had an ulterior, or at least non-social motive).
Once again, even in this nominally liberal setting, I was treated to an earful about Those Homeless–they’re all drunks and addicts, they’re all nuts, they don’t Want To Work.
And once again, in as sugar-coated a way as I could manage, I replied with words that meant: Fuck you. You’re talking about my family–these are the least among my brothers, so you don’t get to run your stupid mouth that way about them. Not to me. Shove your crafty secondhand homilies and your faux street-smart realpolitik. I don’t want it.
I won’t have it.
The hypocrites and moralists–I confess it–are not entirely wrong. Yeah, anyone on the street has problems, and some of those problems are disorders of character, whatever that means, or just plain flaws.
I don’t hesitate to pull my knife when one of them steps too close and violates my robust security concerns. It’s already happened once this year. If necessary, I’ll beat on them until they’re not capable of advancing further in my direction.
But I would never wag my finger at them for what they are, behind their back, or take a superior moral tone about them, like so many dipshits in this world seem so eager to do.
Because the meanest nastiest least moral drunk in the world is still quite capable of freezing to death on a winter’s night with no roof and no coat.
And if they sell their charity coat, or roof, for their next hit, I would still want them to have another, to put off the chill for one more night of life.
You’re more than entitled to feel differently.
And I am entitled to my opinion, about who you really are deep down in the end.
Maybe it’s a series. I’m not taking any solemn vows.
But to begin what may never end, start here.
This moon is call Enceladus, a word that takes me far back to when enchiladas, and hot springs, were very important symbolic elements for me.
The People brought their damned dogs into the holy public springs, and they became plagued with giardia. That was even before the covidian hijinks. Never goin’ back again? Well, probably not; I don’t really even like the idea of motel hot tubs any more. The point is that Enceladus has geothermal energy. Geysers shooting out from under the ice, and how can that not be still cool?
There are no dogs or human lungers in the orbit of Saturn. It will remain, for all my lifetime anyway, perfectly pristine and symbolically unreachable.
On the enchilada front I moved on to tacos I make myself, and every element they are composed of being organic, or trying to get there in lieu of being venison I shoot with a compound bow out near the grave of the child that only lived three weeks in this month of January, year of our lord 1920 A.D. when Saint Grandfather himself was only eight years old.
And I still long for a deep private tub of hot water in which to baptize myself, all over again every single day if I feel like it.
Dream on my brother, whether it ever happens for you or not, whether you ever get to trade in a Bucket of bloody gold for the myth of Silver: some things happen, and most things don’t.
The last part is this. Like I implied, the picture of geysers in space is a desktop wallpaper here on this free and open source operating system. In the FOSS world we get to have as many desktops as we want, and to name them: suck on that, you gimped and walled garden of an iOS.
This one, the first one, is called, by me: 0steer.
It’s holds the app for the VPN. Another one just called Notes, which I use as a steering scratchpad–sometimes amplified by Zettlr.
And the Tor Browser open to the local weather for today and tomorrow and the fortnight to come, because it’s really important right now to my spiritual stability to be able to get at least an hour-long scrap of winter sun most days, even if a girl in trouble is a temporary thing.
We have to allow for the possibility that no one else sees it because: it isn’t there,
and also feel the deep satisfaction and pride that comes from hitting it anyway.
and not let any of that distract us from the truly important question
I think I might actually ‘want’ this one, in that a-job-is-a-bad-deal-no-matter-what way. 18.96 x 40 x 50 -33% = 25K/yr net.
So one year of full-time wage slavery equals freedom
from indebtedness, not counting the mortgage or that god damn student loan I will never pay back if I can help it. Plus a little left over to start on the Turtleshell Project, even a trailer besides, and replacing an engine, transmission, transfer case. All of which is more important than ever making it back to Silver in style, even though that’d be nice too.
I was wrong, about the Katana seeds from the Congo. Even though the roast aroma was unimpressive, once in the cup, they are a revelation of eye-opening deliciousness.
The reveal comes too late, because Maria’s only had a very small amount to begin with, and isn’t selling more, this growing season at the least. There is only what’s left of the test pound I’m drinking, plus one precious more that I would be willing to part with, but not for less than fifty bucks. Minimum.
Learning: first of all, extremely light roasts are definitely The Way forward. Let them ease into first crack and then go straight to the cooling.
Secondly, no final judgments, until the creamy taste is on my lips.
And third, this is now a standard that everything else must live up to, to make it onto my product list going forward.
Living in one’s truck should never be the only option in a great-again land.
Being well-prepared to do it comfortably even at fifteen degrees should always be one (normally, of two), and that is a kind of truth that gives me purpose this morning in my very own transformation village.
For the day, as the quoted victim says, that “all my friends are long gone”, or sitting in a line of cars a mile long, hoping for enough propane to keep the death chill away another day.
***
Oly Jesus, Don, you are SO VERY CLOSE to getting it, when you call the border with Canada an “artificially drawn line“.
Now just realize the same is true of that other border you’re famous for trying to close down …
and every other border ever, from the Sonoran Desert and Palestine, to the one that ran right through Berlin.
***
And finally, the quote of the year, hands-down and already:
Maybe just maybe, the puppets of the evil ones, the stooges that my former audience used to insist I must keep voting for, for voting’s sake, are simply too mortally stupid to care, about you or me or anything.
And all those people standing around her moping through the inanity?
They’re jus’ doing their jobs, man, and …
that means that sadly, they and we get exactly the democracy we deserve.
The conversation with Monica has a hundred views
At least three or four of them are mine
And … I haven’t even seen the whole thing to the end.
It’s incredibly rich and dense and I’ll keep going back until I feel all of it.
Meanwhile in the theoretically real world, this may be the worst of times, because on top of the deep chill and the snow lingering just up the hill over the horizon line, it is gray again.
I study the lore of the bride of Chaotica and I ready myself for the temperatures to plunge beneath that threshold of ten degrees Fahrenheit.
Sometimes cathair gets into my mouse again and trips, and sometimes those mistakes are fortuitous.
In the time of the other solstice, the main thing is barely enough light to see steps by, no more, and not enough to produce any sweat. Hit the ground at the first crepuscular hint of the solar return, then.
Here on this side its all flipped. The more sun the better the hotter, and driving to the farpoint before going pedestrian is almost mandatory to keep away from other eyes.
The Wrong Way to Rewild; I love this shit and nominate PMB for President of my own Heaven’s Gate, and Monica in place of Walz. (Is this relationship between us parasitic, or a mutualism? Is there even a difference, or is it really only a distinction?)
Fifty percent of all human consumed calories come from wheat, corn, and rice. Eighty percent of the total come from just eight species altogether (taters. soy, et cetera–the carbs again). Of course that’s wrong, and harmful, and twists everything else, and you don’t even have to be smart, to see that as obvious. The scarecrow in the big ag field is the apotheosis and avatar of the capitalist satan, and so it is in any vast rice paddy no matter how socialist or fair trade or communal it may seem to be.
***
I tested the Congolese Katana and the results were Nicaraguan.
All that remains is the variations on the theme of Chiapas, a strange little Guat Robusta, and one potential African from the Horn, which I tend to favor, but I alone.
It takes a lot of time, this testing, alongside the amount it takes to keep the stove pristine and the powder jars dryly filled.
I count it all as just on the side of worth it: Life.
Greenland, Canada, the Canal, it’s all too easy. Low hangin’ pomegranates. Juiceless.
Je suis réservé. Rather behold, my beautiful new mind and life.
I have reservations too, about implicitly celebrating the ruin and the damage, about why I might be drawn to pictures of dead couches or scrap metal or defunct railroad crossings.
I think the answer has something to do with the fact that … these things are simply what is There, in the places where people are almost completely not any more.
As I pushed on past the graves and the old new house, the evidence of ruination faded, except maybe for an excess of old crumbly dry cow shit.
The absence of the evidence was very welcome.
I don’t want to walk anywhere but way out there right now.
I don’t want to walk at all, really, in temperatures hovering at fifty degrees max.
But it is good for me in more than one way, and the predicted lack of cloud makes the reservations less powerful.
Almost to the point of overcoming.
Whether I overcome, on any given day, is a blessed mystery that unfolds itself.
It’s a perfectly serviceable tool of language
with the potential to be useful for many things
so why in this time and place and culture
is it almost always prefaced by a word that means
You can’t go down on the same anything twice, but going down for the third time, at least I know … what it’s not.
Even though the conceit of it has been ‘Daily’, it’s not a diario, in part because the teenage-girl baggage that has accumulated around that makes it uselessly misleading as a descriptor.
It’s not a blog. That one is a contraction of web-log, and the original meaning there was: Look, here’s where I’ve surfed on the dubya dubya dubya and here’s some of my thoughts about those places and the ideas found there … The Spill has actually been at its worst when following that approach. Not to say that whatever succeeds the Spill will never link out or anything, but based on the history, the less of that the better.
The common word that fits least badly is probably: journal. It doesn’t satisfy me much better even so. The best part of it comes by association with newspapers, but this ain’t journal-ism either. At best then, Journal is a semantic cul-de-sac.
What it is, is more obscured by various breeds of rhetorical fog.
I have some words and parts of words that are trying to sort themselves into coherence and clarity and … something akin to impactfulness though that is barely any kind of respectable word itself.
It’s a spir- at least for sure.
If I had an audience it might’ve evolved into a conspiracy. I performed CPR on that concept for some months, and only achieved breaking several ribs on a corpse.
Also, it’s winter now and things are slow and gelid.
i think the reason i have no honest desire to go back to Chicago again
is that marriage is an Institution, and i don’t want to live Institutionalized myself
much less spend a pile of money i don’t have Celebrating it
there are fish shoulders right here to roast fry and that much i can afford
and i’m well aware that the institution joke is not even original
but it works for me regardless
i got a Shell god dammit, and it was free but for the cost of mighty labors
just like all of life and just like every decision that shapes our lives
every choice of which road to trip or not
(regardless who do you thinks gonna even read about a turtleshell)
i am not a dependent charity tortoise
i am a free anarch and liony among men and wimmenz alike
temporarily alive
conditionally autonomous
neither emancipated nor enslaved and in love with walking that very edge
while it lasts
which ain’t all that long now
if we ain’t too scared about the future
look out, Spike
it’s something to olvidé and remember at the same time.
them that will never read it here …
(no one, no one i called back knew a thing, about the Shell)
can just do It there
do that
i dunno
whatever-It-is they’re doin’
Know what I mean? celebrating they say and i say
wooHoo!
uh yeahuh
They will tell you you can’t sleep alone, or Pick your Family.
Fuck it, I challenge all the other easy assumptions. Why not add that one to the pile? and god damn isn’t her whole sermon that I had a choice at the time?
Hot off the presses: Yes I did, and I made it, back then.
And I am such a genius that I can make it all over again every single day if I feel like it.
The poetistic part is that mi querida here is both a cat and a lover who lost her cat.
