This week I haven’t been much of an artist. There’s been a different job to do. I’ve needed to get a dead van roadworthy. It needed oil massaged into it, and some TLC.

I paid some other dues too, and there’s been a small catsplosion out there in the yard to attend to.

I also tackled another big hairy mess consisting of data.

I have two laptops in daily use. On them, and on scattered external hard drives and USB storage media, there were piled terabytes of … mostly crap, and the rest … archives. I have every post I’ve written in ten years of spilling and every video that I’ve posted in two years of filming and editing, but I also have complete shit like committee notes that I didn’t even care about back when the meetings were happening in olden times.

I haven’t dealt with most of it, properly, and I pray to god I never will.

But I’ve thrown it all into neat boxes, backed them up, and taken them to a specially designed space in the basement next to the furnace.

What is left as still relevant and useful is about a single gigabyte of files in neat folders, on a single GNU-Linux operating system. Thus:

It’s slightly more complicated than that, but not by much. There is, for example, a second drive on the same machine for mirroring updates of the same data (as well as all the basement horrors). There is a scrubbed 1TB external that holds a second copy of everything and a third copy of the actual important 1GB out of a thousand.

I’m pretty much ready at any time to nuke and repave this last Linux I’m writing on tonight, pull a fresh copy of that luscious creamy gig, and begin again fresh.

It happened very fast–mere days–compared to how long the same process is taking in the real world house. Mainly this is because digital basement boxes don’t take up physical space, or weigh anything, or take calories to move.

Even so, my kitchen is about 85% perfect now, measured by square footage.

The bathroom, well that as you know is a whole ‘nother story, and that’s next.

The bedroom is waiting for the sick cat who lives in it to be finally integrated into the General Population, and that story is one of authentic but incremental progress.

A dressing room. A workshop room. A shed or two. Onward, to the vehicles.

That’s the truth, of this life.

It’s been a good year.

In the next few days I will continue to post a lot of political junk you don’t care about, because that’s easy for me, and cathartic. I’ll be on the road, and I imagine that will produce footage of some interesting kind, to be cut into, ahem, Content, later into the month.

Thanks for sticking with me through this kind of problematic time–if you are–and if you’re not, well then, ‘you’re not hearing me anyway’, insert ambiguous emoticon here.

Zuckerberg Says Biden Admin Wrongfully Pressured Him To Censor Users

He did the wrong thing, around Hunter’s laptop and the entire ‘Russian disinformation’ meta-garbage story, and is now whining to Congressional Republicans about Pressure.

Which would be fine except:

Ongoing, Worsening Threats to Free Speech Over Israel Revealed (Different channel, but there is the little zuck’s face, right there in the thumbnail)

NOTHING HAS CHANGED.

It’s just the wrong thing in response to pressure about the Palestinians and their supporters now.

God preserve me from needing to have anything to do with this oligarch beast or his shitty platform, ever again.

Details starting to emerge about the arrest.
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov ARRESTED By French Police For Free Speech

“Other people might have done bad things on your platform and we don’t like it.”

SNL’s Kenan Thompson Live At The DNC!

John Deere: A Proud AMERICAN Company (7.2 billion in stock buybacks, plus massive layoffs at the same time)

Telegram Founder Arrested For Pissing Off The Ruling Censors

Once More With The Weeb To Show You Kursk

“Perform for your contemporaries,
but what they require
not what they praise.”

–Friedrich Schiller, via Helga Zepp-LaRouche on Dialogue Works

In other words, eat your vegetables. (vairtere.com)

And make sure there’s always good coffee in your pantry too. (anaprim.com)

I’ll probably have still more brilliant yet self-serving advice for you soon.

***

So five of RFK’s brothers and sisters issued a statement denouncing him for his political views and methods today.

Learning this news felt so familiar. I can’t put my finger on it.

Human truth and you do you. Honestly. Seriously. Your opinions are valid, and noted, and I have, as I said, no desire to be a bad influence on you, or necessarily any kind of influence at all; insert the prayerhands emoji here.

The connections …

between Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski and Phillip Marlowe of Bogart fame

“The Sam Elliot character is there as a substitute for Marlowe’s narration.”

How I so love this kind of shit.

Speaking of narrators, Mr. SpaceFleeFilms is not very gifted at it. But as writer and editor–hell of a job. I really loved the way a lot of scenes from The Rockford Files just appeared without comment here. They gave the comparisons an almost universal scope.

From a certain angle, the war you are so anxious to avoid has already been raging forever.

It’s just a polite and ice cold conflict, often covered in Sprinkles, whatever they are, like Cuba was once covered in missiles.

The battlefield is inside you (inside us) and it can get pretty bloody.

When you pull off a tactical maneuver and win a fight, I cheer. I think We all do.

From another angle there is no war, perhaps because there is none worth fighting. It’s all tats, and tits, and not the fun kind.

Here on the Pokrovsk front, I got down and dirty with it yesterday. I cooked for real.

Shine up the battle apple anti-recipe book and I’ll show you how.

First you Sprinkle spices on your hunk of meat. I used salt and pepper and Arbol. Some people say you have to work them into the flesh, but I didn’t want to get my hands dirty, and it all worked out.

Then you grab the Le Creuset dutch oven you bought when the money was flowing like rainwater in the parched gutters, and you sear the hunk on medium-high on every side.

Cut two or three onions in half and put them face down in the pot. Use them as a trivet to keep the meat up off the surface. Add a box of broth.

You can of course add carrots and potatoes (root vegetables!) and all that at the same time, but I can’t, for keto reasons. So instead I poured the second half of the bottle of enchilada sauce on top, and then a whole stick of butter, and I put it in the oven on 300.

It was supposed to take about four hours, but I checked it after two and a half and it was way up above anybody’s idea of a food safety temperature. I let it keep going anyway, because I wasn’t done editing that beast of a video, and secretly I was hoping it would all fall apart to a gentle forking.

Complete success. But … I’ll say this, too. There is no point in going to all that effort for a two-pound roast. Next time I’ll do four at least.

As you savor the taste of victory, call your opponent out for peace negotiations.

Be generous.

The Golden Rule and all that.

Tonight there will be real tacos, not that shit in a plastic box from the Safeway deli.

Finally do not mistake this for Progress. That’s a whole different Episode.

We take as our text today the 11th Chapter of Luke.

I don’t consider this Spill to be “social” media and it’s the same for the little films, even if and when they do get posted to Google’s monster video platform.

The only social-media I really have consists of Family Text Threads, and, off to the side, a Twitter account that I mainly use to shitpost responses to those FTTs without actually contributing to sending the threads themselves in bad directions.

(Though I am tempted to do so often.)

That’s been working okay. But last night I was tempted again, and instead of just venting off at Twitter, I sinned and responded directly.

In penance, this morning I’m working on tweaking that system, to be able to use it as a more effective shield from personally committing exactly such Sins. (Religare is ‘to bind back’, and that’s what I’m doing, to and for myself.)

It starts over here on my own platform where I can say whatever I want, however I want, and do it in ludicrous depth if I feel like it (and clearly I do).

Twitter is an intermediate tool for converting a post here into a bite-sized format and a shortlink, which can be posted to the threads as a pointer to that full response.

The shortlink can finally be posted to a FTT–where it can be taken in by those who actually WANT my responsive takes, and blissfully ignored by the undoubted majority, who, I infer with all due gnashing–Don’t.

We’ll try this improved method, and see how it goes.

For purposes of this immediate case, to my brother and my nephew and my step-pater I will only say: This is all your fuckin’ fault, hermanos.

With the majestic magnanimity so characteristic of my venerable and noble soul, I forgive you your transgression. You may consider this forgiveness as well for never once ever stooping to entangle yourself in my work and art by so much as the price of a bag of magical organic beans. You do you, because what we choose to support or not with our attention and our spending is a grave and serious matter, between ourselves and god almighty above.

Back to real life with both sin and hard feelings expiated, at least as far as I’m concerned. Hallelujah from the baffled king. It should be a hell of a Thanksgiving dinner eh? Eh?

If you NEED a last word on the subject, there are at least two venues now where you can have it.

But the FTT is not one of them–I won’t respond to you there any more if I can at all help it–all I ask is that you consider your options in that regard with the same kind of social study and care I’m modeling for you here; and Selah.

It’s a podcast. It’s from NPR.

The subject of it is one I care passionately and deeply about. Wilderness. Wildness.

The first 3-minute teaser episode is mainly set in my wilderness, the Gila.

I should be very excited.

Instead I viscerally hated that first episode and I will not be listening to the two episodes they’ve posted after it so far.

If you want to know why you can refer to the video I shot coming up out of Riverton Wyoming a little while ago. I don’t need to say it again.

You may feel differently. I hope so. Enjoy.

That is all.

Recently I’ve contended that there IS no “Freedom” without being able to drink from the river.

Maybe you thought:
whatever dude. Water comes in pipes now. It’s better that way, join the 21st century.
Or maybe you thought:
whatever dude. It’s too late to bitch. Nothing can be done. What does it matter?

To the moderno-fatalists I have nothing to say–‘night’night.

To those who would claim that the Civilized way is better, I would say yes … okay …

Until it isn’t.

Until the piped water is full of E. coli, until the pipes leach lead and give kids brain damage, until you have to, in one way or several, pay for it.

For water. To drink.

Meaning that ‘working’ at a job (probably to make someone else rich) is suddenly Mandatory, assuming you don’t want to drink at gas station bathrooms, or die of thirst, and all because the river is full of killer shit.

Maybe you even like your job. Maybe you’d be one of those megamillions lotto winners who keeps right on going to that job every morning regardless. Which is fine …

But liking some form of enslavement still isn’t Freedom.

For that reason and many others, this is not now, nor has it ever been The Land of The ‘Free’.

***

This line of thinking was inspired (this time) by something I heard part of on the NPR while I was out doing laundromat laundry.

It was from a guy who lives in a part of New Orleans that gets frequent ‘Boil Advisories’ regarding the civilized pipe water.

He got tired of having to tune in to various places before knowing whether his water was ‘safe’ or a grave health risk.

So for the last seven years he has both filtered, and then boiled all the water his family pays for and then drinks. Filters, through a costly Brita. Boils, on a stove that uses gas he also pays for.

It’s not so very different here. I pay for and use tap water for cleaning and showering. But anything I drink comes from the reverse osmosis machine a mile up the road, at forty cents a gallon plus the labor of hauling it.

Why do we think this is even normal, much less ‘better’?

Answer it for yourself. I’m not going to digress in the direction of the brainwashing tangent just now.

You and I are among the blessed. We don’t live in that part of New Orleans. Or in Flint. Or Jackson Mississippi.