It also means:
Been attending to that party less and less anyway
I think I’m pretty much done with it for good
So do me a solid baby and let me know
If there’s something I need to pay attention to there
if you would, like that policy we had
when i blocked that guy that time y’know
i don’t give a shit about birthdays, I know when the important ones are
thanks
For that
For being what’s left of my readership
For being a good mom to the Buddhacat
For the memories
***
another cool thing about it is that in English, it rhymes
I roasted a shoulder that used to belong to a big hog, turned it into pure chili verde, and have been indulging myself in eating it and only it, unadulterated by even so much as a tortilla. Just straight out of the crock, sufficient unto itself, sinful delicious and satisfying.
as it was in the beginning
so shallot be in the end
since filth and entropy are everywhere i mean, it blows in on the very wind
then and so the work of consciousness
becomes holding it at bay, at a line called frontdoor
first you must engineer access to clearwater (there is no clear water in the creek no more
:filth won the culture wars) and next, a way of warming
or boiling it up with sun or the blood of dinosauruses
there are okay ways and better ways
there are major appliances + mere pots
and this is how i fail to celebrate
the lie that they call newYear holiday
i’m not online now but there’s no cause for
worry unless you enjoy that sort of thing
still deep in
the solstice fog
gone fishin
back soon
Yesterday was Friday. Before it happened, I finally got the perfect night’s sleep again. That’s roughly eight hours between roughly nine at night and five in the morning.
Then I worked steady and hard all day, and went to bed again at 9 PM again, tossing down a little magnesium to make sure I stayed on track. Couldn’a been better or more virtuous or more promoting of all that is healthful and right.
But after three hours I woke up anyway. It’s a little after 1 AM on Saturday. I’m at the keyboard when I’m Supposed To Be Sleeping.
The temptation is to feel frustrated, and honestly I am, but honestly just a little.
I might blame getting old some.
I might blame myself, for not perfectly observing the ‘no eating in a three hour window before bedtime’ rule.
But …
I also realize that the main reason to blame at all, or to feel frustrated, is Habit.
“I’m going to be a mess at work tomorrow”. The chant of the wage slave.
But I’m not a wage slave anymore. so it’s not really and truly that big of a deal, unless I let it be–Habitually.
Instead I get up, with a minimum of fluster.
I turn to tell you this story, and brew a pot of perfect peruvian decaf, and remain alert to signs that my body and brain will be willing to take a nap, say between four and seven in the near future.
Keeping on schedule more or less.
Or … not.
Maybe I’ll stay up again until 20 hours from now, groggy toward the end of it, and nail the ideal bedtime yet again for another try.
Maybe the theoretical nap will be later, and shorter.
***
At some point in the three hours, I dreamed of fighting my father again, only this time I did not beat him to literal death as I did in the last such dream.
I just parried him to a draw.
Awake now, I am considering that maybe he, and other dead people like him, are my only real and true audience after ten years of this practice.
Or, in parallel, that I myself am a gaistijaną.
***
Then when I was waking I was thinking about major appliances.
Throughout most of civilized history, Owning A Dishwasher meant owning a person (or at the very least paying them wages to dishwash, which is pretty close to the same thing in terms of economic theory).
Nowadays a ‘dishwasher’ is an expensive appliance, though that doesn’t stop the most morally lost of us from hiring people to load, run, and unload our dishwashing machines.
I don’t own either kind and I don’t want to; I wouldn’t even if I too was loaded.
In some weird anarch-ronistic way, I want and need to wash my own dishes, regardless of how much money I have or will ever have.
***
Sinks, therefore, are the most important and essential of the modern appliances.
Alongside a water heater. Hardly any practical way of getting around it.
Followed closely by the other big food ones, the fridge and the stove. (In some idealized world, a garden and a pasture and [let’s face it] an abattoir.
Then out past doing your own food, there’s the furnace, a convenient way to avoid freezing to death. (AC, on top of the HV, if you live somewhere you shouldn’t.)
And a tub, and/or shower, kind of an almost-essential.
Way down the list there are optional conveniences: washer, dryer, toilet, and so on to the minor appliances: “coffee maker” (please don’t fucking keurig ever), grinder, roaster … uh, “Ninja Foodie”.
However long or short your own list of Necessaries is here, there’s a tremendous amount of work involved in maintaining them and using them, every day of allegedly civilized life, yours and mine both, in varying degrees.
There’s a lot more to say about it all.
But I’m not saying it right now; in part because Who Do You Thinks Gonna Care?
guess i cared for whatever reason about what you think/say at one time
but unmercifully and relentlessly you beat that caring out of me
one rabbit pellet triviality after another One
half-baked truism and a doz’en clam refusals-to-even-engage on the side
…
today with my time running out i’m not deeply/particularly interested no
mo’ in that shit / in your sallow and compromised opinions and worldview*
*** *(vide:
them homeless they don’t really want to work now do they
and
dem serial killer colonials have a right don’t they hurp to defend demselfs
or, simply:
Murka fuck yeah baby ty for yr service)
and
for the most part / on most days that is all i ever am
episodically : as ‘necessary’ : i morphwalk toward
husband son brother catdaddy for visits holidays
but not friend nor colleague
neither innamorato nor citizen
titular neologism meaning both
artist, if you’re on team, and spergy, if-u-ain’t
leaving it up to your opinion
to define me for yourself either way
and still be
accurate enough
to satisfy
the opinion of the i that am
***
***
The Ever-Popular Tormented Shaman Effect variations on a theme by Rundgren
******
You’ve got something that’s a secret to the average eye
been saving what nobody’s seen in your Hideaway
I can’t stand another second in this tinker-toy empire
bless me with your direction
***
In the back of my head there is doubt, suspicion
with my latest fascination
I should trust myself, should beware of this, but
it’s like the Stranger’s kiss no man can resist
***
It seems like trouble so you hide,
keep it bottled up inside
til its too late and
you track down the tears that don’t rhyme
***
I stand behind every word I said
It takes a special thing to make her stay
I was convinced I’d found the Way
Now I can’t believe it’s happened to me cuz
there goes my bay … bay
***
All I need is your whispered Hello (it’s me)
your gin-soaked smile melting the snow queen
Memphis hazel eyes that are deeper than time
Give me your love before mine fades to dust i guess
***
I am the Emperor of the Universalizing High Way
(Where’d you ever find that ancient gas sucking pig of a truck?)
Chino Valley. This time my friend, you are outclassed
(Any real man would drive a stick and shift)
That stings but my uncle is the Duke of Highway Patrols
(Cut me off again and I will punch your headlights out)
And he will place his Royal Boot upon your aaasss
(This is my exit but on a live wire
right up off the street
you and I should meet
[another
day])
***
*I* DON”T WANT TO WORK EITHER
no sane human doz,en moralizing is shitty fooldump
Ah jus wanna bang on the belle all day, don’t
want no candy I don’need no toy, jes grab my sticks
and go out to the shed
and i pound on that drum
like it was some boss’s head
Because IIII
***
IIPIty the man scanning the pitiless sky
hunting for a sign from above to gather
never catching a glimpse of what he’s worthy of–
Don’t sit and wait for the hate world to plate you
just get a clean, white line on that motherfucker, motherfucker
and drive
***
we don’t hold the power reins own even
a horse, Somebody else greed up the control.
Mustn’t waste another hour
to get directly to the soul
the words don’t matter just feeler
deep, in the thump and spatter and
zipper blues. As you see thers
no. 1 a round
I will always listen carefully and with intention when anyone speaks of the relationship between film art and the written kinds.
On an unrelated topic: Any source claiming that Stoicism is really about Having A Positive Outlook is delusional, and not any kind of veracious Answer.
But that might be okay, if the Answer is not what you’re actually after, or if, as I surmise, you already have your answer and are instead after the delicious forbidden pleasure of indulging in a confirmation bias that comports with it.
This is the answer I theorize you already think you have, and a few variations on its central theme:
If (as any of these flavors suggest) you see yourself as being … redeemed, enlightened, emancipated … free? according to the arguments of the Answer, then you are (by virtue of that answer) philosophically permitted to live in what is here being called Positivity.
That is a most enviable place to be, from the perspective of chronic irredemption and perpetual inescapable enslavement.
Mainly I think because it is so attractive, perhaps engendering a genuine charisma, and facilitating an aura of contentment, success, and health.
Yet even so.
It will never be the path I walk, nor Be a Deal I am willing to make.
Progress, whether in terms Christian or Marxist or Capitalist or whatever …
It’s still a lie
(even if I have no problem admitting that it is a very pretty one)
(even if it was told to you long ago by a well-credentialed, doubtless well-intentioned spokesliar)
(even if it looks to have been a very Rewarding one, to have Adopted as a belief
and a haunting spiritual tune about the power of positive thinking, as sung by the noted rock monster Dale Carnegie, in the bargain)
(and even if its shaking really does bring all the girls, boys, et cetera to the existential Yard).
I prefer the truth as best as it can be ascertained by all too human means, even if that truth is not pretty and smooth and a good investment, but rather expensively nasty, brutish, anarchic, and short.
And yes, that must be, I fear, my final Answer.
Thank you for providing half of the context today, for the dark blessing of that intuition, and thanks to Rosencreutz, for the other half.
Maybe it is nihilism and maybe it isn’t.
Might I suggest instead
that it is the awkward position that results
from an actual and honest form of modernized …
stoicism, let’s call it
if you see what I am meaning
or if you don’t.
Either way. Splendid.
Onward, ChristDay Soldiers, to the death of metanarrative, the question of what to do about that or any death, and the relentless reality that considering every question has a sunk cost, in terms of the expenditure of conscious time, the one precious very limited resource whose value exceeds that of money even if you are, and you are
loaded. Keep moving on down the road sunshine to your best life
with your good and kind self, and I mean it unironically, admiringly, even covetously:
but my path has been twisted and diverges, in this winter wood, this mess of pottage and
I must needs hang that left alone at Albuquirkey
to get to the place where one sole wolf learns to go on living dare I say
Hunting beneath
the sound
of hope
These phrases around remembering, or not … so evocative. Poetic.
Such a symbol of democracy in decline, or something …
This afternoon I am considering to what extent this house is a memory care facility, and in what ways the art that I do here might be seen as a therapeutic modality.
The next thing is to get it to where I can drive it again, without load straps and a clenched asspucker.
The next interesting thing is to figure out how (or really even if) the back hatch and the tailgate can co-exist peacefully.
Just as with getting it all acquired and home at all, that will take far more time than I want it to, because even though I tell myself again and again that I don’t have to do anything, there are things that pretend loudly that I am wrong, here at the end of the month and year, and I have to spend hours either addressing those things effectively or handwaving them away credibly.
Not to mention the Phases of the Day which are exempt from the Anything rule.
Not to mention keeping myself holding course, just this side of what the society glibly calls sanity.
The shell was still there, on Bucket of Blood Street, for the next four or five solar returns.
Which is how long it took me to figure out how to actually acquire it.
When cyber-research led me to realize that it was exactly and precisely made for a longbed Ford like mine, back thirty-odd years ago, I quickly abandoned the idea of cutting on it.
But–no chopping?–I could not figure out any way to get it home in one piece, and certainly not all by myself, which is how all things have to be done here and now.
It didn’t take very long to realize that the only answer was: the hardest way possible.
The rooftop tent would have to come off the rack.
So that the rack could come all the way off the truck.
Making room for the shell to sit exactly where it was supposed to these past three decades.
After trying and failing to invent another way, and then groaning about the obvious state of affairs for a couple of days off and on, I got down to it.
At length, some moments after sunset, there was a happy ending.
It is still very far from a completed project.
Among other things, the stray boys and I have no clue what to do with the rack now.
Or the tent for that matter.
And by the way: at the lower left in the cat n’ rack shot, you can see the back door to the shell, also free, and filthy, but mostly intact and modestly functional.
Come the night evil, come the gray day. All ways darkest, before the full of the moon.
Friday and 13 may well have been the blackest of it, or Saturday, it all ran together.
Then Sunday, and there were five precious hours of sunny warmth. At last I walked in their honor and they in mine.
Since I was out in it anyway, I made a bridge back to myself for later and cold and wet.
This bridge is probably going to be useless, and building it a waste of effort, cuz:
1) If it’s wet enough out for the bridge to be needed, it’s probably too muddy for my liking on the other side anyway.
2) This low road walk is less than perfect, at least on days when the least hint of hiss (or any sound that says people) is enough to set my teeth on edge, and
3) This way of getting five miles in works, but involves either walking through neighborhoods, or parking the truck somewhere less than perfect.
But: I also learned that wasted effort is better than no effort at all.
And I found a vast, previously undiscovered dry duck lake, which ain’t nothin’.
In the last moments of full sun, having decided that the low road will have to live as a dead end on those sensitive days, I drove out to the other end of the wash again and ate a wicked burrito.
The other end still exists, as an option, for the times when my head isn’t right enough to just jam out the low road an call it done. Doubtless I’ll be making use of that option, in the very near term.
So I got my five in for real.
And I made sure of an option.
In between all of that there are two more little pieces to tell.
Little Piece #1 is why I was so god damned depressed for 36 or 48 hours.
“A Lakeland woman was charged Tuesday after police said she ended a call to an insurance company with the words:
Delay, Deny, Depose”.
Why is that terrorism? (Besides the obvious fact that it isn’t … )
Because those three words were the same ones that were engraved into the casings of the three bullets that killed that evil fuck of a health insurance CEO.
So by uttering them, in the course of ending a phone call to Blue Cross in which she herself was having a claim denied, she became a terrorist in the eyes of the Liberty and Justice For All Crew.
The judge denied her lawyer’s request to release her on her own recognizance and set bail at One Hundred Thousand dollars. Really and Truly.
I don’t recognize this country any more, and I damn sure am done pledging my allegiance to it, or to any corporation including the one that claims to be in charge of caring for my health. These things they say routinely are all lies, and they keep coming even though everybody knows that by now.
I might not have gotten so depressed over this kind of bad news, this time, except for the days being so gray, and except for the fact that the people in the family adjacent to mine don’t think anything is wrong, either with any of what I just detailed, or with the philosophical slavery they were sold into back these forty-some years gone by.
(and why lord oh why do i still care what they think i am such a fuckin’ dumbass)
All together at once, it was just too much for me.
The nose of my plane dipped sharply and for some long moments I was seriously in danger of crashing, of Losing It. Hitting the unforgiving ground a Loser.
It’s not over, either. The dishes are still piled, and I’m still wearing the filth and the fear that coated me in the midst of all that.
Walking in the sunshine even though I didn’t want to just leveled out my descent path somewhat.
Little Piece #2 is this.
I’m not going to go into it too deeply.
I’ll just tell you that the cardboard sign you probably can’t read just says one word:
“Free”.
And that to advantage myself, theoretically, by acquiring that questionable piece of freedom, I would need, at the least, a proper circular saw.
Which of course is not free, but between 50 and 100 somewhere, per Harbor Freight.
Taoist Philosophy for the Unambitious, Failures and Nobodies
The title is clickbait and the content is recycled, but …
That doesn’t mean that the Wolfman is a Loser.
I might say instead: Decide for yourself what a loser is, and whether you are one, based on the murmurings of your own best heart, rather than anything or anyone else’s.
It doesn’t matter how big a deal you are, or how much you love or are loved, conditionally or otherwise. Eventually all trace of you ever having existed, good or bad, will be gone.
Ten or a hundred or a thousand years from now, the last person who ever heard your name or looked into your soul will die, and you will die your second and utterly final death with them, no matter how many books you write or how many times you get laid. Thus I say unto what I acidly think of as my self: You don’t need to do anything.
Thus speaks the prophet:
We don’t know just where our bones will rest. To dust I guess; forgotten and absorbed into the earth below.
Underneath the guilty traffic lights of the cement town, beneath the sound of hope.
I incline toward believing it will be the same for the whole species. I’m right about that. I’m always right. At the same time, I don’t know anything.
Either way and in the meantime:
Oh my life is changing every day in every possible way.
Oh my dreams, yeah, never quite as it seems.
I know I’ve felt like this before. Now I’m feeling it even more, and
then I open up and see the person falling here is … me?
A different way to be. Different from the ways of 1979, or ’84 or ’00 or ’08. Some of them already all but forgotten. The new way to be is cool with even that.
All the ways are stories, and all stories are born and burn bright and fade away, to dust I guess.
As you see there’s no one around.
I defined that scene as isolation and for a few weeks I sardonically said it was splendid, and maybe saying it was necessary but necessity of course is a story too.
As it was when I said no, no, not splendid, but schismatic, the SchisMatrix explains it all, He took all the shopping carts from the mall and took ’em to Ormond, which was Zion.
Stories.
Lovely fragile things.
Sometimes the reason you don’t know who I’m talking to is because I’m not talking to anyone anymore about anything.
I’m typing words, onto a screen, in the night that is never so endless as it seems, and asking why?
the only difference being that the new way is to never live in expectation of a reply.
From up above
Them, you and I together are feeling the pull
(a pull quite lamentable, but assured, in equal measure)
of the concrete lights
and the guilt towns
below.
From up above
we are pulled down toward them
at seven or eight hundred feet per second-
-much faster than we thought we’d go–
into, and then under,
beneath the reach of
Slowly and admittedly painfully, I am starting to get a handle on the platforms and Project(s); what they really mean and are for, and (thus) how to best present them, and where … how.
I keep manual text file backups of all the posts here. Part of what I decided was not to do that, at the pure-politics version of the substack. Just like with Twitter, that’s solely a venting spot. For now. Nobody cares, probably not even me, once it has been spit out.
Tomorrow is a warm-winter day, by which I mean that it may struggle up to sixty degrees.
Today I’m just making myself ready for that.
I burned two hundreds worth of money I might or might not have, on an Azure order. Including a dozen cans of that Bar Harbor herring.
The cats got very well fed after a 9-degree night.
That was about as much as I was able to manage under the half-lit sunless skies, and it was enough.
Girl pink energy expressing itself openly and unashamed.
Boy bone energy permitted at last to respond to it purely in the same fashion.
I found this rare thing at a party in a closed bank, after hours.
In suburban Glendale.
In the company of Marianne Williamson, who was feeling quite a lot more milfy than I’ve seen her in a long time.
Everyone kept all of their clothes on.
It was the barbie movie, but for real human adults with brains still intact, and passions still somehow against the odds undimmed.
And I had to dream it into being, because there’s far too little of it in the real Glendale, or anywhere else in this real and unrelentingly ugly world.
I know it was quite stereotypically the dream of an old man.
But I’m telling it to you anyway. Open and unashamed, because fuck it–I don’t have anything to lose by living that way.
For a change.
***
A-em, scuse me sir could you maybe put down the newspaper just for a second
We was all alone
and she said Tone (-Lōc)
Let me tell you one
(more) thing
or two sentences
of a minute each.
The fact that I woke up 24 hours before with that Falco song about Kathleen Turner on my brain was a preview of coming attractions for the pink-lit dream.
Both things and the attitude in which they’re steeped are partly attributable to finally having enough meds for my bio-condition again.
And.
When I’ve whined orangey (naggin’, braggin’ putting things down in the world) over the course of the past few months, in some sense all I was really asking for was someone to gonna-care
about things exactly like whether or not I had those meds, could afford them, could navigate the evil system efficiently enough to get them; to get what I
really needed: an echo of what I was asking in the months before I did what I needed to do in order to get the checks rolling in again, way back early in this same benighted year.
It’s not an easy life for anyone right now, and
yes I’m self-centered, selfish, and
most everyone I know and knew had their own fish to fry on up, down at the Bellagio or in Molokaʻi or
wherefuckingever
(not too well-humored ’cause life doesn’t show any pity).
Whatfucking was left was a nearly total isolation
and of necessity
down in the local ditches
I called it Splendid.
Called it splendid and spit those facts across the table at the holiday, which of course changed nothing
but
Now in the winter depths I rub the cream into my shoulder and twisted flowers
(somehow against the odds)
begin again their vivid bloom.
Now at last again the walls of bedroom red are washed after all this time
and I am making my way to sleeping between them
after so many cinders of years (he wants a kiss) “You can be my principal”.
Is it a dream
or what?
Marie? Kathleen? Marianne?
Can you still hear me babe?
Claire?
Do you know what I’m talking about?
I’m just talking about
I’m just talking about
not the first kiss of my life
I’m talking about
The only happy part of this story is not the baking or the invented family togetherness, but that when the covid drones posted Jennifer to Twitter, their PSA got:
59 likes
but over
1000 comments
This math, along with a lot of other stories I’ve felt compelled to discuss this season, makes me happy, because it strongly suggests that people are actually beginning to wake the fuck up–potentially, about a lot of things.
May we, every one, have just such a holly, and maybe even jolly Christmas.
Mr. Berletic is a genuine thought-provoking treasure.
In this one, he will explain for ‘you’ how Academia (and the rest of the weaponized media-informative complex) has been systematically compromised to serve the Interests not of The People, anywhere, but of the hegemonic elites, everywhere.
I saw College as my alma mother and Journalism as my godly salvation. Either might have been marginally true, once upon a time before I was born …
But I was, in the end, proven dramatically and definitively wrong on both counts, in this world.
In this world, there is no reason for hope.
Or: If there is any marginal malnourished sliver, it will only be found in the quiet seintuārī̆e of each of us, especially the twenty-three-year-olds, as every new day breaks.
Bonus video within the link of him sleeping through a conference in Africa, as seen above. Word has it that when he woke up he pardoned another elitist sleazebag like his shitty son.
I don’t know why the you that isn’t wanted me to vote for him, or his cackle puppy.
I have no idea at all why the opinion of smart people I love, regarding Ukraine, is exactly the same as the opinion of little Lindsey fucking Graham.
And we care that there are people sleeping in tents in freezing weather in Asheville, more than we care what happens to that puppet of alleged democracy, no longer even the pretend president, in Kyiv.
Thirteen or so generations ago, America was just another ragged pile of colonized lands.
Then the Americans had a Revolution, and it was good.
But alas, at some point back halfway between then and now, they started to become colonizers themselves.
Early into that process, Hawaii stands out, as not only a victim of colonization, but as a victim of fascism, which as you recall is the merger of the corporation and the state.
After the overthrow of the monarchy, Sanford B. Dole served as the provisional president of the Republic of Hawaii while the US was in the process of invading and illegally annexing it.
You might recognize the Dole name from pineapples or bananas, or involvement in later projects of fascist colonialism and massacres in places like Colombia and Guatemala.
This is how Success works, within an Empire. Corporately.
But that’s not what the video is about.
It’s about an unusually promising effort to right that habitual wrong, out there in the Kingdom of the Hawaiian Island Chain, as it existed in great-grandfather’s day.
And the former US Army Field Artillery captain who is spearheading that effort.
Meanwhile, I went to a real doctor for the first time in years (mainly to see if I could get cheaper meds for my existential condition–the jury’s still out) and I learned that I’m in generally excellent health.
The one major area of potential concern is arterial plaque. I think my aorta is probably pretty blocked up.
There are a ton of things out there for potentially reversing this kind of sclerosis.