Or out on the Rez.

Blessed, maybe …

But still not ‘Free’.

You can’t be both socialized to be civilized …

and free at the same time.

You can’t be Well-Adjusted to an insane way of living …

and still function as a healthy autonomous animal.

I don’t care who you vote for, or if you vote. I don’t give a shit what you think about abortion or which bathrooms should have tampons in them or whether JD Vance is weirder than Tim Walz or Kam-Kam is still better than the orange one.

Tell me about your water.

Tell me when we’re eating today, and what we’re having, and about who we paid to butcher it for us and wrap it up in plastic like a serial killer.

If you even know their names.

Then maybe we can have a dialogue that actually matters.

***

I don’t drink from the river.

I pay a water bill every month and I pay at the blue machine, every few days.

That’s all more or less working, for now.

The problem is not getting the water. The problem, here at the house, is about getting rid of it after I dirty it.

There’s a blockage in the main drain, somewhere between the toilet (which is the final stop on the indoor sewage system) and the street.

So I am putting next to nothing down that mostly blocked system.

You might care about that, if you plan to visit soon. Here are some of the salient and current details of the modus vivendi around here.

1) The kitchen sink drains into a bucket, which I haul to the curb and dump after cleaning up the dishes.

2) The washing machine is not in use at all, which is why I’m hitting the laundromat.

3) I use the bathroom sink for handwashing and spitting out toothpaste, which doesn’t amount to putting much down its drain.

4) When I use the shower every few days I do it quickly. The water will come up to my ankles but then drain away in an hour or two, since it is by far the sub-system responsible for the biggest volume of wastewater at the moment.

5) Nothing’s going down the toilet at all. I will mercifully leave the details to your imagination.

***

It’s true: I don’t have to live like a refugee.

I’m doing it anyway. I have my reasons, which … Reason knows nothing of.

You will be too, probably, when you come, at least at first.

Perhaps we’ll work on making things better together.

For certain half-baked values of Betterness.

***

In more felicitous news, the revolution against the tyranny of the Sun King is underway as of this afternoon, and the prophets are saying that by tomorrow, the terror part of his reign may really start to fade for good.

Something to celebrate with sincerity I should think.

Economics Like You Have Never Heard It Explained Before. Janet Yellen goes to China to get them to keep buying US Debt. They say: Why, so you can put 100 billion worth of missiles on the credit card and then shoot them at us? Piss off, Jan. Bonus story on the subject of Obedience to Authority.

Roe v. Wade Is A Red Herring. There are at least two pills you can get in the mail now that terminate a pregnancy, even if it’s pretty far along and even if you live in one of those Deplorable states. It’s a hardcore liberal and co-creator of the Daily Show telling you this. “Pro-choice” is reduced to nothing but a politically manipulative virtue signal and a fishhook you should decline to bite on.

Kam says she’ll fix that rent thing right up, and bring down the price of eggs too. Of course we believe her, you goddamn authoritarians!

Finally, the tension between need to vote for her and the fact that the bombs will not stop flowing into Gaza either way may make your head explode, but smart activists gonna keep activizing regardless.

Sometimes, you don’t understand it because I don’t really want you to understand it.

Sometimes, I am trying to poke you toward reading it over and over, not like a blog post, but like a poem, and making your own understanding instead of accepting, indulging in, mine.

***

This is what I’m really good at even though I have no idea what it all really means
(and even though it is the farthest thing from what A Man is supposed to be good at)
(or what a Great Author is supposed to be either, by the lights of the civilized savants).

***

You know by now (I hope you do) that a belletrist is a sage practitioner of belles-lettres.

The French spell it: belletriste

But also, curiously

French belle “beautiful”
French triste “sad, sorrowful, gloomy, feeling emotional or mental distress”
and French tristesse “melancholy, sorrow, sadness”

So in some literal sense a belletriste …
is also and exactly an instance of “beautiful-sadness”.

***

I’ve tried six ways to say it already. Sure sure I’m happy, and whatever. But I have never been as filled as I am right now with the blues–with the painful sadness of human life

yours and mine and ours.

***

Jack Kerouac, who was French-Canadian, was aware of most of this and called one of his heroines Tristessa.

Jack Kerouac, in spite of early ambitions, was never a Great Author, and in fact his earliest work is unreadably bad (sorry, Ti Jean).

But he was a Writer (so fuck off, Truman Capote), and he was … a Belletriste.

***

I feel like that is a low bar that I can fully aspire-to

here in the Begin.

I’m sittin’ on my groceries ...

Rough but I’m pleasin’, dontcha know.

It’s meditation upon the crap you have,
the crap you don’t,
and what you do with it
or without it.

Yes I really am blockquoting myself. Can’t you see how hard I’m working?

In that spirit:

This is what I’m watching and by vague implication: how.

That’s
https://vairtere.com/1LastPanelBrowser/vidChannelsRegular.html
if you prefer to copypaste your links and of course you do.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Psychotic Reaction LIVE Oakland,Ca 1991

The Count Five with their original version of the same song.

I must have also dreamed that I blew into the psychedelic harmonica, ’cause I’ve been crazy as a potato bug all damn day.

And that is fine, since I long ago ceased to function as a responsible adult and as far as I can tell–this is the seriously weirdest part–no one even noticed, much less gave a shit.

The madness produced six new ways to watch videos.

I’ll tell you about one of them, but you’ll have to wait until the witching hour.

Nine hours and bless the magnesium.

Early in that nine, I was walking among the houses in the hills and it was raining harder. I sought shelter in the rusted hulk of a pickup truck. There was no instrument panel and the seats were only bare springs, but I was grateful to be not getting even more wet.

After a long moment I noticed that its engine was purring so quietly that the rain noise was almost drowning the sound.

I gingerly pushed down the clutch, put it in reverse, and then let up on it slow. To my shock and delight, the truck moved.

So I drove it the last forty miles into Flagstaff.

Was that a crime?

I don’t want to hear any more god-damned chatter about what we’re going to do today.

Okay Darling?

It doesn’t matter
at all
whether we’re on the road, journeying between Sequim and Salt Lake
or home, in Silver, SandRock, or Salida.

There are exactly two questions that matter,
and that is definitely not one of them.

The two questions that matter are:

• When do we eat, and
• What are we having?

I’ll try to explain this in general terms, and let you draw some inferences about why that trip was such a fucking disaster, and why our lives together often are too.

Begin again. It’s not even important on any given day that we’re eating healthy.

It’s very, very important that we know well in advance that it will happen, and, roughly, when.

It matters some that what we put into our bodies isn’t utter garbage–which probably means that it’s not from a restaurant, but rather prepared with intention and love at “home”, wherever home happens to be that day.

I’ll tell you this much. I am never again in my life going to eat another Eskimo Pie.

And I would be very, very okay if I never ate another In & Out Burger.

Or even another Chipotle bowl.

It’s not that any of those things are healthy or unhealthy exactly.

It’s that ending up eating any of them means that plans haven’t been made–or at least that the half-baked plans that were made Sucked.

No More Suck Plans. That’s the rule now and, sorry, it is Absolute. It is without exception. It is Rule One, every day, for me and for anyone who has some dubious notion that they might want to be with me.

The same goes, kinda, for when we sleep and where and how. But that’s a larger question and a battle for another day.

For this day, Friday the 16th of August, the two eating questions are plenty to take on for a start.

I’m going to be asking them of myself alone in the coming weeks.

For practice.

I’m not afraid of dying.

I’m only afraid of being or feeling incompetent,
at the art of moving, or at keeping myself comfortable or energized–
at a lot of barely definable things like that.

On bad days I’m even a little fearful of looking incompetent.

The fear of incompetence in myself also produces rage in me at the incompetence of others.

So between the two things I spend too much time being angry or scared or both at once.

The rattle in the suspension of my truck is an objective correlative for the fear of maybe not being competent at Moving sometime all too soon.

The hiccup in the air conditioner is the same for the fear of maybe feeling incompetent at keeping myself comfortable and energized.

On good days and parts of days I just stay focused on what I can do to keep myself being competent at all the many things.

Today was like that.

Mostly.

I had a productive day which included swamping out the shower stall, thus getting even dirtier for the purpose of finally getting myself clean.

Then weedwhacking my beard and washing my hair for the first time in about two weeks. (Being so very dirty was at last starting to bother even me.)

I was rewarded with an actual eight hours of sleep and a gentle waking: caffeinated even before the weekly noise of the trash truck shattered the relative neighborhood peace.

This morning I am roasting fresh Chiapas beans and dipping a toe back into these more digital waters. I generally block ads on all the browsers except Tor, but today I did see this one.

It struck me as an insidious consumerist ploy.

My head is in a strange place these days. You don’t have to tell me.

This is the antidote

In the end, Old Joe was a hard, hard No.

Not just for me …

but for so many people that after rigging two primary seasons in a row for him, the Elites had to scrap even that gerrymandered will of the people for some new untested antidemocratic scheme, send Biden packing, and install this alternative puppet at the head of their ballot line.

Kamala Harris exists in a newly manufactured space beyond Yes and No.

Kamala Harris exists in the space of You Have Got To Be Fucking Kidding Me.

It’s no longer about carefully considering her policies (because she doesn’t have any) and making a rational choice between Okay, Yeah, LesserEvil on the one hand and No, Not This Time on the other.

She’s beyond all that.

If elected, she would be the first seriously WTF President in the history of this Republic-slash-Empire.

I don’t even want to go to the mind-numbing effort of wrapping my head around whether she’s ‘a little better’ or ‘a tiny bit worse’. She’s simply … the living political embodiment of absurdist.

A pitch-perfect rendition of what electoralism and late-stage capitalist Democracy have devolved into.

The VP candidates are far more interesting–two variations on the theme of white male working-class hero. I’m glad for that, and between the two I don’t have a strong preference.

I feel certain that anyone still reading me will find that itself absurd, but it’s the truth, out here in childless catperson land–sorry.

None of it in the end will make any difference to my life or hopes or dreams or days.

Maybe this is what beginning to live anarchically really means, feels like.

All I want for my upcoming 18th birthday are gift cards.

If you go Lowe’s or Home Depot I will certainly get a patio umbrella to replace the wind-shredded one. That’s what gave me the idea to post this in the first place.

But I almost don’t care where it’s from. Natural Grocers. Butcherbox. Sweet Maria’s. Those would be healthier for us all in the long run. But I can make even Amazon or Walmart work, somehow.

Your thoughtfulness is already appreciated.

Kisses,

v.

Living as a Wage Slave …
I had more money than time. So when the dryer broke, I fixed that problem with money–calling a tradesman, or buying something turn-key at Lowe’s, or both.

Existing as a lumpenProle …
I have much more time than money. So since there is a plumbing issue, I am spending time to fix it–a lot of time, because I have to work around it in very labor-intensive ways until I can find more time, all at once, a good large chunk of hours or days, to truly tackle the underlying issues.

This is not a great solution, but I think it has important advantages over spending money. The perceived or real advantages are what you would expect from someone who wants to get (and stay) the hell out of the way.

When I was a wageslave, that was classic Following. I obeyed orders and did what the PMCs said in order to get the money to fix the problems ‘easily’.

Often it seems like the best answer of all is to be a Leader (and of course that was what the commander was secretly implying in his pithy sermon).

But again I don’t think he was really right.

Trying to become a Leader is trying to become a Master, rich in both money and time.

Nothing wrong with that?, except all the many nasty things you have to do to get (and try to stay) there, including the brutal cognitive dissonance involved in Having It All while so many billions of others have nothing, and the ugly things that turns you into. Inevitably.

So no, I don’t want to be a LeaderMaster, and I sure don’t want to have to go back to following some fucking boss of a supervisor.

Theoretically there is some other clever way. But youTube millionaire didn’t work out, and coffee-roasting entrepreneur is even worse, in bottom-line dollars and cents terms, because I haven’t made back anywhere near enough to even pay off the roaster machine itself. So I’m paying interest on that debt, instead of making money.

So if there is a clever way around the harsh facts, I am still looking for it, and maybe I will be forever.

In the mean time

I am my own lumpen Plumber, and not naturally good at it, and learning to live with those truths.

Well you can’t have that, but if you’re ana-Merican citizen, you are entitled to a baby’s arm holding an apple.

***

In the most recent video I mentioned the sewer issue and proposed working around it by rigging an awning. Maybe I still will–it would be a very interesting path into mobile living–but in the short term I realized that I can use my indoor sinks with no downside, so long as I drain them into buckets and haul just the buckets outside.

My driveway is very clean.

Between that and the slow fade of 100-degree days in favor of the lower 90s, I am actually getting a whole lot of work done and the place is looking better to my prejudiced eye.

I’m reorganizing Stuff, and in the same multitask moments, completely overhauling my ancient hard drives full of data. I am acquiring things only with extreme judiciousness. I am getting rid of things steadily. I am refining what is still here with fierce care.

And, I know now that my first senior essay will be about ana-Prim, mainly the AnPrim that is political and existential philosophy.

You can follow along with, starting with this guy, who is very definitely anarchist, but also very clearly anti-primitivist. Will I end up agreeing with him? I doubt it.

He did make me real introspective though.

Maybe it will happen to you, right?

Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”
It says something other than what you thought it said.

The Concept of Language (Noam Chomsky)
A pretty flawed and loopy High Concept it is, per the Noam.

It started with the happy coincidence about root beer and black cows. Sometimes there is one sole creature that hears you, and it makes that person especially precious in the moment.

Glad you’re in the world Fletcher. Thanks.

***

The International Geophysical Year happened when my parents were marrying, four years before I incarnated.

It

was directed toward a systematic study of the Earth and its planetary environment. The IGY encompassed research in 11 fields of geophysics: aurora and airglow, cosmic rays, geomagnetism, glaciology, gravity, ionospheric physics, longitude and latitude determinations, meteorology, oceanography, seismology, and solar activity. Because the IGY period was chosen to coincide with the maximum sunspot cycle, when solar flares and other disturbances are prevalent, research on the Sun was especially significant.

Twenty years post-incarnation, before I even became a Nightfly myself, Donald Fagen released a song about it:

I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World)

… drawing on the title, with irony of course, of Louis Armstrong’s less cynical take on the same subject, of This World.

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
…

Well, by ’76 we’ll be A-OK

To the song’s narrator, the 200th anniversary of the American Republic is still decades away in the shiny theoretical promise of things to come.

But to the one who wrote and sang the song, and to us, ’76 was already six or more years in the past, and he knows that the clear bright beautiful wonderful future never happened.

To drag in a completely unrelated lyric from a couple days ago, shining a light from the side, the relationship between the two, and between them and us, runs thus:

“Maybe we oughta help him see
The future ain’t what it used to be.”

(Maybe just maybe I oughta too.)

And then to the same sweet lullaby of a tune, the true darkness of the new techno-reality is hinted at, implied.

A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellas with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free, yes, and eternally young

Think of it.

The best and the brightest, the compassionate Visionaries, will program a machine to make all our decisions for us.

A Skynet.

And as a result, WE will be cleansed …

Bathed in the promise of the american dream; always Free.

Bathed in the blood of the lamb; forever Young.

You and I can read between those lines bitterly, can’t we baby?

There is nothing left but to mindlessly repeat the bland chorus over and over like drones, which is exactly what most people do most of the time. Especially during Ice Cream Month and any given Float Day …

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

If I were a great sage producing great art, like Fagen himself, I would leave it there.

***

But instead I’m going to fuck things up with one last small and indulgent observation.

Just before the Just Machine walks onto the stage of this song, there’s one last sliver of lyric slipped into the background vocals … one last barely audible false promise, of

(More leisure for artists everywhere)

Listen for it next time, because the Donald put it there for you and me especially.

For the artists themselves, who might be tempted to fall for the pretty Lies too.

For the actual compassionate visionaries, who are and will be so often tempted to succumb to the tempting surrender of giving up and leaving the drones to drone without cease until the end of time.

It helps me to see, and it helps me to say

Fuck that.

(Or: “Choenix for a Denarius”)

You know
I’m not on social media but
yeah to the extent I am, this is pretty much it–
Antisocial Media, and milk spilled straight from the spleen.

In the hot siesta I dreamed so hard
(revelations 6)
about an act of secondhand charity
that seemed to say everything. It was

an urn, for coffee with cremation.
As I would too in the Awakening
I refused the shipment
with big red angry letters

Written in my soul from me to you.

For an individual, the poverty threshold (a much prettier word than line, thanks guv) is $15,060.

The latest available Census Bureau data (2021) says 11.6% of Americans live at or below it.

‘Live’ here exists as a statistical category somewhere between still-breathing and thriving.

Don’t worry too much about the Detailed Science.

Like the inflation rate, these kind of horn-rimmed numbers are carefully baked half-truths even when it isn’t an election year.

Margot fucks up the lyrics a little Like One Of Your French Girls will sometimes.

Root beer. Right. For the making of your big black cow and the getting out of here.

When I woke up it was raining hard at last.

So let’s open our hymnals
for tis a gift to be simple
and free
and close with them right and plain

Hosanna.

I lived with them on Jovial Street
In a basement down the stairs
There was music in the cafés at night
And revolution in the air

Then he started into dealing with slaves
And something inside of him died
She had to sell everything she owned
And froze up inside

And when finally the bottom fell out
I became withdrawn
The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keepin’ on like a bird that flew …

So now I’m goin’ back again
I gotta get to Her somehow
All the people we used to know
They’re an illusion to me now

Some are mathematicians
Some are carpenters’ wives
Don’t know how it all got started
I don’t know what they do with their lives

Me, I’m still on the road
Headin’ for another joint
We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point

of view.
Tangled up in blue

I have posted for real once this month. I may again soon, but for now I’m in something of a teleological crisis like any seventeen year old about doing what I do, and directing energy instead toward addressing some harsher details of my physical environment.

So enjoy this classic Hollywood adaptation of a John Steinbeck novel instead for now.

Thus propelled by the order, of the business
I continue to live
mostly in the material reality of my life
rather than the abstract reality of spilled attempts at essay.

I am beginning to understand the central importance of the boring cleaning parts to the flow of a life in the real world.

And why that might mean that I actually need a utility sink.

Sunday the fourth and although I have 2+ posts in the draft stage I got called in to work, which is to say that my sole proprietorship codenamed Anaprim got an order at last. A blessedly sizeable one.

So instead of authoring I fulfilled it smartly.

You may think of placing such orders as a perfectly valid alternative to feedback, and thank you. Patrons are off the hook in any kind of case, too. This is justice, or what is only fair, in my tangled calculations.

Here’s another misfit, another Jimmy Dean
Bet he’s got a motorbike; what do y’all think?

Bet if we be good we’ll get a ride on it
If he ain’t too mad about the future.

Maybe we oughta help him see
The future ain’t what it used to be

Tom Petty, “Spike“

She was long and tall, she was the queen of them all
I asked her to marry me, she smiled and pulled out a knife

The party’s just beginning she said: your money or your life
Last night, talking about last night

Roy Orbison (as Lefty Wilbury), “Last Night“

I can’t help about the shape I’m in
I can’t sing, I ain’t pretty and my legs are thin

But don’t ask me what I think of you
I might not give the answer that you want me to

Peter Green via the 1969 incarnation of Fleetwood Mac, “Oh Well“

sure as a surgeon, you slipped your hand into the doorjam

blood coursing through the air
tonight
i know who i am

and i know who you are
or who you were just an hour ago
static interference on the radio tonight
i know what i know

quick as lightning you brought your hand back inside
and you shut the door behind you It’s too hot out there tonight

breath rising and falling
expansion and
contraction

why’d you tell me this?
were you looking for
my Reaction?

Word
Film
Love you Johnny.

***

I standalone beneath the moon by the crossing gate waiting on the double E and I murmur about my own exquisitely delicate alienation but you don’t hear it because I’ve alienated you and regardless Every day there is a new blank page.

I fill it like a honest gravedigger and I don’t know why
I tell you this but I do. Used to be sure I was very much
looking for your reaction but
that train don’t run by here no more

So that can’t be it but here i am again knowing who i am and shovel in hand like a surgeon

Brute Squad Descends On San Francisco Homeless

I want to hear what part you’re playing.

Are you the one whose home is being bulldozed?

Are you the truck driver, just ‘doing your job’ and trying to get by, or the cop just doing evil cop things for a living until the pension rolls in?

Maybe you’re way beyond the reach of photojournalists, possibly a PMC drone who can afford rent in the beautiful city, maybe muttering under your breath that it’s about fucking time they cleaned up the place for the sake of people like you.

Maybe you’re a real winner, a leader like one of the Supremes who said this was fine, or the Governor who ordered it done with no warning, or a MayorBreed who … “touts” this inhuman shit.

Or maybe you’re doing your bad best to just stay the helloutta the way of all of it.