I’m looking most closely at the ones called K2, berberine, and longer forms of real Fasting.
As for the Who do you thinks gonna care factor, I think there’s three, maybe four of you, and I’m very grateful that you are in the world. Thank you.
I don’t like the Donald. I don’t like the Whoopi. I don’t like that Karen Finney from the other video on the same subject that I’m not linking because you’re not clicking anyway.
But mostly I just hate the brain-rotted group-think that tries to justify anything and everything, so long as that justification is in the name of protecting or enriching someone who is a member of the same cult.
Sometimes, as in this example, the rot is obvious, big, and dramatic.
Much more often, it’s far more subtle–to the point where the cultists can even think that it has nothing to do with politics or culture or even the big picture regarding anything.
Twenty-six percent of Americans will look you in the eye and tell you in all apparent sincerity that the economy is doing just great.
From the point of view of their cult and their class, maybe it really seems so.
If they are not among the ten percent of Americans who own 88% of all the stocks, then they’re close enough to still have a reasonable hope of someday getting there.
For the other 80-90% of us (and for 95% of the eight billion humans on the planet), this way of life and this System generally and overwhelmingly fucking suck.
It’s been months running into years now that I’ve been at making essentially just that one point, and trying to get “you” to see it.
But outside of a fan or two, and for all practical purposes, I know now that there really is no you.
I’m trying to decide in these solstice days how I feel about that, and in what ways how I feel will or should change what I do in this practice of self-anointed Art.
Rolling toward the deepest darkness, and into the brave new year.
the spiral shell curving inward upon itself
the spire of straight grass church rising up
the spirit breathing life into space dust
the secret is revealed: what was not, now is
each and all these pieces can only transpire
within the sainted uaire, a private room
where we work out the way to grant immunity
to our selves for no one else can take Place.
The Four Parts of This And Every Weekend
October 4, 2015
I’ve lived my life wrong.
I could tell you that it was because I had to, and that might well be true. But precise justifying of that sort is not what interests me here at the far end of rectitude.
I choose rather to begin again, walking uprightly even if my knuckles drag.
–The First Spill
***
Time for a new book.
***
spir- has many completely different derivations and meanings in English.
The spir- in spiral comes from the Greek speira “a winding, a coil, a twist, a wreath”
from PIE *sperieh-, from a base *sper- turn/twist/wind
(some interesting parallels there with ‘vertere (v.)’)
(“The Latin verb “vertere,” meaning ‘to turn,’ turns into several common and not-so-common words in English, such as ‘reverse’.”)
In the directly opposite sense, the spir- in spire, as a noun, descends straight up from
Old English spir “a sprout or shoot of a plant, spike, blade, tapering stalk of grass,”
from PIE *spei- “sharp point”
and thus, spire as a verb:
“to send up shoots, germinate, sprout,” as grain or seed”
“to extend to a height (in the manner of a spire), to rise aloft”
The Latin spir- means “breathe.”
Thus the blowhole of a whale is called its spiracle, the aperture through which she breathes.
When you have an in-spiration, an idea is breathed into (or perhaps within) your mind.
If you hold onto it, tight but not too tightly, the fleeting idea may tran-spire
… it may breathe-across from not being, into Being–that which we allege to be Reality.
That transpiring might need a con-spir-acy to help reify it–a breathing-together, while hatching a plot …
… or, you know, while breathing a belief in something together, such as the goodness of the American national experiment and Defending it with military force, the goodness (or badness) of the institutions of slavery or genocide or fascism (whatever that means), and alternative theories about who killed which president when. Or: lizard people, or: how and why Building Seven of the World Trade Center fell.
***
Further down the evolutionary etymological ladder there is
Espíritu Santo
From espíritu (“spirit”) + santo (“holy” or saint[ed]).
see also “the Holy Ghost”
***
And this is the ghostly connection that makes
that which
is sanctified.
Thus:
sanctuary (n.)
early 14c., seintuarie, sentwary, etc.,
“consecrated place, building set apart for holy worship; holy or sacred object,”
from Anglo-French sentuarie,
Old French saintuaire “sacred relic, holy thing; reliquary, sanctuary,”
from Late Latin sanctuarium “a sacred place, shrine”
(So sanctuary is a refuge–and also to provide refuge–and thus, earlier or later, a holy place …)
(Likewise: So a saintuaire is simultaneously a relic, and a container that holds a relic–which in this case also means: a house. Whether it moves
or whether it doesn’t.)
a sanctuary also simply means “one’s private room;”
and in Medieval Latin: “a church, a cemetery; a right of asylum“,(and also–to provide asylum, to give sanctuary) fr. Latin sanctus “holy” (see saint (n.).
Since the time of Constantine and by medieval Church law, fugitives or debtors enjoyed immunity from arrest and ordinary operations of the law in certain churches (and even in certain secular districts, biblically, and in London); hence its use by mid-14c. of churches or other holy places with a view to their inviolability.
The transferred sense of “immunity from punishment by virtue of having taken refuge in a church or similar building” is by early 15c., also of the right to such.
(Exceptions were made in England in cases of treason and sacrilege.)
The general (non-ecclesiastical) sense of “place of refuge or protection” is attested from 1560s;
as: “land set aside for wild plants or animals to breed and live”
it is recorded by 1879
in reference to the American bison.
***
“Do you have a name for the new Book yet?”
No, not yet. The math hasn’t been done.
This was only determining what the different parts of the equation are.
“by modern reckoning
the last month of the calendar, the month of the winter solstice,”
late Old English, from Old French decembre, from Latin December, from decem “ten”
(PIE root *dekm- “ten”); thus the tenth month of the old Roman calendar
which began with March.
***
Decembrist, in Russian history in reference to the insurrection against Nicholas I in December 1825.
In the midst of the confusing transition into Nicholas’ reign, the Northern Society, a secret society of liberal revolutionaries, nobles, and military officials, organized a conspiracy to replace the Russian Empire’s autocratic regime with a constitutional monarchy.
On December 26th, Northern Society members led a force of approximately 3,000 troops into Senate Square to prevent the loyalty-swearing ceremony and to rally additional soldiers and officers to their cause. This group of rebels, although disorganized due to indecision and dissension among its leaders, confronted troops loyal to Nicholas outside the Senate building in the presence of a large civilian crowd.
A standoff ensued, during which Nicholas’ envoy, Mikhail Pence, was assassinated.
The loyalists eventually opened fire with heavy artillery, scattering the rebels.
In the aftermath of the coup attempt, many of the rebels were sentenced to hanging, imprisonment, or exile to Siberia.
So there came that day, and on that day I was really and truly both twenty, and twelve.
On that day, I cried tears of rage. They fell hot and they fell fast. I couldn’t stop them.
She gazed upon the dewy droplets and laughed, precisely because it was so ridiculous that a grown man should weep over something so trivial and so foolish. Over a father or over another father.
But I was not grown.
Neither was I a man.
I was twelve even though I was twenty, and so I cried the ridiculous tears.
It was all explicable, in those terms, and I see that now, and I don’t really blame her.
Not for the laugh at all events と in any event と at any rate と anyway and so apology for it is neither here
nor there
I don’t know what to do with it; I don’t know what good sorry could do, for you or me or any of us.
Three more years it took me after the sobbing to only begin all over at the beginning to figure it all out for myself. I was seen by the blessed dwarf and his blessed nursewife whose name was Marie.
Two more years more, and then a graduation I haven’t finished paying off four decades later.
By then, the other shard of shattered family had a fully formed (reformed) new identity and belief structure and respectable name to latch onto firmly, and plane tickets, for Portland, for the Alps, for Iceland and Greece.
By then, I had … well I had what they used to call a walk-up apartment, and a downy beard to match. I had a radio show and the exact right kind of dirty magazines under the futon mattress which laid just as dirty, on the floor of the walk-up apartment, and I upon it, and them.
I had a walk upon the floodwall, which I still possess, but I was young and pretty, and so I had a harbor too, since vanished into the northering depths of the Columbia. Roll on.
With the salmon. They sleeps, them gig harbors, with the fishes, just like Luca Brazzi.
I had a gig and got another.
I became the bibliographic instruction specialist and then the webmaster and then the professor (and how could a granddaughter have never known that, about her uncle?–it’s a wonder to me). Then and then and then in a bad forced deal in a compound driveway, I traded that for becoming the anarchist.
I voted the right way for the first and last time in my life and I think I was trying to save something, something familial, by doing it. But four years later I was up to my old new tricks again and something about them prestidigitations surprised even me and
I started finally to awaken
To the truth of the twelve and the twenty …
Reeeeegrets?
I’ve had a few.
But then again
Chief among them not listening to Pat Boone when I had the chance.
It’s a solace, knowing that even if I had listened all those eons ago, I wouldn’t have had what it took, to understand.
I feel like I have it now.
I feel like I’m right about it.
That being right all the time has never done you (or me or any of us) any good.
That I don’t know much about much really, except that in the words of the philosopher-king Rumsfeld, there are both, and ever, known unknowns and the unknown kind also and always
In our godly America where men slept on newspapers back when those were still a thing (back in Pat’s day).
Two years ago, was it?–a trip to Silver to live for a while, and the first films were born.
A year and a half ago, coming back from a cross-continental, Anaprim twinkled into tentative being somewhere near the Anvil Rock Road out between the Willows and Seligman.
Upon thanksgiving-time just past, it’s significantly more nebulous.
It’s not you I’m writing this post for, if indeed it is a post at all. It’s different now.
Things have gradually and then suddenly changed.
I traveled to the past, to the singular moment when I was thirteen and nineteen at the same time.
The instant of Schism.
Plus you’ll get all this, too.
A small, friendly group of 24–28 people — half the size of most tour groups
Full-time services of a professional Rick Steves guide and local experts who will make the fascinating history, art, and culture of Europe come alive for you
Steves. Yes. Not for the right reasons at all. For twisted and perhaps even vengeful ones.
I might have to get a job again after all dammit.
I hope not. But I know which very specific one to apply for anyway, if worse comes to worst.
Maybe there are entrepreneurial mushrooms to be leveraged instead.
I know nothing. I am always right, and it never does me a fucking bit of good, and I know nothing.
Except that it’s not a Spill anymore. To spill is accidental. This, now, is a-purpose.
The word to replace spillage is brewing itself like a hot cup of pourover decaf.
En el nombre del Padre, y del Hijo, y del Espíritu Santo.
Fathers. Mine, and yours.
The Son.
The madre, de dios.
Even in splendid isolation, too, he was never an only child. There were sisters before there were brothers, around the corner, halfway around the world.
A father is a whole belief system, unto itself, and passes its selves down intentionally.
Unto the seventh generation.
Not all religions are good ones.
Seven generations ago.
Devonshire.
I may still see it before I die, and doing it or not doing it are both not important.
Nothing is important, unless we choose to invest in it and see it as being part of our Interests.
There is a small house on a concrete lot in a nowhere town, called Compound.
If I never again move farther from it than five miles down the floodwall to the wash, that’ll be alright.
If I, like those in the other shard of family, swing around the whole other half of the world someday, who do you thinks gonna care?
Wait, what, who do I think?
Liony.
He might.
Though we only just got back and so though it’s late
Out in the now, I have a mother who I love and who loves me, and lots of loving brothers and sisters.
But even so …
In the family of my birth, every single one of us is a freak of nature out of a Tom Waits song.
***
In my family smoking is still a thing people do.