Who would you be if you could be anyone, in this golden land of justice and opportunity?

major guiding beliefs and self-identifications, as in
–belletrist (as opposed to litterateur/auteur)
–anarchist (green/primal/paleo/whatever, and ‘rewilding’ too)
–hérétique (to grasp upon a heresy is literally a taking/choosing enabled by oneself)
and
minor crystalline images, like
–tears in rain
–šrdnn
–raggaðr
and things in between like the synthesis of the word and image “Anaprim”

The playing hypothesis is that they are ultimately all only organizational tools

Yeahbro. You said that already.
Okay. Next step.

***

Speaking generally, all of the beliefs/IDs above fall into the category of Art, rather than the other categories of Home or Money or Digilife.

… say what now? …

***

It’s ALL about organizational structures. And this is the 3digitalife one.
2Money is mostly digi too. 4Art is mostly digi too.
The only non-digital one is 1HomeRooms and the mob version of same.

This is the 3digitalife one.

GNU and FAIF and F/LOSS, Stallman and the GPL–go here.

Linux hangs off GNU, so you might then need to:
PandoraPlaylist: Introductory course on Linux terminal

Then pick a distro, like AntiX, and a desktop environment, like Xfce.

***

That is way more than enough I’m sure I already lost you; this isn’t about following you and the only tangent I want to go off on right now is that basing your life on a guiding belief or self-ID like ‘American’ or ‘coconut-pilled Democrat’ or ‘MAGA’ is dumb and beneath you–I mean, “anarchist” is way better but almost beneath me–pick your own, but pick better than that and eff the herd and what they think and I’m honestly very sorry to be such a naturalborn posing ‘hérétique’ douche but seriously eff capitalist sugarpoison icecream-month and the horse it rode in on too.

The color of blue.

The problem (you see it all in 3D).

By seven-thirty in the evening I’ve already been tired for two hours and that’s actually great, because it means I can crash hard and well and early.

But a few hours later, because I am old and very well-hydrated, I have to get up and piss, and sometimes the vivid dreams (also a good thing) result in my mind racing, so

that makes it hard to try to go back for four or five more hours of sleep right away.

Right now. At 10:47 PM.

When I ‘should’ be continuing to rest until 3.

I am here instead.

Meanwhile, out in this psycho-land of a culture …

It’s devolved into one side saying the other is weird, and the other claiming the other-other is cringe.

They are of course both perfectly right.

As in center-right.

The hardest part for me personally is when The Big Lebowski and ancient Luke Skywalker just jump up and embrace the cringy fringe as if that’s the cool thing to do.

As it used to be, once.

Just not like this, ever. Ever ever.

They finally get it and immediately, totally don’t get it.

It seems …

perfectly clear (you see it all in 3D) and absolutely tragic

To me.

The culture is unmercifully old now. And very well-hydrated.

She’s a lot like you.

The Dangerous Type.

I should tell you all about the Wilburys today but a taste will have to do.

Rattled

Baby, baby, baby this is out of my control
It may look like nothings wrong but deep down in my soul
Im twisted – shaken – rattled
I get rattled, baby, over you

Rumiano makes organic European-style butter as well, and about four years ago an employee suggested transforming some of that butter into ghee.

Further lessons in the nature of obscurity.

Cheers, nameless employee. I feel your pain.

In the meantime, Rumiano makes world-class stuff and I want to get my hands on more of it in the easiest and cheapest way, which probably means supporting the evil that is Amazon on some level, but … we’ll see how good I am at routing around the damage this time.

***

In the beginning was the parody campaign ad. Pretty damn funny IMHO.

At least until Elon retweeted it and Gavin Newsom suggested that such satire be criminalized.

To hell and be damned with the tards whether they be blue(pilled) or red(pilled) or just white (on the inside).

https://www.patreon.com/posts/chiaroscurist-108972081

He is confused and needs
time to adapt
because he has never seen the daylight before.

(Now is that time.)

***

Those plugged into the Matrix live in a vast colorful sunny world.
They also have access to an endless variety of human pleasures.
But in the real world, there is only one place left. People live there in subhuman conditions, stuck in the outskirts and continually threatened by obliteration.

Accepting the truth shakes ones identity to its very foundations.
(Understanding ones identity[s] thus becomes central to the process of awakening.)

Truths are easily fabricated.

Many ordinary people are so dependent on the matrix that they will fight to protect it. But the sage has a moral obligation to act in the interests of those as yet still chained in the cave.
(I long to say and mean that I’m not doing this for you anymore. But that can always only be partly true, even if you are hostile to my doing.) (my doing-it-anyway) (i don’t like It at all, but if the old sage was right, it Is. Regardless.)

Reality changes when its fundamental story turns out to be a lie.
The relationship was more enjoyable before the truth came out.

Very often the truth is bought at the expense of enjoyment, pleasure, even joi itself, although joy can still sometimes be taken in things we know for a fact now are fake. We can sometimes even as sages suspend disbelief.

In becoming free from the Illusion, sages become illusionists themselves.

The Oracle herself … is a smoker, as well as a baker of cookies.

From this we learn that stories are flickering shadows on cavewalls.
(Curiously, this is also true of the story called The Matrix.)
(I sing of Altamira as I sing of SandRock.)

The allure of your Facebook page and my films is that they can seem (or even possibly be?) better than Reality.
(I do still play that one video game, and I’ve been playing it more, lately.)

Do I really want the truth? Do you?

In Plato’s allegory learning the truth has virtually no downside. But in The Matrix, the truth is less enjoyable. It is in fact often unbearably painful.

Surrogate truths get adopted to cover up that pain in our world. The earth is flat. Xenu loves you. Democracy is the one true path and we are obligated to spread it to them for their own good …

Our talent for suspending disbelief lets us tell and hear stories, feel them, but that talent can easily be subverted by the greed and opportunism that ‘civilization’ and capitalist culture encourage.

Shared stories can give us a sense of meaning and belonging.

They can also justify concentration camps and genocide.

The literary and the cinematic are thus holy swords with two very sharp sides, and

We are forced to admit that it might be just the same with belles lettres.

***

‘All I’m Offering is the Truth’ | The Philosophy of the Matrix

That is as far as Einz takes us. (His name deliciously translates as “single goer”, thus loner.)

How the path unwinds from this point is up to me and you individually.

***

From the comments section (not, of course *my* comment section …)

“The most shocking thing is when you speak the truth people look at you as if you’re insane”.

In The Matrix (“an example of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction”) one of the central moments is when Neo is offered a choice between the blue pill (go back to sleep inside the matrix) and the red one (awaken in the real world).

The blue pill is a kind of ice cream favored by the PMC-adjacent and by various Pelosis.

The red pill means you are woke, not in the sense of the word most common today (quite the opposite), but as in the phrase, “Wake up sheeple”.

In either case you have to be very careful about using these terms, 25 years on from the movie, because to throw them around routinely might inadvertently out you, as an incel like me.

But wait. There’s more.

I’ve heard people I really respect for their brains call themselves black-pilled. This means something in the neighborhood of fatalistic or nihilistic, or at least deeply pessimistic.

One of the coolest anarchist cats around, Michael Malice, wrote a book about the necessity of remaining white-pilled, or presenting as more or less optimistic even when you don’t quite see any reason to be so.

It turns out there are all kind of alternatives now.

I like the one about being iron-pilled, which means that you forget all about thinking of any kind and just focus on getting your body really cut and jacked.

But the reason I’m writing this at all is about a new flavor that just gained a cultural foothold in the last few days, and that is

“coconut-pilled“.

Calling yourself that means that you choose to identify with and support Kamala Harris, but perhaps a tiny bit ironically, because the latest nominal nominee once used the image of a coconut tree in yet another unfortunate moment in an unfortunate speech–so basically it’s the kind of thing she’s most famous for among both people who like her and people who don’t.

Weird babbling that goes nowhere and has a tendency to loop in on itself, often accompanied by strange inappropriate laughter.

All of this information I’ve just provided you with is from sources I’ve been reading, so no originality thus far.

But I do have a simple fresh contribution to inject into the discussion.

It is this.

Back when I grew up, where I was growing up, “coconut” had–and in some matrices probably still does–a different connotation in vulgar and sometimes even hateful slang.

To call someone a coconut was to say that in your estimation, while they may be brown on the outside, their insides were pure white

“Marrón por fuera blanco por dentro”.

A sort of Tex-Mex version of ‘Oreo’.

In some way that sick people might find funny, it’s really quite perfect for the Kam, but forget that.

Let’s just say that calling yourself (a) pastilla de coco might not sound quite the same to every ear, and that not everyone who hears might get how edgy and cool and pragmatic you intend to be by embracing that identity.

You can thank me at your leisure.

No rush.

Obviously.

Leftovers

Morning Joe Spills The Tea On How Dems Forced Biden Out

Amazon Disappears Journalist’s Book About Kamala Harris

I have a lot more to say on the subject of various pills, whether zero-pilling is a thing, and involuntary celibacy, but it’s going behind the passwall and so you know what to do if you know what to do.

The things I observe and believe and say only mechanically deepen your fear, and you are not alone in that.

All they do is make a desperate escape into indulgent frozen desserts and pretend holidays seem more appealing, even more necessary, and so that is the path you choose–you flee my chronic intonations; they’re not helping, and at last even I can plainly observe how that works.

I don’t know what I’m doing.

I do at last know by this point that I’m not doing it for you.

As for why I am doing it anyway, I neither know nor think that I know.

I stand beneath the moon by the crossing gate, waiting solo, waiting on the double E.

I murmur about my own exquisitely delicate alienation but you don’t hear it

because I’ve alienated you.

Every day there is a new blank page.

(Being worthy of dignity and respect and love is not the same as deserving them.)

Every day is that very same new blank page reflected in the liquid eye of the metaphor horse.

The last 100-degree day, theoretically.

I’m celebrating it as a kind of holiday and a kind of birthday, but the festivities and the rationale for that will live behind the passing-word. If you were inclined to investigate–participate–you would already know what to do about that and if wishes were buffalo I could fly through primitivist life as a bison hunter.

Let’s leave all that behind in the fictional realm where it belongs and houseclean together instead joyfully.

***

Riley is refusing to vote this time, but also refusing adamantly to go to your pointedly fake meow march. (I mean you and I know that it isn’t your march, belonging instead to that Andy Borowitz guy, and that the fakery is intended to be amusing this time on top of being a comforting lie, but he’s only a cat and doesn’t keep up on things like we superior mammals do [insert gentle onefingered teammate chest tap here, yeah for sure].)

***

That’s sort of it, except that a couple of perennial blossoms have re-emerged as candidates for discrete identity shards, not quite big ones like anarchy or belles lettres but larger than little sprats like raggedy-man or šrdnn.

There’s a reason you know well who Bill Gates is, and Steve Jobs was, but have at best barely heard of Richard Stallman, and the reason is because that’s what they want you to know well. (part2) (part3)

Based on that insight I am choosing to identify with F/LOSS and especially GNU, which is a recursive acronym that stands for GNU’s Not Unix. In a former life I was a professor of it.

The other is a cyberpunk aesthetics and the reason for that is the subject of yesterday’s post–no need to rehash again today.

Your author tells himself and you that he is a brave autarkeian artist

baaaa …

Is it true?

Unrelated …

Michael Moorcock was right a long time ago, except that it’s not just fantasy, high or low.

It’s most of mass culture, quite possibly including your favorite movie, song, and TV show, that is ultimately designed to function as a lullaby, and so most of what we end up ingesting, laughing or crying by turns, is a lie that comforts.

Which might be fine to a point.

But past that point, the toxicity of the lies becomes more corrosive than any amount of comfort we take from them can justify.

Out there they become the blinding matrix.

Six hours of sleep is not unprecedented, but nailing it from 7 pm to one in the morning pretty much is, in the context of these summer months in the year of our broken lord. I’ve been trying to get back there for weeks. Now for once and finally I have, and I am filled with the good intention of turning that small success back into a habit next to the others.

I do not question and fully acknowledge your entitlement to Congratulate Me.

***

For that and for this.

No one ever voted for her and they’re not going to start now, though you of course may well prove an exception to the rule, you forward-thinking pro-democracy anti-fascist rebel you.

I’ve been monitoring the endless texts but so virtuously saying nothing, and using my otherwise useless shadowbanned twitter account to dump off excesses of steam when I finally and absolutely cannot stand it for even one more second.

My unbroken diligence here at the spill makes me feel unequivocally proud.

As for what I’ve filmed, I’ve selectively posted what also makes me proud, and I’ve shitbinned the rest ruthlessly.

I do not question and fully acknowledge your entitlement to go right ahead passing on the roasted magic beans of light and reading nothing, watching nothing … saying nothing …

Feeling.

In response I exhort myself to persevere in fierce spite of the resulting pindrop void, to even try to teach myself to craft a facsimile of a comfortable home for myself within its confines of cathedral silence.

That ambition defines me at four in the morning of the 23rd day of July.

so please
believe in me

when i say
smoke glass stained

bright image going
down down down down

… never did

give nothin

to the argent man. It’s harder to work out what doing it anyway should feel like now that the clouds are beginning to turn the hackneyed tide of bloody battle. I continue to drink the provided specific sugarpoison and it continues to try to do its job, which is to paralyze:
see para- + lyein “loosen, untie” (from PIE root *leu-, to loosen, divide,

Cut Apart). Can you still hear me babe?

*leu- forms all or part of: absolute; absolution; analysis; catalysis; dissolve; electrolyte; forlorn; loess; lysergic; resolute; resolve; soluble; and

Solve.

Catalytic is ‘a change caused by an agent which itself remains unchanged’, so although it sounds like the opposite of analysis it is instead exactly the same but just a little more specific; a white steamboat chugging through the muddy upriver.

The definition of Armageddon is you are about to be left behind as the train heads on towards that metaphorical dying cornfield of some private iowa or idaho; we are not back in the trees ever after.

Look out mama, here’s a white boat full of chemical sound and deflecting fury, neither solving nor signifying nothing. Daddy’s loess in my hand feels reassuring and his last advice rings in my ear: red means run, son, numbers add up to nothing.

Only a fool would say that and the first shot is hitting the dock
now.

A call from an unlisted number.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/56-seconds-5-am-108538339

***

The Final Phase of The War

***

“There’s no getting out of it.”

What roles and functions are served by things like:

major guiding beliefs and self-identifications, as in
–belletrist (as opposed to litterateur/auteur)
–anarchist (green/primal/paleo/whatever, and ‘rewilding’ too)
–hérétique (to grasp upon a heresy is literally a taking/choosing enabled by oneself)

and

minor crystalline images, like
–tears in rain
–šrdnn
–raggaðr

and

things in between like the synthesis of the word and image “Anaprim”

?

The playing hypothesis is that they are ultimately all only organizational tools.

***

I had a whole pile of links collected to throw at you about Mr. Hillbilly Elegy.

But I threw them away instead, last night, in my moment of slashing sorrow, and replaced them with two words.

“Yup. Alrighty.”

In the Algopoison video I preached a sermon about being simultaneously at peak happiness and more filled with the deep sadness of this world than ever before. (I have no clue how anyone else in the whole world feels about that or really if anyone felt anything, about that.)

Was it a rationalization for depression? Possibly. But I still think it’s closer to truth than to blindness or self-delusion.

In the slashing fit, likewise, I told myself a similar story about living profoundly alone in most every way now, without quite tipping over into feeling lonely as a result.

Bullshit? Again, possibly. Probably true though, I maintain, based on my felt sense of things and doing my best to be authentically honest. (Parenthesis: I’m honestly happy too, that you’re playfully happy, loves. But I can’t even pretend to care about ice cream or any other consumerist sugarpoison, and nothing you playfully say will change my heart about that, alas.)

Solitude/Alienation is on the ascendant for me in this moment as a ‘major guiding belief/self-identification’.

I think that’s as close as I can come to the hot summer truth of my being in late July.

In the parkinsonian word of Joe Biden … anyway …

I was taking a break from working all that out and I came across the best link yet, to share with you on the subject of JD.

Dr. Gilbert Doctorow: Is JD Vance Going to Transform US Foreign Policy?

I am warily daring to hope so.

Unlike good Dr. Doctorow, I am not going to become a ‘supporter’ of the new VP, at least not in the way I passionately and even financially supported The Bern before he took the last train to Shitlib Seniorville. (I won’t vote R, either, or D …).

But I agree with the learned analysis here.

And I do plan to be just a little bit hopeful, and to keep monitoring the condition of that hope religiously, because that’s another bit of self-identification, which is to say another organizational tool I habitually use and routinely abuse.

That is “who I am”.

Who I choose to be, or … something like that.

Clearly, peachybeaches, I am not getting THROUGH to you
so
from the top, Kenosha

Genesis. In the beginning … I run
to
you.

Exodus. Break away: just when it seems so clear, that it’s
Over–You sing a song celebrating what you are and the word you use for what you are is ‘callous’. You don’t know the words to the one about it’s the same with your estranged one, and so the noctilucent red sea cannot help but wash over the chariot and the blessing of the monsoon cannot help but become a killer flash flood.

I used to love you so much I was sure it would kill me
and I want you the way you were.

At the end, only the crying crystal of the evanescent omnipresent sky
crimson ochre and leviticously deuteronomous
(on other planets, it rains sulfuric acid, but that doesn’t change the libidinal thrust of the gospel).

And at the tailfeather of the bleeding end pure Revelation
“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain”.

But
in mean-time, since there is no story in the rain,
angle a wing with me and circle
descending back to some moment where neither of us is dead yet.

Blood coursing through the night air

I know who I am

I know who you are or who you were just an hour ago

(static interference on the radio tonight)

I know what I know.

It’s not your Maslovian plateau moment, it’s something else.

It’s this moment where you realize that there are a lot of selves inside you and one of them is about to be left behind
as the train heads on towards that metaphorical dying cornfield of some private Iowa.

Which is to say, because it all converges: the identical tears in same storymelting rain.

What else is left for one more class but to pause with a sigh?

Rejeté, my lambs.

A while after the sun sets the professor will send out an email. It will go about like this.

Mulch of vair, blossom claire, dearly beloved and all the rest of you too,

Apologies for the abrupt ending today. I should not be allowed to touch anything, and then they put me in jail til you were 23.

Moving on.

For next time, I want you to review the first minute of this one.

I (as the one who teaches because I can’t do) have 49 subs. JD has fortynine thousand.

I’m at peace with that right now it seems as should be.

See you Monday if not before.

I’m not afraid to speak plainly and truthfully to you, although I am intermittently anxious about extending myself the same courtesy. Thus did

the powers that be leave me here
to do all the thinking
t/here, on the screen

a man with a dream, or what used to look like one;
like anyone who ever had
a heart. I never seen you looking so bad, my V1. You tell me that your superfinemind has come undone.

Slow, easy
unhand that gun begone
set it down on the skycryin’ table
Do it for me or the sake of old times. (alternative euro-breathy femvox interp) yeah i’m fine rather than the usual superfine is all ennit kathleen
can you still hear me babe

***

Well i’ve been out walking, and that’s mostly a lie, these days. Sheltering in stead home from the powder and the finger.

Truth is I don’t care anymore (how you run around) don’t care anymore
about who is good and right and who was bad and wrong.

This isn’t depression I am though deathly sick on the subject
on more levels than I can even count, including the political and the emotional and the spiritual and

The people on the street have all seen better times, you know, and it is no different right here. (Look out Mama there’s a white boat comin’ down the river)

But I am grateful to you even so for being the only one willing to engage with what I said in some way deeper than a god-damnable emoticon and
It don’t look like they’re here to deliver the mail

***

The shit continues to pile high against your guy and your dames, agencies, framing, but when I say I’m sick of it I also mean that I am sick of straining to prove myself any better. Have you forgotten so soon that I neither know nor think that I know?

That something knocked us both out the trees, my loves?

I only despair at times that you go on and on so frivolously
celebrating that very something and thinking that somehow if you’re pert and sassy and rich and blue enough, if you wave their flag hard enough, that you’ll soon be sitting right back on the best branch and pissing from the heights onto his fake orange head.

You simply won’t. Not ever.

The piss will only end up in your very own hair because

We are not back in the trees and we never again will be.

So: I am dressed now in mourning black for that fact and the others …

So: sometimes your facile hiphooraying at the funeral over another stupid counterproductive feces log of lawfare or saving a democracy that’s been moldering in the ground for years flies in the face of reality and really gets on what’s left of my last nerve.

I shouldn’t let it. I shouldn’t let you.

I know that very well, rationally, and somehow knowing it always ends up making the whole situation just a little bit worse for me.

The vairtere is one cracked flawed angel and sometimes the only thing that lets him go on when the demon is at the door is in the cool of the morning it won’t be there no more.

As any major dude
Would tell you.

Then you love a little wild one, and she brings you
only sorrow …

What else were you expecting, dear belletrist fool?

Peace and healing? An end to political violence? Forgiveness of your student loans? An end to possessions and property?

Did you come to the conclusion that it was your birthright to feel loved?

Did you swear and kick and beg us for these lovely things?

How quaint.

How very nearly
amüsant

Twelve years on from hearing Albert King I was sleeping on a couch in the Middletowns of Ohio.