In my family, going to college is not a thing people do. It is a major break with family tradition and belief, and in fact an act of profound rebellion, not the defining act of conformity.
In my family, everyone is Homeless.
And even more importantly, exactly the bad kind of homeless that Don’t Really Want To Work.
In my family we are all Welfare Queens, and we all drive ancient but beautiful Cadillacs.
***
Today I give open and honest and grateful thanks, for my Mom and my brothers and sisters.
It can still be true that in my family, I am the only one left alive.
It can still be just so, that it is down to my one sole self, singing this soliloquy
And with that, in the name of phasing and juggling well, I’m going to put the Spill on a non-daily hiatus for a few days and go pay some bills, of both the economic and social sort, and think about what a Spill is for, in 2025 and beyond.
The reason why the thanksgiving has always been my favorite holy day changes over time.
Today I would say: It properly marks the start of the month-long holiday, of WinterSolstice, the days of cold and deepest darkness in which we try to birth what we will become.
A day spent deep in the weeds, roasting in the name of StakeGen, to the tune of a few hundred dollars, gross not net.
Which brought up a lot of questions. First and foremost
“I agree. Now is the time, and it’s blissful. Could you provide some specifics, though, on the ‘anything
everything you do, anything’
that is going to inevitably turn out Great, according to An?
Answer 1: No, because what you wanna do must be born of the present moment, not pre-planned.
Answer 2: Yes, and I already have, at great depth, at least quietly to myself, in ritual.
What I wanna do is:
–anarchic Sanctuary rooted and mobile both
–Generate a stake in a way that I don’t hate and nominally makes the world ‘a better place’
–Run a clean Free/Libre/Open Source digital desktop that serves the Interests of all these things
–Art, in the form of what I call belletrism and ‘radio’ and ‘film’
Juggling it all and moving through each Phase [of the day] Well is complicated and more than enough to base a life on, in spite of what any given normie, of any generation and not just the greatest one, thinks about that fact.
The ultimate point of all of that sardonic
We Care booshiwa
was simply to remind m’damn Self over and over
until its driven deep enough into my thick skull:
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
(the breath of life, it never left her hollow):
I can do everything, she said, she said with a smile.
So the bodyDoctor diagnosed. Then he prescribed … and everything changed.
Now these 40 years later, the brilliant headDoctor has likewise brilliantly diagnosed.
Does Dr. Brilliance … have a prescription?
Well he’d goddamn well better
if he wants to go on being thought of as Sage and Eminent, ennit?
That’s what the rules say verbatim, in this sad dumb-ass world of ours.
It hardly matters at all if the anointed Competing Hypothesis works, or is “right”.
The important thing, in this world, is that the Course of Treatment is pronounced in a deep authoritative voice, full of professional confidence, with an airy aura of expert Certainty.
If his brilliance is just one bloviating misconception after another, well, that’s a topic to be dealt with by another theatrical event at some point in the vague handwaving future.
Exactly like all those pundits that were provably wrong about the prescription for Iraq, and are now once more being paid so very well, to be provably wrong about the ones for Ukraine, Iran, the housing crisis, income inequality, inflation, and Joy.
God damn it I got distracted again.
***
For nine years, this Project has been about proving to you that I’m smart and right.
About proving, to you and myself, that I am a Sage and an Artist of the Belletristic sort.
The main way it has attempted to validate those hypotheses is something even simpler …
I’ve worked here every day and written so dutifully, so virtuously, so selflessly, to prove
That profound Depth of Caring itself, whether I changed your mind or vote or not, is exactly how I proved myself as Right, and as Sage.
And just like any of those other better-paid and Successful pundits, what I demonstrated irrefutably was mostly a steaming load of self-important Bollocks.
I was spilling in my own Interests, namely, to obtain and acquire for my very own–if not your Love, then at least your indulgent approval, and agreement about how very right I was, and am.
Sometimes the cryptogenously blind squirrel actually was right.
But that was and is beside the point. The point was: look at how beautiful I am.
Well it’s a dirty job (it isn’t)
But someone’s gotta do it (no they don’t)
Well it’s a very dirty song (very very)
But someone, errrNope.
not yo daddy’s illuminati
nor mine neitha
***
A scientist reminds us that there can be a very fine line indeed, between following the-Science, and blindly trusting in allegedly objective expertise, or allegedly legitimate authority.
One of the most fascinating things about the interaction between them is that they are in perfect agreement on one thing:
Whether human-caused climate change is an imminent existential threat in and of itself, or not …
The question, and even the ‘data’ behind it, will be deployed in ways crafted to manipulate our emotions (particularly our trauma-based fears) and thus our very perceptions of the world.
An even greater and urgent question than climate change, therefore, might be: By whom?
Author’s note: This post was originally drafted six or seven weeks ago, and got derailed by the incident where my intentions were (more or less gently) bitchsmacked down in a private text thread.
Having at length recovered, I finally edit and publish it here as the final pair of episodes in Getting Caught Up, and leaving the Spill once more clean and free to be the fresh blank page it was always intended to be.
Enjoy … or not, so as to the desires of your heart.
***
Dreamed again, like … nightly military raids … This time I was eighteen.
I dreamed again. This time the keyboardist was God Himself, and me, I was God too, and a criminal painter and the breath of life who Never left her hollow. I know, crazy, right?
I rolled over and felt the old man prostate groan with piss. Let it out and saith unto him: Let The Day Begin.
So I got up and had a surreal sugarpoison cream soda to settle me down and for a minute I almost felt Well again, like I could care again
about the Welfare: of all you boys and girls.
Then like a damn fool, instead of stepping outside to look at the moon I opened up the laptop than runs Linux instead of the right proper OSX and watched another video. I know.
It was that fucking Roseanne, straight out of nightmares, claiming she has proof that Hollywood is full to the brim with babyeating vampires. I wish I was but I am not lying.
At least, not my sanity, but maybe it will turn out that you actually are helping, to save the babies from the necrophilic likes of Leo and Kevin and well I got my doubts about Taylor, like the skunk that ate the cat food, like the slaves on dope. Why don’t you tell me: who’s on the phone?
It’s so hard to tell. Maybe I really have gone full clear around the bend this time.
Around, It’s kinda pretty here the leaves, the stream, the mad perfect autumn weather Get Away
From That Fridge NOW. Sorry. I don’t … want to work. I just wanna bang. On the drum allday.
But why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lions in the cage, how they growl; they toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you, that Bezos in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
Waking hallucinations aside. I have some advice for you, from here on the far shores of an imprecisely stilted and inflamed consciousness.
“Captain Smith, where would you like these deck chairs?”
–apocryphally ascribed to a junior lieutenant on the Titanic
I have some rearranging in mind this morning.
Partly this is based on the fact that although I’ve tried my best, I just can’t seem to stop with the posting on politics here, and it’s starting to annoy even me.
At the same time, I have this substack that’s been lying idle, because although it’s generally a decent platform, the Spill is better for writing, and Patreon (/YT) is better for video.
So I’m going to try splitting off the overtly political screeds and dumping them over there.
Leaving this place to focus on the pursuit of the more purely belletristic.
It’s a very interesting discussion, but this one line hit me especially hard:
“Childhood and adolescence are thus lived within an elaborate system of conditional love.”
I really have no idea to what extent or in what ways this is true up and down the class structure.
But I have experienced certain ways, and the essential truth of it, all through life–in the distant past of my youth, in the prime of life, and in the senescence of my mortal existence now too, daily as I spill.
It makes me wonder how much of the inequality and insanity and ultimately broken spirituality we live within, as a culture and a society, can be attributed to this single complex factor.
Even if that factor itself is an inevitable product of humanity’s choice to embrace agriculture, sedentism, and what we blithely foist upon each other as “Civilization”.
Wednesday was a day lost in the weeds. I went to bed early and I woke up thinking about my mother.
I flipped this machine back on and started hearing the first things about the escalation. An ICBM hitting Dnipro is all I know as I begin to wake and write, of a Thursday predicted to turn into a beautiful weekend, almost a brief Indian summer.
An old fool admitting to wringing his hands in despair.
Reckon there’s a lot of that going around.
***
Trump is live but apparently I have to go to Indian State TV to hear it.
His notes are convoluted and rambly, but he does say the globalists not the Russians are the enemy, and he has never been more right in his life.
It’s listed as live, but I don’t know what it is really. AI maybe. The big media are ignoring the story.
The coffee is made. I’m going into chambers to listen to the sound of nothing for a while. More later. Maybe.
***
Some hours later, my kitchen and I are very clean, the laundry is started, I am ready to head out on the Walk, and there are details emerging.
The main thing I’m struck by is that the Western Hegemon is very lucky to have sage rulers as enemies.
Iran has been showing remarkable restraint for months. China lives that way. And now even Russia, their favorite of all the bogeyman, has shot a retaliatory ICBM, with hypersonic MIRVs, at an allied city, but …
… not only did these MIRVs NOT carry a nuclear payload, but might have carried no significant explosive payload at all.
It was a warning shot, about what might have been, and about what still might be, if the senile Eagle persists in its manifest insanity.
America is very clearly the aggressor here. They shot the ATACMS into Russia, and tried to pretend their puppet Ukraine did it, because Biden wanted to fuck over the start of Trump’s second administration–to force him to start in a hole, and leave him teetering on the brink of world war even before he takes office.
The retaliation, apparently, only amounted to a bit of demonstrative theater.
If nothing changes, Biden and his handlers should be indicted for treason against the nation’s own security. He put all of us, Americans, Russians, Uzbeks and Brazilians, at mortal risk of nuclear fire, for stupid and selfish reasons, and he needs to be impeached yesterday, in spite of the fact that it would mean the red button would be placed into the hands of a witless tool that just lost an election by telling suffering people to dance around in a frenzy of Joy and vote for more of this same anti-human brain-dead shit.
Until something that dramatic happens, humanity itself continues to remain imperiled.
***
Final note.
I had a nice long hike. But before I left I caught the top of the hour NPR news on the pickup radio.
They had nothing at all to say, about an ICBM impacting Dnipro.
The top story was about Gaetz withdrawing from consideration for AG.
The last one was some feel-good drivel about a prison barbershop.
Either intercontinental missiles are just too trivial to mention these days, or someone at the network mothership got a phone call shushing them for some lame-ass politically motivated reason.
I didn’t vote for him and I never will. But I wish godspeed to the cranky orange narcissist.
May he change shit just enough and just in time to save your ass and mine.
All the things the corporate media never says or lets you hear. I usually emphasize the flyover, but this is from down the street, over there on the eastern, urban coast.
Fresh off a seven-year screamfest about fascism, white supremacy, and literal-Hitler, the sleaziest duopoly duo in media run down to Mar-a-Lago, bend their knees, and get down to serious slurping.
Yep yep; those black people in Flint and Jackson suffered, and so it goes. A bunch of Trump voters in East Palestine, well whatever. Decades of malnutrition, poison water, and no sanitation on the Rez? Whatcha gonna do, right?
Welcome to the evolving new reality in liberal white Asheville. Winter is coming and that’s more than a metaphor.
You could not be more right, about your nine points of utter failure regarding your party actually giving a shit about We The People and our hopes and dreams.
Kudos for your perspicacity.
Even if it proves (as it will) to be far too little, and far too late.
Love,
Citizens of the Heartland/Flyover
In Order To Form a More Perfect Union
(Thank you, Pascal. The key is: this ain’t just about “Africa”.