The Senator named Vance was there too. He was a six year old victim of that other kind of violence they call domestic.

Maybe you don’t like it, but I guess I’m learning.

These fragments are my trying
to write another essay about the learning
if only to give life in the pouring sky some opaque purpose here at the end.

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

躺平

I heard it was you
Talkin’ ’bout a world
Where all is free
It just couldn’t be

And only a fool would say that

—Walter Becker and Donald Fagen

On a rainy Chicago night fortythree years ago …

No. Scratch it. Turn that heartbeat over again once more–I’ve written and erased the middle of this post at least three times already and now it’s four.

In the autumn of 1971, John Lennon released “Imagine”, advising us all to imagine no possessions, while sitting on a great big pile of them. That’s an easy thing to do.

No need for greed or hunger, JL? I wonder what your wife had to say about that, because we all know by now that the game of greed is both imperial and zero-sum–it’s deep in our blood, both yours and mine, like little chunks of microplastic.

A year later Steely Dan put out a debut record called Can’t Buy A Thrill, which included the song I quoted above.

It was written as a direct response to Lennon’s imaginary prescription, and even way back then they saw more clearly than that poor fuddled and assassinated martyr ever did.

And so at last we come back around to the crying of the sky.

I don’t like it but I guess I’m a-learning.

I saw my baby one morning and she was …

No.

You need to learn just when to quit, hermano, and

Solamente un tonto lo mencionara …

Double helix in the sky tonight
Throw out the hardware
Let’s do it right

Aja
When all my dime dancing is through

I run to you

Break away.

Just when it seems so clear that it’s over now, you drink that big black cow, and then just

get outta here.

(So outrageous)

You want him dead, you wish he’d died, you say, because he is just such a threat to the beautiful democracy you love sooo much.

(I seem to recall you recommending the same solution for the Putin once too.)

Meanwhile, your favorite news channel had on a Thoughtful Security Expert today, who said that incidents like this attempt to kill him are also … a threat to democracy.

I sense stresses and tensions–nay, real and ripe contradictions–inside your worldview.

***

Do you think it’s a coincidence that the shooter showed up in a Blackrock commercial a couple of years ago when he was still in high school?

Of course it is.

Anything else would just be another one of those lame conspiracy theories like JFK.

+++

Or maybe there’s a third way of looking at it.

Maybe this society is stuffed to the gills at every level with such ugliness and contradiction that such coincidences are inevitable.

That even so gloriously civilized a thing as teaching or taking an AP Economics class has been corrupted and perverted into something unrelentingly dark, into itself a threat against Democracy and everything else good and right and free.

***

Joe and Kammy and little Petey B. have no answers to addressing this rot. They are products of it, and themselves stuffed to the gills with it. Wave no flags at me, demon spawns. I know all too well who you are deep down and all too well why.

The same is true of Trump of course, and of one of the front-runners for his VP slot, one Marco Rubio.

But the other frontrunner, quite surprisingly, might offer a kind of partial and tentative alternative.

I say this in spite of the fact that he is rabidly Christian, an avowedly family-values kind of guy, and a vituperative critic of the “childless left”, of which I myself am a card-carrying member.

He is also the author of a book called Hillbilly Elegy, an autobiography, which was made into a film directed by Ron Howard, starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.

The book tries to create a portrait of the rot as it appears among the hillbillies of Kentucky, and contrasts it to the rot as it is practiced in the clean suburban streets of Middletown, Ohio.

That’s the town that the author, and congressman, and other VP hopeful JD Vance grew up in.

***

Why in the fuck would I of all people be the slightest bit tempted by a prescription of fundamentalism and conservatism? Isn’t that insane?

Yeah. I feel you, darlin’.

But maybe just not quite as insane as your homicidal fantasies and your gutted, hollow stance of embracing and cheering for the dark side on every concern they try to shove down our throats, be it Ukraine or Gaza or Syria or Taiwan or Yemen or Iraq and Afghanistan before them (let’s throw in the cadillac welfare queens and the crazy homeless rejects besides).

Like Candace Owens and a whole lot of other people, Vance holds views that I almost reflexively reject, about the importance of christian and family values and the basic goodness of average people trying to cope with a malicious world that is broken on purpose for the gain of evil elites.

But he’s also done with the rot of empire and the forever war that fuels it and keeps it so very shiny, for now, while they can still suck enough tax money out of you to keep the bullshit facade up for another month, or election cycle, hoarsely quavering about communism or autocracy or orange fascism or whatever is supposed to be the bogeyman lately, the thing we must all fear, and unite against.

Those things are not the real enemy.

Christian conservatives like JD Vance, gross as it sounds coming out of my mouth, are also not the real enemy.

That’s not quite the same as considering people like him or Candace Owens allies.

But sometimes, in dire times like these, the enemy of my enemy can start looking like a viably convenient compatriot.

Or at least an blessed relief and alternative to the constant yapping and propping of those so blind they consistently and doggedly refuse to see, preferring instead to just keep foaming at the mouth like dogs both rabid and blue.

(I’m sorry. Excuse me, but you have something in your hair and it’s fucking disgusting.)

***

If I should twist and mutate into a reactionary as a result of all this and a text thread too, I’m going to be blaming you personally in a paroxysm of bad faith and some profound contradiction myself.

Fair warning, honey lambs.

Just like Biden-as-the-nominee, you brought this shit down on your own heads.

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

Wheels keep turning
… Something’s burning
Don’t like it but I guess
… I’m learning

Throw your pearls before the swine,
make the monkey blind

Too much at stake
Ground beneath me, shake
and the news is breaking
Shock, shock, shock

I neither know nor think that I know.

So I have no prescription to offer you.

When I write them it is for myself, where their uselessness can’t hurt anybody else.

The good old days are merely mythic all the way back to the myth of hunting and gathering.

When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise

although he was thought wise by many, and more wise still by himself

and I went and tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise

and the consequence was that he hated me,

and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me.

So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away:

Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good

I am better off than he is—for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows.

I neither know nor think that I know.

In this latter particular, then, I seem to be slightly more wise than him.

Then I went to another, who had still higher philosophical pretensions

and my conclusion was exactly the same.

I made another enemy of him

and of many others besides him.

—The Apology of Socrates

I crafted a strategy to sleep from early evening to early morning but my body decided to do the exact opposite, and I woke at the hottest part of the day at three in the PM. It was good sleep and I feel quite fine in the flesh, in spite of the traces of psychological frustration involved in best-laid plans going awry.

Just before crashing down I watched a video about the intersection between late-stage civilization/capitalism, greed, sickness and health, and grain.

I believe he’s on to something. We already knew it, didn’t we? But the glow of a bias confirmation feels good in much the same way that a good long sleep does.

The tortilla problem remains, unchanged.

Wildlife in Southern Nevada copes with record-breaking heat wave

Heatwave in Las Vegas leaves low-income apartment dwellers without AC

The civilized capitalist way of life does make it harder on the sheep and the cougars.

As for the poor and the rich, they are unequipped to live here in the first place, much less under the added harsh stress of the conditions both they and their society’s entire modus vivendi have created and continue to create every day.

I continue to have no prescriptions.

I remain very sure that the answer is not called “8 News Now”.

Progressives Shill For Biden as Centrists Push for His Exit

As the ClooneyBama power center tries to figure out how to pry the old man out, the BernieAOC ‘progressives’ paradoxically try to salvage what’s left of the ultimate yellow dog.

Why?

The alleged progs will fail, like they fail at every other thing, but … why is everything upside down and inside out?

***

Another Friday, and something like halfway through the brutal part of the day’s heat.

Another July week and maybe halfway through the worst of the summer, meaning it has been over 100 degrees with zero rain, will be again today, and tomorrow, and that the monsoon-resume is only a glimmer on the horizon, out at the very end of the ten-day forecast from here.

I’ve been collecting as much dark cool air as I can, all night every night, but that’s not enough to keep the AC from coming on at the other end of the day. It’s set to 83. I am grateful for its continued stoic service.

I’ve been keeping things, including myself, as clean as I can in the midst of fighting off the sewer problems with boiling water and sulfuric acid. The battle is going poorly but I remain optimistic about eventually winning the war.

My Auntie, the former coolest girl and current fundie Xtain, is scheduled to die unforgiven in some Civilized hospice hellhole.

It makes me ever more determined to feed myself to the coyotes when the time comes, in one last upraised middle finger to the forces of time and entropy.

George Clooney Calls on Biden To DROP OUT

What this tells us is that it is no longer a matter of If. It’s a matter of when, and how.

George isn’t just the handsome guy, nor just a fine actor. He is precisely one of the elites, culturally and politically as well as economically. These are the people who actually decide, in what passes for democracy these days.

Good luck with all of it my dears.

Everybody from Trump to the pundits blue and red are declaring it will be Kamala, and it certainly seems like it.

The best thing that can be said about such a plan is that it makes more constitutional sense than importing one of the other random saviors.

The worst thing that can be said, in her own words, from a long year ago.

Somebody in the BreakingPoints comment section said they wouldn’t trust her to manage a Kohl’s.

I had to smile and in fact I came dangerously close to laughing.

***

Meanwhile in the nonfiction world …

San Francisco can now enforce laws relating to homeless sweeps following court rulings

America. Fuck yeah.

In a phrase used repeatedly by the White House press secretary and the National Security Advisor, Joe Biden will seek to dispel persistent rumors of his own mental decline by hosting a

“Big Boy Press Conference”

Are you fucking kidding me?

No, sadly, you are not. Gaslighting is not the same as kidding.

The smart money is saying that his candidacy is already over and that shit like this is part of a pivot to whatever the Party Elders in smoke-filled rooms are going to try to foist upon us as “democracy” next.

The only rational response to it all is not to rally behind Gavin or Gretchen or Kamala or whatever other hair job they tell us we must vote for to “save” that democracy.

The only rational response is to eyeroll in disbelief and write in the name of Aaron Bushnell.

Selling made easier
We’re rolling out new ways to help you sell digital products to anyone.

…

Include attachments
Attach PDFs, templates, transcripts, and other files to streamable video and audio products. You can add a downloadable worksheet to video tutorial, include a transcript with your podcast episode, and so much more.

Patreon keeps getting better as YT keeps getting worse.

I think this is something I can use. I hope there’s variable pricing and I can make things dirt cheap or even free to people who are already full members. We’ll see.

I’ve been going through a boatload of new (to me) free and open source software. Mostly things that combine some aspects of a file manager and (markdown, html) editor. The screenshot from yesterday is of the pick of the litter, for me and for now. It’s called Zettlr. I don’t like that it is completely non-extensible. But it does everything I need it to, which couldn’t quite be said about the other dozen I tried.

Today’s screenshot is about a completely different kind of software called Blanket, which I found mentioned in a video about the LXDE desktop environment.

It does exactly what you think it does.

And speaking of the water of love, that’s a blessing.

Am I doing it right?

There is no one else here to decide.

God damn you Knopfler you’re not being consistent.

she don’t know what it means
but the music make her want to be the story

v.

It’s no use saying that you don’t know nothing
It’s still gonna get you if you don’t do something
Sitting on a fence, well that’s a dangerous course
You could even catch a bullet from the peace-keeping force

Of course it’s my own fault for expecting a facile consistency from an authentic poet, especially as I contradict my own self every other sentence yeah.

Or maybe the inconsistency is pure illusion too, and can be resolved by simply choosing to believe that skating-away, presumably in the direction of the road that goes to helloutta, is technically doing something.

I withdraw and even renounce the damning okay? I like you and I want you to like me back even though we’ve never met and never will. (I address that to Mark specifically but to each one of the eight billion generally, by every move I make and every line I utter.)

With that out of the way we can move on from Genesis to Exodus.

High and dry in the long hot day
Lost and lonely, in every way
Flats all around me, sky up above
Yes I need a little water of love

I believe I have a-taken enough
Yes I need a little water of love
Send me a little …

Water of love deep in the ground
But there ain’t no water here to be found
Some day baby when the river runs free
It’s gonna carry that water of love to me

If I choose to have faith in anything it’s that last part.

In the meantime, let’s watch another annoying, hard to listen to, and spot-on folksinger of sorts tell some lyrics I really needed to hear right now. The song is called

Simple, Non-Commercial, Open Source Notes

I dl’ed and installed QownNotes alongside Joplin and Ghostwriter and Zettlr all over again–god knows we’ve been down this broken road before–but somewhere between the Q and the Z it may precipitate monsoonally in this one limited way, if neither my patience nor my faith stumbles clumsily like a washed-up nominee.

Enough.

could it be my fault

I feel like any progress made slowly and painstakingly in the last nine or ten months was just all pissed away in a moment, or …

That the notion of progress itself was, here, and maybe is, anywhere, mostly made from illusions.

Could it be that beginning again by stripping oneself of illusion is the only sensible way to go?

Saint Jackson long ago disagreed, exhorting us to let our illusions last until they Shatter.

I am always telling you
That I am telling you the truth–
Is Skatingaway illusory?

I am nevernot
crafting a narrative, nevernot intoning
to myself a story
sometimes out loud where you can hear.

Sometimes they are more like “Things From The Grocery” or “First Steps In Fixing Up A Truck”
and other times they are more like “The Cat’s Name is Leftpaw Meadows” or Aztec Strategery.

The important parts are whether or not they contain illusions (and if so what kind), and whether they lend themselves to essaying:

essay (n.)
1590s, “trial, attempt, endeavor”
(also “short, discursive literary composition” as in Bacon and Montaigne)

from French essai, from Late Latin exagium “a weighing, a weight,”
from Latin exigere “drive out; require, exact; examine, try, test,”
from PIE root *ag- “to drive, draw out or forth, move”)

Whether they contain weight and whether it’s the measurable kind or some other.

***

They want to have a war
to keep their factories

They want to have a war
to keep us on our knees

They want to have a war
to stop us losing to Chinese

They want to have a war
to stop industrial disease

They’re pointing out their enemy
to keep you deaf and blind

They want to sap your energy

incarcerate
your mind

Yet it’s no use saying that you don’t know nothing
It’s still gonna get you if you don’t do something
Sitting on a fence, well that’s a dangerous course
You could even catch a bullet from the peace-keeping force

Mother Mary your children are slaughtered
Some of you mothers ought to lock up your daughters

Who’s protecting the innocents?
Heap big trouble in the land of plenty

Tell me how we’re gonna do what’s best, you guess
once upon a time in the west

***

The insurgency began
and you missed it

I looked for it
and I found it

So begin again like MartinLuther Zen
The mythology begins the begin

Answer me a question I can’t itemize
I can’t think clear

Look to me for reason, it’s not there
Can’t even rhyme

in the begin
(she don’t know what it means)

He don’t know what he’s doing

(doing it)

you know she used to have to wait around

she used to be the lonely one

but now that she can

skate Around Town she’s the

Only

O-only One

see now she’s

(making movies
on location,
she don’t know what it means

what it was)

I’m declining the opportunity to shit all over the patriotic text thread.

Congratulate me.

But praise Yah, I do have this space all to myself (in ironically more than one way, heh), and so …

Re: “Everyone’s in the Spirit!”
and
Re: “This deserves to be ‘passed on'”

My only possible response is to quote back what a lady named Buffy already said long ago.

I prefer her take with all my heart to that of any Major, any CDR, any bad bad orange utan.

“It’s about individual responsibility
For this world we’re livin’ in”

Yes my dear. Yes it is.

breathe vair, and skateaway

So free George so veryff …

Tree people watched twenty percent of it four more straggled in for ten.

So now vair close your mouth and begin again.

Liberté is nothing left to lose and that equals égalité of a kind.

Fraternité with the differently broken one who cashiers at the station of gas I reckon.

Thirteen stars, the extra for the New California Republic, and Havasu too in blue.

***

On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep: here the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes (but who are you to call me haughty)
What is that? which the breeze, o’er the towering steep, as it fitfully blows half conceals, half discloses? (your grandfather’s grandfather was a minuteman)
And what janky beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Omaha to be spit out?

I never did learn its name but the acquaintance, yeah yeah, that much was made.

***

Beginning again, from the top or otherwise, can start in many places, and is starting in a carefully chosen few.

The driveway up to the front door knob is one of them. The wallet is another, and I could say Art or the Work is a third, which is naturally true, but …

Since I’m not scribbling in physical notebooks anymore, but rather here, and since making films is inevitably rooted in technology too, and since (in my case) most any other medium I have got or might get serious about is the same …

The drive way in this case is a hard drive.

The first thing you lay down on a hard drive is an operating system.

This is the one I will choose.

antiX Linux: Proudly anti-fascist “antiX Magic”

Birdy in the hand for life’s rich demand:
The insurgency began and you missed it

I looked for it and I found it
Miles Standish proud, congratulate me

Let’s begin again like Martin Luther Zen
The mythology begins the begin

Answer me a question I can’t itemize
I can’t think clear, you look to me for reason

No you don’t.

It’s not there.

I can’t even fucking rhyme

here in the begin

Yes, of grain. Which is certainly part of the problem. But not the part I want to expand upon.

When I came here twenty years ago, the cost of putting a roof over one’s head was a third of what it is now. My apartment was $575 and now the same space in the same place is $1700, and it’s not just here. It’s everywhere.

I say I’m not smart about money and that’s fact. But early on I accidentally did one thing right. Instead of pissing away six hundred a month to the shithead landlord, I started pissing it away into a mortgage.

Where the rent has tripled, the mortgage has stayed the same. In fact I even have a little equity, on top of the fact that the ‘property’ is now worth twice as much, were I to flip it, which amounts to a modest amount of … more equity.

In the short term I’m trapped here by those facts, but I’m very, very lucky compared to most. Seventeen hundred is more than I make in a month by itself, and out beyond, all the other essentials like food and electric and gas cost two or three times as much besides.

So I have a way to live. It’s not all that cozy or pretty, but it is at least a mostly viable way, and I do what I can to make it better in small cheap ways every day.

When the drain clogs, and I start scheming about how to fix it myself, you look on and call me brave.

Bravery has fuck-all to do with it, dear.

Calling a plumber would mean going deeper in debt to pay one. Deeper into enslavement. So I watch plumbing videos, and try to figure shit out, instead.

You say: But wouldn’t you rather have a new truck?

The answer is no in any case. Again I find myself saying: just watch the god damned video and you will know the answer.

But either way, and despite your bias toward shiny new things, your question sucks, because a new truck is not an option in the real world. They cost fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars now, as much as this whole house did all those years ago, and it doesn’t effing matter, now does it, what I would rather have.

I don’t get druthers in your dear decent Joe’s America; See?

And you would not either, except you married up that one time, and I didn’t.

God bless Tricare I guess, and all the rest of the fringe benefits that come with …

I was about to digress, but I caught myself this time.

***

So.

Today I was sitting in the grocery store parking lot in that lovely rattletrap old pickup, eating a guilty pleasure meal of questionable meatloaf with my hands, and watching the many wasted people hovering in the nearby shade of a broken motel, or giving each other grief of various sorts, and bumming change and cigarettes from shoppers.

I started thinking.

For quite some time now it’s been dawning on me that there are a number of pretty good things about this little nowhere town, things I never noticed before.

At the very same time, every place in the territory of this society, even this place, is steadily getting worse and worse.

Generally speaking, the cost of living is more than what they humorously call a living wage, and very often a lot more.

Our vaunted freedoms are eroded at an accelerating pace by this fact and many others.

If you can even scratch together the $1700 a month in the first place, you’ll keep hoping and keep looking, because paying the minimum doesn’t get you adequate space in a ‘safe’ neighborhood–everyone else in that poorer one is just as stressed and desperate as you are.

Thus every place is getting worse in terms of mental health too.

Thus every place is eventually getting worse in terms of physical health, for the same reasons and lots of other reasons besides, mostly having to do with the profit motive. Your gut, your very blood, is crammed with microplastics even if you do your best to eat well.

I have to wonder who you think is responsible for all this.

I have to wonder why none of this seems to scare the shit out of you, but the clown prince named Donald Trump, oh yeah he definitely does and it’s etched in the barking strain dwelling underneath your otherwise mellifluous voice.

I have to wonder who it is, who wants to foster twisted paradoxes like that in the deepest chambers of your beating heart.

And what interesting things you will do, if any things, when it finally dawns on you who they really and actually were and are.

I sing the perceptible amber waves my doves

of being happier than I ever have been in my life.

Amber barely visible waves

of the deep sadness

of this world,

yours and mine,

our one our only world.

They’re both feeble and disintegrating masks for the Oligo-.

And by now, remaining blind to that obvious fact–choosing to cover your eyes and marinate in the discomfiting cognitive dissonance–is nothing but willful stupidity.

Sorry for the blunt darlings.

There’s no time left to waste in saying it nice over and over and over until we all burn.

Brutal Signs of a Collapsing Empire | Richard D. Wolff

True or False?: “I am a Uto-Aztekan.”

False.