It’s very much about Pine Ridge and Flint and Cuzco and Dien Bien Phu and dear Paris too.)
Some deeply interesting thoughts in this video, which help me to understand why I can never seem to let go of ‘politics’.
–“The Genocide” is nothing new at all. The current situation in Gaza is especially horrifying because it’s happening now, in a time when we can theoretically do something about it (and don’t)–but the same was true for our ancestors back in the day, living through the Little Big Horn or the Benin Massacre of the 1890s.
–Such genocides, happening in a context of colonialism, are not the exception but the Rule, as in “the international rules-based Order”.
We cluck and clutch about shitholes and thank our lucky stars that we were born ‘here’ instead of in one. But we never seem to get around to thinking about how the shitholes got to be shitholes, and how that shitification process has been so very central to the establishment and maintenance of our clean white Free way of life far away from what ‘we’ve’ done to the ‘other parts’ of the world. (Meaning at various times, Namibia or the so-called Dakota Territories.)
–Then and now, we all are involved in constructing and psychologically propping up Narratives which justify and try to explain away what ‘we’ do in the world, and how we can still see ourselves as the Good People in spite of atrocity being so necessary to building ourselves up into a so-called superpower.
–Then and now, ‘they’ are always savages, and we are always liberators bringing the Light of Civilization to lands without morality. When you hear the evil ones nattering about how there are no Palestinians, or about how none of them are human, but only animals, you are only hearing the updated version of ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’.
–It’s always a jungle out there, and it always needs to be made into a garden, by ‘pioneers’ and ‘settlers‘ and visionary tycoons who look at a waste of space and think: “ahhhh yes, someday this will be a productive banana (or coffee) plantation”. Someday western mining or ranching will make this place Productive, just as God intended.
–That Welfare Queen that you can’t help yapping about periodically, with her Cadillac and her fingernails and her processed hair? It is so very easy to forget that your grandmother enslaved her grandmother, that she is likely a product of a Grandpa Master literally raping a Grandma slave because in his beady eyes she was nothing but property.
… and so …
You are cordially and magnanimously invited to shut your trap about laziness and food stamps sucking up your precious tax dollars at a fraction of how those tax dollars are always spent, killing people and turning them into pieces of ground meat or empire machine, all over the globe, for the whole length of your life and the lives of your well-adjusted, healthy, happy children.
***
I don’t want to be a Settler.
I don’t want to live my life according to these fucked-up narratives of colonialism, or the underlying ones about what constitutes civility and Civilization, and,
thus, to the utmost of my limited abilities …
I just won’t.
And at the same time that I struggle to divorce myself from those stories, and make my personal way to the promised land of Helloutta the way …
I cannot remain blithely silent about what seem to me to be Self-Evident truths about the deeply ugly nature at the heart of Leading and Following alike in this culture and society.
I cannot use my own leisure to merely and only live life as a drowning of my sorrows in the drug of Celebration, without reflecting on the mechanisms by which you and I and grandma and grandpa stole that leisure from those hearts of darkness in the first place.
I’m not going to be celebrating the Pilgrims or the Founding Fathers, over this year’s turkey bird.
That failure might make me look a little sullen, but underneath the apparently morose gazes I’ll be fiercely trying to just figure out how to chart and embrace a really and truly better Way of Life
than this one
you choose every day
to embrace instead. No,
Despite the clear warning weeks ago from Vlad that it would be considered an act of war …
Just authorized long-range missile attacks on the Russian homeland.
Oh by the way, the Ukrainians can’t fire these ATACMS on their own. American service personnel have to point them, regardless of which grunt of a private gets the honor of pushing the red button.
And this has been common knowledge for years.
Expect retaliation to be inbound as soon as they’re in the air.
–Neoconservatives, like George Bush and Victoria Nuland,
and
–Neoliberals, like Barack Obama and Elon Musk.
In the practical world this is a distinction without a difference, for the simple reason that they are all war pigs, and (given the opportunity) war criminals. They all support for profoundly selfish reasons the pernicious process of endless war, money laundering, ‘spreading democracy’, and wealth transferring and concentrating upwards.
Taken together, in other words, all the hallmarks of modern colonial empire, and, locally, of the Duopoly through which it breathes.
Trump is not a neocon or a neolib, and perhaps that’s why he can rightly claim to have started “no new major wars” in his first term.
That doesn’t mean he won’t turn into a war pig, though, over the alleged threat of big bad scary China, or on behalf of our evil little friends in Jerusalem. It does make him less likely to beat a dead horse in Ukraine, which … is good, of course, but that war is in its bitter final stages anyway.
“We” are gonna lose it, just like Vietnam and Afghanistan, and just like pretty much every war, if you think about it carefully, since the Big One in the 1940s. (Yes, Sodom Hussein died. No, that doesn’t equal a “win”.)
The thing is, winning wars isn’t what matters to these people we call our Rulers.
Just having wars is plenty good enough, for the purposes that matter most to them, which consist mainly of the right pockets being lined lavishly while you and I remain enslaved on the home front, or, failing that, being sent Over There to die for the cause of Capitalist Oligarchy.
I mean, uh, Freedom. Liberty. Justice for all.
All the good stuff.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
***
Brief snippet on Gaza. You still care deeply about that boring shit, right?
Friday: 4.6 miles in 84 minutes equals 3.25 mph, into, I might add, fierce gusts of headwind on the way out, 40-50 miles an hour, briefly halting my progress completely at the height of the worst.
The wind quit at dusk and I fed the strays and re-opened the red umbrella.
There are no more remarkable weather events for the weekend and until the night after trash day, when it is scheduled to drop down all the way to sixteen degrees Fahrenheit.
Over the next four days I have to keep building my tolerance for the cold over longer distances.
Late this afternoon we made it up to 73 degrees, and for a brief moment I realized that I had nothing against Kindness–though I believe I do have something against Days marked off specially, For anything, regardless of how noble or right.
In the dry land of iconoclasm and heresy, no single day unto itself deserves to be called holy.
Each is only a day more or less, sufficient (or not) unto itself.
From sunset to sunrise, it will plunge, is plunging at the time of this writing, by 35 degrees into a chill dawn, and there will be no more sign of temperatures above 70 for months to come.
Past tomorrow in fact there is nothing in the long-range forecast above even 60. But by noon the winter wind arrives in gale force, for six short hours, just enough to blow in a cold mass of air that will feel, for a time, permanent.
My being shifts in tune with the tilting of heavenly bodies and branches unclothed, even naked.
I listen to them rattle against each other in the breeze. They intone thus:
I nod. I murmur. Yes. I very much want those ten percent to consider celebrating Kindness Day, even though I know in my heart and very bones that they would only laugh, at the absurdity of the notion.
I grow serious and on a moonless evening some weeks from now
The Kam lost because We The People were sick of having the War Machine and the plutocrats continue to murder and pillage the world in our names, sending us the bill for it, and enforcing the ungodly System by the mechanism of a bought and paid-for Duopoly.
Any slim hope that the offered (nominally populist) alternative would make things even a little better on that central score is now fading fast.
I don’t plan to quit resisting, in the ways I do and have.
But I am willing to acknowledge that Resistance may be, if not Futile in every sense, at least hopeless, in the practical one, for the foreseeable future and very probably for the rest of my natural life.
We stare into the abyss of the ultimate Game Over screen.
The will of the citizenry, the example of Christ, World Kindness Day or Ice Cream Month–none of these things is going to change that, nor, alas, get me to celebrate.
I don’t feel it likely that I will reboot that particular game and try once more to win at it, whatever that even means.
I do feel it likely that I will continue to walk multiple miles on most every day.
That one of those days, perhaps, my sanctuary will begin to resemble something that could be called Organized.
That I will begin to understand that Carne Asada just means “Roasted Meat”
If my socks don’t match
But I have half a reason for it, from time to time
(I mean besides not paying attention)
Then any laughter created in others thereby
even if it is intended to ridicule or humiliate
Has No Power
over my mind.
***
Along the same lines, there have been, over the last few years of relative freedom, plenty of days where I did not take a shower. (Sometimes weeks in fact.)
What I learned from that experience is that I don’t ever have to take a shower.
But … that … more days than not …
I want to.
This lesson has amazingly wide applicability
because
There are in fact very very few things
That I have to do.
Piss and grunt. Drink water even if it’s not from the creek. Occasionally, Eat. Feed cats.
(I don’t have to pet them, but I want to, quite often.)
Even something like cleaning a litterbox or getting the trash out are optional, on any given day.
On most trash days I do both. Usually. There isn’t any steep downside to not doing it.
Maybe I want to do it. I’m not sure, but maybe.
I don’t Have to have a job, and more days than not, I don’t want one either. (Although I have an application on my desk, strangely enough.)
I don’t Have to be anywhere on time ever for anything–except every six months for the dentist.
I don’t have a daily driver of a relationship to meet the usual kind of obligations within. No kids.
Splendid Isolation works out real well for me, most days and for most purposes.
***
Also, let’s say that I do want to take a shower, most days, especially cold ones, mainly because it’s warming (or on hot ones because it’s cooling), or I feel gross.
And I go right ahead, and it feels good.
Still … I don’t have to use any soap.
I do need, or want, a clean washcloth, and a clean towel.
The shampoo, the face soap, the body wash, the ‘product’ … all really and truly completely optional.
I’m planning to start showering every day (the experiment has already started), and I’m going to use soap if I want to, and not use it if I’m not feeling it.
And yes, I do have half a reason for bothering to tell you these things.
And a full reason for telling you just the half of it
If I were a smarter person I would just let that sink in and speak for itself.
But since I’m reckless, foolish, and possibly mentally ill to boot, I will continue briefly, just to warn you that although technically I’m not a Trump voter, I may be more than close enough to imperil your Health and Sanity, if we happen to eat out of the same bowl of stuffing, in the eyes of a decorated Ivy League shrink. To wit:
1) I’m quite ambivalent about Trump’s win, but I’m very glad Kamala lost.
2) I did vote for the wrong Jill, and according to Orthodoxy that’s more or less the same thing.
3) Most importantly, I’m not in the cult, hate the cult, have made a whole volunteer career late in life trying to de-program the unfortunate from the cult. I’m what they used to call an evil slave.
Somehow I am only now realizing that Azure deliveries can cover a majority of what I need to stock under this new and very healthy way of eating, and at damn good prices too.
If you live in a more typical kind of place and can run down to Natural Grocers on a whim, this probably isn’t as big a deal to you as it is to me.
But it’s 90 miles one way to get a lot of this stuff here.
I’m ordering things this time that might or might not work out (Will the avocados be in an edible state upon arrival?) and happy to share whether they do, next week, if you care to know.
The red: A regular can of organic tomatoes, crushed, diced, whatever you like …
(Perfectionists will fire-roast maybe ten romas.)
The green: A jar of ready-made green chili or tomatillo (the local Hatch brand is 505)
(Perfectionists will fire-roast maybe ten tomatillos)
If you want an all-red or all-green salsa, adjust accordingly. This mix is mainly reddish.
Bring the heat …
Twenty de-stemmed and crushed dried arbol chilis
plus 4 shishitos and/or two jalapenos and/or two habaneros
Tastes will vary widely. These are my proportions–it comes out respectably hot but not quite nuclear. The arbol is the essential part for flavor and that slow burn.
Accessories …
one onion chopped fine
4 garlic cloves chopped rough
salt (one tsp. seems like plenty for this batch)
oregano or cumin or black pepper to taste
cilantro if you like it (I used cil-sprouts)
For those who have no idea what’s going on in the thread …
When I was 24/25 and finally back in college for good, I happened by a booth full of guys who were recruiting officer candidates for the Army Reserve.
The offer they made me was: go to basic training over the summer, and at the end of it they would have the option to reject my candidacy–or–I would have the option to sign up for real for a four-year hitch of one weekend a month and two weeks a year as a real paid lieutenant Reservist.
It sounded like recruiter lies to me, so I checked with my friendly local Colonel. To the surprise of us both (I think), he confirmed that the deal was real and legit.
So, long story short, I went to Fort Knox, Kentucky for the summer, got paid for it, and completed real basic training in the real Army. I figured that if nothing else, it would be an experience worth writing about (even then, writing was my primary goal, and journalism was the mechanism by which I thought I could compromise with my society successfully).
At the end of it, I was rated 20th overall of the 39 cadets in my group–exactly in the middle, the very definition of average, and they commenced to recruit me pretty hard.
I said no for three reasons.
Number one, they could not 100% guarantee me that I would be placed in my chosen specialty of Military Intelligence, and I did not want to sign up and then be told that I was just going to be a grunt or some other kind of cannon fodder, dead in some Middle East ditch.
Number two, the $388 a month they were offering was not quite enough, even in the mid-eighties, to live on without having any other kind of job at all. Seriously, if it had even been a hundred dollars more, I would probably have signed on the dotted line.
And finally: I had, and have, a clinical-grade Problem With Authority, and eight weeks under a pair of beady-eyed drill sergeants had only served to make that crystal clear to the dimmest understanding.
I did write the story.
It was never published.
It’s nothing but a memory and a contributor to the stacks and stacks of boxes that I am attempting to rid myself of, these days, four decades later.
Standing tough under stars and stripes we can tell. This dream’s in sight–you’ve got to admit it–at this point in time that it’s clear. The future looks bright …
On that train all graphite and glitter, undersea by rail, 90 minutes from New York to Paris,
well by ’76 we’ll be A-OK.
In the real 1976 I worked all summer so I could afford a car.
It was not a jet car, and it still isn’t.
It was not a bullet train.
spandex jackets “One For Everyone” is communist utopia
***
They broke everything a long time before that, just as they will again. In the year my father was born, clear through to the year my mother was born, we all lived through the what they called The Depression.
gave us SS New Deal because they were facing down a real revolution if they didn’t.
FDR, banned.
Anti-communism, McCarthy.
For a bright shining moment near the end of Eisenhower, IGY.
But he warned us.
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry.
…
We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
We should take nothing for granted.
Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
The murders, starting with JFK.
in the comments section of the various IGY videos they
sing of hope and feeling good
That’s not what this song is about.
Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream’s in sight
You’ve got to admit it
At this point in time that it’s clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well by seventy-six we’ll be A.O.K.
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
Get your ticket to that wheel in space
While there’s time
The fix is in
You’ll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky
You know we’ve got to win
Here at home we’ll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There’ll be spandex jackets one for everyone
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
(More leisure for artists everywhere)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
Imagine being a mafia guy who wants to take a leave of absence from The Family
and so turns in through the proper channels
all the required paperwork to initiate the process correctly, like a mensch I think they call it.
Today, the Daily Spill
is that paperwork.
***
Picking up where we left off two weeks ago at Luke Eleven verse eight.
I tell you, even though he will not get up
and give you the bread because of friendship,
yet because of your shameless audacity
he will surely get up and give you as much as you need.
I don’t know what to make of this menudo, O Lord.
If the bread here is, what … real dialogue? … honest conversation?
Connection, relationship, storg-e with some actual meat on its bones?
Then this doesn’t seem to be true
not even a little bit; sure
We’ve got funnel cakes from the state fair
We’ve got a whole month set aside for celebrating one frozen dessert.
We’ve got styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer, stories aplenty about how none of it was your fault, and a baby’s arm clutching a MacIntosh or maybe just its stock price.
And yes, we’ve even got lemon berry electrolyte cat picture, you bet we do.
But we got no soul bread wholesome and true enough to be worthy of the Name.
I’m losing faith in You Prince of Peace,
bleeding it out just a little faster than I ever did before.
Ahead my gaze twists further on out the high lonesome road to Hairésis
I expect it’ll take a while, so
I forward my regrets.
***
29 September 24
“You’re more of a man than your father ever was.”
Thanks for that. You’re right.
But …
… becoming more of a man than him was not hard. So it didn’t mean that much to me when I realized it was true, or later when (sorry) you said it was true, either.
When you can honestly feel and say that I am a better man, or more of a man, than, say, Colonel Sanders … well now, that would be, in theory will be, a whole new ball game.
Personally I won’t really be satisfied until … not only is that one true too, but …
until even that doesn’t mean much, or at least feels like …
it was not all that hard to get even to that point,
in the end.
You know?
Because then and finally, I can forget the past and start to learn about what being the man I can be
will be.
***
Okay. Let’s call it there. There are two left but they need to be made one, and made real. Thanks for putting up with the laundry.
26 May 22: The Good Kind of Class Traitor
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=jjz-a4D20z4
***
30 June 22
We the People of the United States in Order to form a more perfect Union
–establish Justice
–insure domestic Tranquility
–provide for the common defence
–promote the general Welfare and
–secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity
do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
It sure sounds good.
I have some ideas, about why for instance there are cabinet-level positions for Justice and Defense, but none for Liberty, and god damn if I’d even been ambitious, my ambition would have been to be the Secretary of Tranquility.
The Book of Revelations in the New Testament lists the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as:
White Rider (Pestilence), or Plague
Red Rider (War)
Black Rider (Famine)
Pale Rider (Death), who is clearly the officer in charge
“Protesting farmers and their children sit in their tractors at a blockade outside a distribution center for supermarket chain Aldi in the town of Drachten, northern Netherlands, Monday, July 4, 2022. Dutch farmers angry at government plans to slash emissions used tractors and trucks Monday to blockade supermarket distribution centers, the latest actions in a summer of discontent in the country’s lucrative agricultural sector”.
Once upon a time there was The Sixties. And then Occupy Wallstreet. In the freshly modern era, France had its YellowVest movement, and then the Canadian truckers of all people jammed the streets of Ottawa.
The backlash in Canada was truly Orwellian. People’s bank accounts being illegally seized. Their employers and insurance companies contacted by spooks and their coverage, their jobs, revoked without due process or recourse … Trudeau the nice pretty liberal, taking a long first step toward totalitarian control.
The American truck convoy saw all that and it broke their will to fight before they were within five hundred miles of DC.
Now the small farmer protest in the Netherlands is ramping up sharply
Yet in the face of this climate emergency,there is nascar and formula one racing and espn arranging leagues to fly cross country, instead of close to home. The rich build mansions, have yachts, and fly private jets. It’s hard to take this seriously when our leaders do not change their lives, but expect us to starve.
Alexander Mercouris, commenting on the fall of Boris Johnson’s government in the UK, and Biden’s plunging poll numbers:
“The event that has turned what was already a difficult inflation crisis, that we already had at the start of this year. into an all-encompassing crisis is the economic war of attrition that the West blundered into against Russia when they announced all those sanctions back in February.
They didn’t expect that the Russian economy would absorb the blow. They didn’t anticipate that they would find themselves in that war of attrition. That’s what they have. They’re not prepared for it … They’ve done enormous damage to themselves”.
Elsewhere this morning I heard someone identify the sanctions as the mechanism behind a ‘circular firing squad’ throughout the West, and this seems perfectly apt to me. Germany decides to boycott Russian oil, and now they’re looking–not at a great win for ‘democracy’–but just at a winter without heat, even for those willing or able to pay hyperinflated prices for it.
***
14 January 23
Later, one night in Portland, my first real girlfriend called the cops on me because she thought I was losing the thread.
When they got there I was sitting quietly in the big chair, reading Walden.
They asked her if I was hitting her and she said no, I wasn’t like that. They ended up baffled about why she called them at all, and finally in frustration the cop who drew the short straw told me that if I was any kind of man I would just leave on my own.
I laughed and I suggested I might, if maybe there was an extra bed for me at his house. Offi-cer.
They seethed and left and she seethed and left too.
I put down Thoreau and I went to bed.
For the next few days I got real high with the downstairs neighbor lady every morning, on her supply. She at least was impressed with my genius, and my smooth turning of a stoned phrase. Thank you, Dora.
Then I packed my single bag and found that studio walkup in the pre-gentrified Northwest of the naked rose city.
A few weeks later, girlfriend called to say that she might have chlamydia and her doctor told her she was morally bound to inform all her partners, which consisted of … me.
I went and got checked and I found out some unexpected things.
First, that I was free of any infectious disease.
Second, that the dumb frustrated cop had been accidentally right about one thing.
I wasn’t any kind of man, not of the kind known to common medical science.
There was not then, nor had there ever been, a single droplet of testosterone in my mortal shitkicker’s blood.
I was a chromosomal mutant. I was XXY. All that on top of the stupid religious cult, and the willfully indigent father, and the big bruises on the face of my mother and eventually on me too, and the hitchhiking adventures in starvation and the lost scholarship and the graveyard job at the convenience store and the girlfriend who loved me so much that she called the bacon raining down on my scrambled head.
I had every fucking right to be mental. Certifiably and forgivably, as batshit as Syd Barrett or John Bolton.
But somehow I wasn’t.
Not very, anyway. And some of the other stuff was treatable.
A year after that I was 24, and a reasonable simulacrum of a functioning adult. I grew a first downy beard just to prove the fictive truth of my apparent masculinity, to the whole world, to myself.
And so, everything began all over again, like if a Temple chose to migrate under a double full moon.
The Rise and Fall of Eric Weinstein (feat. Joe Rogan)
***
14 August 2023: About A Cat
It took her three days to decide to come home this time.
She made the choice finally from hunger, and so she still doesn’t know if it was the right one–her doubts run deep.
So deep I can feel them as if they were my own, although naturally correlation does not always equal causation, and a simile is not a smile.
***
19 August 2023
The Truck is designed as an instrument for movement of itself, and me and some tools along for the ride with it.
The Bed is designed to remain perfectly still in a single secure place forever and ever and foster restful sleep.
The laptop is one of the tools and a musical instrument for playing data.
Water/jugs. Pantry. Chuck box. Stove. Fridge.
***
7 October 2023: “Quarrel”
from Old French querele “matter, concern, business; dispute, controversy”
…
directly from Latin querella “complaint, accusation; lamentation”
***
That’s it, until the present year. There are about ten of those left to go, and I will probably finish this little project off with one of them, actually fleshed out in living color and full glory.
May of 21: The Other Kind Guy
(I’m attempting to create my “Identity”)
Anarchist
Poet (prose mostly. A belletrist, if you want to be precious about it.)
Firequester (A gearhead, if you want to be prosaic about it. I’m interested in tools that make life more efficient and free, like water pumps and FLOSS computer programs.)
Vitals
Age: You and I can both guess that the time left to me is shorter than the long strange trip it’s already been. Don’t ask me how old I am. Ask me what I’ve done lately to make my inevitable death into my trusted Advisor.
Race: is an utter fiction. Even Neanderthals could interbreed with homo sapients. Where’s your aryanish or humanish exceptionalism now?
Gender: Maybe not quite as fictional, but pretty close.
You know there’s more.
Lurlinist. Doggerlandian.
***
June of 21
Better than average NPR fare, The World with Mark O’Wirman, or more likely Marco Werman. I swelter and burrito and listen.
He markets himself, the show today, by saying Hey:
‘We know environmental stories can be a major depressing drag.
That’s why we’re committed to solutions-based reporting!’
I think I see the problem.
Real solutions-based reporting wouldn’t be about how billionaire Elon is going to save us.
Or what our friends at Texaco are doing about the pressing climate issue of the day.
Real solutions-based reporting would address human greed, and the better-lives-for-our-children problem.
It would probably look something like what Marianne Williamson does, or Russell Brand.
(Note from the future: Well that didn’t age very well … )
Short of diving off the spiritual or existential deep end, you’re just something slightly less aggravating to listen to while auto dining in the 102 degree heat.
I know it makes you a living, Marco.
It’s not active evil, and good on you for that.
But ask yourself.
I will be too.
***
June of 21
https://old.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/
On my good guy list you’ll find The Grayzone, Chomsky, Hedges, Greenwald, Status Coup, Rational National, TheAnalysis.com, Consortium News, Jimmy Dore, Richard Wolff, Nader, Briahna Joy Gray, Matt Taibi, Cornel West, Marianne Williamson, WOTB, and maybe, i.e. hopefully, Breaking Points with Krystal and Sagaar. The jury is still out on the last two but I’m hopeful now that they’ve freed themselves from The Hill. There may be a few others worth adding to the list but that’s a good start.
We on the left should never let the current ruckus reduce us to People Magazine status. We need to remain focused on “our” issues. The issue is not the shallow, juvenile sniping by TYT; it’s that TYT is and always will be dead wrong about what’s really happening in Syria. They are dead wrong about Russiagate. They are dead wrong about US empire. That’s where our focus needs to remain.
So let’s weed out the propagandists who are seeking our support. Let’s help their ratings sink to almost nothing. And then let’s start developing a tangible plan to build a network that gives us all a voice on the national stage.
***
5 September 21: The Avocado of Anticapitalism
One sanctified gifting I did bring back, unbox, and place in a position of honor was a brand new luscious cast-iron piece of cookware. A pan.
It claimed to be “pre-seasoned” but that was obvious marketing bullshit. To properly season cast iron is, relatively speaking, a long hard row to hoe.
I researched the latest in best practices for the job.
It turns out that you want to season your pretty new pan with an oil that has a very high smoking point, even up to 500 degrees.
Practically, that means avocado oil is the best of the best … okay, so I need some, maybe even a big bottle, to not just season, but to stand in for olive oil sometimes when actually cooking at higher heat.
Even I have a nostalgia for the good old days, when you could sit down and watch something on history or culture or geopolitics without it seeming to make reference to a political dimension. Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, they were just reporting the facts, right?
It was a lie then and it’s a lie now.
***
2 December 21
As you may know, I have a lot invested in the idea that the dawn of Civilization is roughly contemporary with the Fall from Grace.
Sketched crudely, the idea is that humans once existed in small groups dependent on hunting and gathering, and that the migratory way of life that necessitates impeded the formation of authoritarian structures like kings and priests and vastly unequal allocations of resources.
***
That’s all of theoretical value that was left half-written and unposted from ’21.
Sitting at 2000 posts exactly, on this latter-day vairtere version of the spill. This is #2001.
To celebrate, I walked 6.2 miles today.
To celebrate, I’m going to start telling you about the produce of the Ritual now.
But …
before I do that, I’m going to get things cleaned up a little, by dumping a lot of draft posts, and footage, half-finished dross, from the last 2+ months of Splendid Isolation.
Quantity will improve. Quality may suffer.
Be advised.
Wary.
***
One more thing about politics, my lambs, before I try again to ignore it for a while.
(This isn’t the Ritual stuff, per se.)
I remember very well all the times going back eight years that you cheered madly, anytime anything bad happened to old Donald. I remember the last such time, a few months ago, when he got convicted on random bullshit and you were elated.
I have noted with a certain quiet amusement how preternaturally quiet you’ve been on the subject of that particular oligarch’s landslide victory this week.
And on Friday, when I heard the news that all the rest of the lawfare cases against him were being dropped one by one, almost sheepishly, I thought of you again, imagining what you must be feeling about that.
It raised a question in my mind.
Have you spent any spleen or bile or anguish or angst over this phenomenon of him getting off scot-free, incredibly and at last?
And if so: Why?
No, really. Deep down. What the fuck difference could it make, to your life?
Why would you burn ten times as much energy on wanting to see him punished as you ever spent on war criminals like Mr. Cheney, unarguably guilty of far, far worse crimes?
Why didn’t you go insane when President Obama decided not to prosecute The Dick, or his theoretical boss George, because their crimes, as he said, “happened in the past”.
Like all crimes invariably do.
Why are you going to burn still more angry life force when he keeps his campaign promise to pardon every single one of the January 6th “insurrectionists”?
I have a theory about why.
I think you have a very deep need to believe what you’ve been told, about this being a Nation of Laws and not men.
Even though you know, rationally, that what you’ve been told is a complete and cynical lie.
I think you crave this kind of belief being validated at every turn, because ultimately it is in your Interests to believe them, in spite of knowing they’re horseshit.
“With liberty and justice for all”, we droned as children.
As intelligent adults, we know very well that our fellow citizens get exactly as much liberty as they can jolly well afford.
And as much justice too.
The System, I am grieved but obligated to report once more, is rotten to its core, and it grinds up and spits out living breathing people, like so many appleseeds, so we can pleasure ourselves with iPhones and pretty new trucks and ice cream and flat screen TVs. For .. Success.
You know it, but you don’t want to believe it.
Believing your own lying eyes is … not in your Interests. It’s depressing as hell, not only for the obvious reasons, but also because it means that your entire American Exceptionalist worldview, from the flagwaving to the lyrics of one Francis Albert Sinatra, has to be called to answer–if you choose to quiet your mind and see things clearly.
Donald Trump, whatever his many documentable failings, is your Id talking.
He says the quiet parts out loud. Fuck yes we’re in Syria for the oil. What other reason could there be? (There is no other.)
And in Niger for the precious metals, and in Guatemala for the Chiquita-branded bananas, and on and on, wherever we can jam in another military base by the hundredweight.
He is naked stupid greed, and naked stupid greed lives well inside every one of us, too.
Yeah. Sure. People die every day. What of it? “The poor are with us always.”
” ‘ Democracy’ is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” Har.
“You, child, need to lead. Or follow. Or get the motherfucking fuck out of The Fucking Way.”
Of Progress.
Of Murica.
Of every shiny Buick that ever rolled off the line in poor dead Detroit.
Of Holy Profit, most sacred of all. Sing Hosanna, and Das Kapital.
Do I want to talk about it around the Thanksgiving table?
No I sure don’t.
But I won’t be able to stop myself from thinking about it. Then, or ever.
I’ll shut my trap and be civil for that one day. Unless I’m … provoked beyond good intentions, anyway.
And for now, I’m going to try to do the same here for a while, for reasons mandated by the process of my own belletrism.
On the dewy-eyed reflections of Van Jones:
“Asshole. This administration has been in power for four fucking years. Why didn’t people help them with their dreams then? Why all of a sudden is Trump’s victory putting them in a worse position than they were yesterday?”
On the continuing murder of Palestinians: “Not a fucking word about that!”
Yep.
On the bright side, Orangeman released a ten point plan for reining in the deep state. Let’s hope he’s deadly serious, and let’s hope they don’t JFK him halfway through the implementation.
Okay.
Maybe that can be it for now.
Please pray for my headbroke propensity for distraction.
What this really is, is another $9 billion to weapons manufacturers (“defense contractors”) right here in the land of the theoretically free.
Money laundering, with your tax dollars, just as it has been all along.
When I call myself a single-issue voter, this is the issue I mean.
“The war machine and wall street”, working together to concentrate wealth in the hands of the lily-white few, at the expense of the many, at home and abroad.
When in a few years from now, the bills run up in exactly this fashion by Empire come due at last, those billions and the tens of billions spent on the misadventure in Ukraine, and the hundreds of billions of run-up debt wasted on just such exercises in killer waste … will be missed.
This country is not going to be able to afford even the interest payments, and the whole shitshow is going to come crashing down.
The perpetrators of the end of Empire will rush to their villas in New Zealand, leaving the rest of us holding the bag.
***
Meanwhile, I listened to a whole batch of NYT podcasts, to learn how the Dem establishment is reacting.
When Hillary lost the talking class was screechy and full of blame. It was Jill Stein’s fault, it was the fault of those stupid people who never went to college–whatever.
This time, just by the numbers, they know it’s their own goddamn fault.
And the rationalizing contortions they put themselves through trying to unburden themselves of that blame make my stomach lurch.
Compared to 2020, his numbers with black voters went up 5 percent, and among ‘Latinos’ it was 13%.
Why? Because those people are disproportionately on the wrong side of income inequality, and therefore suffering, and they didn’t feel that their suffering mattered at all to the Joe Bidens and Kammy-Kams of the world.
It’s the same with young voters of any race, as dramatically demonstrated by charts in the video.
They too are on the short end of the stick and being shafted with it.
You can probably afford to base your vote on “abortion”.
But millions of your fellow citizens couldn’t even afford to base it on claims of “white supremacy”.
And so he won them, in a landslide.
Thanks for laying it all out so cleanly, Glenn.
This wasn’t about gender or race or age or whether you went to college. All you need to know:
“They only call it class warfare when we fight back.”
Tempting though they may be, we stand united in declining to lick up the delicious lib-tears rolling down your puffy cheeks.
You can mope a while if you like. It’s understandable.
But very soon it will be high time to stop screaming at each other trying to score points, and start making common cause for a legitimately better society and planet, not this fake blue mockery of “better” that actual democracy just broke in half and threw away.
The Resistance has been waiting to welcome you all along.
It’s impossible to say, of course, whether doing the only moral thing would have also changed the outcome.
But I can say that if she’d have stalled the genocide by refusing to perpetrate it with bombs paid for with my tax dollars, I personally, as something in the vicinity of a single-issue voter, would have had to strongly consider holding my nose and giving her my vote.
In the real world, I voted for the only candidate willing to even use the word ‘genocide’.
And, by the way, for anyone railing against men and the gender divide the day after …
I think I mentioned once or twice that the heartland is seriously pissed off.
But I admit it: I wasn’t expecting to see it demonstrated so vividly–up in the popular vote by +5 million!?
Very nearly heartening, that.
It’s still the duopoly and not much will change. But maybe the Empire finally stops pissing away billions on the fiasco in Ukraine.
Maybe Bobby gets something real done about the shit we eat.
Maybe the blue powers start to realize they can’t rig or get rid of primaries, install candidates by fiat, and have that work out for them.
Congratulations on your ‘I Voted’ sticker and all, but maybe by the next time it will start to dawn on you that lever-yanking and bitching on Twitter ain’t gonna cut it any more.
Your countrymen and women are enraged and despairing, and their reasons for that are not all deplorable, in spite of what the pundit millionaires keep trying to pour into your head.
What will you do, to honestly feel their pain, and work with them toward a slightly less horrifying world?
Each November shitshow is worse than the last. I deeply wish I didn’t have to go vote later today. But Arizona has a robust ballot initiative process, and I have to go waste my time to try and vote down one that is against tipped workers, and another that is against homeless people.