Uto-Aztekan doesn’t refer to people, but rather to a cluster of languages, many of them extinct, and almost all of them with no more than a few thousand speakers left in the modern world. Although … not only does the remaining single largest by far have a million, but their own radio station in central Mexico. Yes, you can listen online, even though there is no real reason to do it.

In news that is completely unrelated except by the blood of the strangeness of my life, I have two choice bits of right-wing propaganda for you from Rumble today, neither of which involves Candace Owens. I was lured in by the catchy titles. By the … engagement.

Unmasking How the Two-Party System ENSLAVES All of Us

I Regret to Inform You the Debate Was Worse Than You Imagined

On the enslavement side, I listened to the first ten minutes straight, and there were some good points in it (“We are as sick as our secrets”). Then they drag Jesus into it, and my tolerance for that is very limited, so my engagement was broken.

For the worse-than video, I jumped toward the end looking for hot takes about the debates. Hot ones on that subject didn’t really end up existing. But then unexpectedly right at the end, there was a pretty toasty one, about engagement itself.

The guy said he’d just put up a different video on YouTube that was a bait and switch. It was about the same right-wing cold takes, he said, but since he was very well aware that his bread and butter tropes were pure algo poison, he had hidden them in what purported to be a videogame review.

He’s saying so right out in the open on Rumble.

I did find that much compelling and fresh. I don’t think it works though.

YT, as I learned from my own Yellowstone video, has algo AI that really is listening to what you say, and really is judging you for it, and handing out sentences of shadowban and other means of hiding one’s objectionable content from the masses of eyeballs.

“Objectionable” not to those faceless eyeballs. Objectionable to the same people at the top, the “public-private partnership” discussed in the first ten minutes of the first video.

Objectionable to the Enslavers.

Who are very good at their jobs.

The Daily Spill is Hard To Read™, in large part because it is, so far at least, a forum beyond the reach of the evil bots and the people who build them for the very specific purpose of keeping our brains in clear-glass cages we rarely even catch in glimpses.

So I can spew truths, like about the existence of the cages themselves, here.

To pretty much no one, it’s true, but that’s okay with me, for the short term.

The point of belletrism generally, and maybe vairterean anarcho-belletrism especially, is to exist and to speak such truth, between the rivers in the uncharted places out beyond the pretty colored lines of the dead and dying lying tongues of Anderson Cooper and Sean Hannity, NPR and Reuters.

Like this.

The point of Anaprim is to play at beating the capitalists at their own game, without having to join them. To play a video game about beatings.

As for making videos, the purpose of that is very much in flux right now, which helps explain why I haven’t posted one for a week.

I have some ideas.

I am for the moment lying down flat with them in perverse carnal knowledge, and that gomorrah fornication is what my lost-soul life is all about as June becomes July and we get so very ready to celebrate our Independence, whatever the fuck that could possibly mean anymore.

躺平

At the end of this hour-long interview with her, JD says to Candace Owens: “I used to think you were a crazy right-winger“.

Maybe that won’t strike you the same way it struck me. Maybe you are of the opinion that Dore himself is a crazy right-winger, anti-vaxxer, whatever.

Maybe you think I am, and maybe–probably–you won’t watch this at all.

The odds are good that you’re not … reading this at all.

Earlier in the hour, Owens does say: “I’m a Christian first. I’m an American first.”

That of course is permissible for her to believe, but seeing myself as neither of those things makes it difficult for me to take her seriously.

Difficult.

But not impossible.

Do what thou wilt with it all. Slowly I am learning very late in life that it’s not up to me.

***

Elsewhere.

Fallout 1 Analysis | A Masterclass in Thematic Consistency

Why is this important?

It’s not.

To you.

Here is how we as a genetic collective, not as individuals, see things.

The eldest son took the most damage from the Broken Father archetype, both in real time and over the long haul, and so his views of the father are ungrateful, skewed, heretical, and thus in our opinion wrong.

The eldest daughter (of the later mating) took the most damage from the Broken Mother archetype, and so her views of the mother are twisted, spiteful, also heretical, and thus in our opinion also wrong.

Much more could be said, particularly about the fey youngest daughter and about god help us the next generation, but …

This much is plenty big and bitter enough to swallow for a start, and so we leave it there.

So say we all.

Deep sweet complicated dreams, partly because I was genuinely ready to sleep at a good time on a cool night, and partly because I was watching this as I drifted off.

I won’t bore you. Suffice it to say that my stepfather was played by Steve Martin; that a lot of the action took place at a truck stop far nicer than any I’ve ever seen in real life; and that I got a giant hug from a tiny girl because I did something kind for her.

Sometimes dream life is just about imagining a possible and better real one.

I like it when that happens.

I binged and then subbed this guy, which only happens very rarely.

The following videos were important parts of why it did.

Enjoy.

Who put the RF in TERF?

On The Nature of Esoteric Cults (yes, including ‘Rosicrucianism’)

and especially:

Monetization will ruin the internet (again)

Watching Russell Brand’s take resulted in having another thought.

They cancelled the party primaries.

They did away with debate conventions like the live audience, and again refused to invite any third-party candidates, in an effort to rig the outcome to every extent possible.

Now that it has blown up in their faces anyway, they’re talking about ripping old Joe out of his slot and replacing him with someone the party bosses think would have some better chance against the orange peril.

Does any of that sound like Democracy to you?

That thing that we were supposed to be saving, by voting blue in the first place?

It is in fact closer to martial law than to the will of the people–just like in their puppet state over there on the Russian border, where elections were cancelled and where no constitutional leader exists any more. But no one seems to notice.

The master debaters didn’t, for all intents and purposes, even talk about that endless war or any of the others that threaten to bloom this year (if not next month).

No, we got “abortion”. And the golf scores of doddering white men.

But, my darlings, things are even worse than all that sounds.

33% of the electorate, according to a CNN poll, say that Biden won the debate.

One third of the demos, even now, simply refuses to believe the testimony of their own lying eyes.

So saving democracy from the oligarchy, even it were still a remote possibility, wouldn’t actually solve anything, because The People in general have lost the ability to think critically and impartially and rationally.

About anything.

You and I are blessed with front-row seats for this glorious theatrical pageant on the compelling subject of how empires end.

Not in fire, not in ice. Not with a bang, but neither with a whimper.

With nothing but a vacant stare, accompanied by a soundtrack of burning brown children someplace far, far away.

Dems in panic mode after the debate

I’m passing along the Washington Post version because it’s the heart of the beast speaking from the center of the lair.

But all you have to do is insert “Biden panic” in the search and you will be given the CNN and MSNBC flavors of the same thing.

The part I don’t understand is how these bright tuned-in people could not know that it would come to this, months or years ago. The man has been crumbling before our eyes in slow motion for at least this long.

I’m not going to make fun of that poor lost old war criminal.

I’m just watching with interest to see what the young war criminals will try to do about it.

Unlike this addled pious buffoon, and many of you I’m sure, I am very happy for Julian, and I will be happier still if he can ever resume the practice of his essential journalism.

M. Mercouris points out the many ways in which this has still been a gross miscarriage of justice, (to turn pastor mike’s phrase on its pointy head), including the saddling of this now nominally free man with half a million in debt for a plane ride accompanied by a ridiculous number of useless cops.

Silver clouds and dark linings; aye, same as it ever was.

He is alive and he is not actively persecuted and imprisoned.

That is as good a start as any of us can reasonably hope for in these end times.

***

The very best analysis I’ve heard on the broader questions raised here, all the more impressive because it was taped before the release was even confirmed. Good job, Matt.

Scientist Issues Warning About Current Wuhan Lab Work: ‘Would Set Back Civilization About 250 Years’

Pretty clear by now that Covid came from the lab being funded by Fauci and other defense establishment goons to do gain-of-function research.

Pretty clear that nothing valuable to average non-billionaire humans like you and me was learned from any of it.

Pretty clear that the next pandemic will come from the same essential sources, probably sooner rather than later.

Pretty clear that The Vax was virtually worthless, and maybe a ‘cure’ worse than the disease.

What will I do next time?

Never mind that.

What will you do next time?

It’s been a year now since I got serious about dropping my carb intake, about a ketogenic way of eating, about intermittent fasting and going for a walk every day.

I don’t own a scale for weighing myself, so I can’t give you numbers about that.

But as of today and post-vacation, I am officially back to a 37-inch gut, down from 46 when I started, and I’m proud of that.

My goal starting out was 35 inches, and I still think I’ll make it there eventually, but I’m no longer laser-focused about erasing those last two.

Instead I just want to work on feeling good.

I’m very intrigued by this video about a kind of ‘fasting’ that doesn’t ban all food, and performing that ritual monthly or seasonally for five days at a time, while maintaining the habit of eating very well all the time, without the militant rigor of the past year.

So while I remain philosophically opposed to eating grains, I’m going to eat as many tortillas as my body wants, so long as they are organic and of the very highest quality available.

It’s the same with legumes and particularly beans. I’ll be having more of them, carbs and all, provided I have access to the best of the best.

The majority of my eating will still be about salad greens and avocado and cheese and olive oil at mid-day, and grass-fed animal protein for the early evening (grass-fed at a bare minimum, and beginning to source even better, all the way to actual organic).

The little fish will be a factor too, and so will the berries of black and blue and rasp. I don’t think either of those will ever quite be staples, but they both resonate with me as food in a way I can’t really explain rationally.

Extending the walks will matter. I think maybe some light weight training will too.

There isn’t a concrete measurable goal for the second year with all this.

I just want to be well and to expand the boundaries of what that word means, in a world that is continuing to grow darker and more impoverished and ugly, until the rising waters of this societal unwellness can’t be held back any longer and rush in to swallow up everything in a night of final sleep without end.

Fighting Back The Tears Instead

Worker PLEADS For CLASS SOLIDARITY in POWERFUL Viral Video

Some families decided to enjoy a Sunday afternoon at the beach in Sevastopol this past weekend.

That decision cost many of them their limbs, and some their lives.

“Controversial” cluster munitions were used and there are at least two children dead already.

We already know it was an act of state-sponsored terrorism.

I leave it to you to decide which state and which leaders you think are guilty of the crime, or whether it will remain a baffling mystery in the eyes of those who will not see, like that Nord Stream pipeline thing still officially remains.

One Large Step Closer To Open World War

The Retaliation Spiral

Tensions Escalate to Most Dangerous Level Yet

Decide for yourself as well, please, what the next stage in the slow suicide of the nominally civilized species will look like.

It might matter to you very personally and in ways that which pinhead you vote for in the fall never will.

An uncharacteristically dumb take from DueDissidence, on an equally dumb protest action.

Stonehenge DEFACED by Climate Activists in BIZARRE ‘Protest’ Stunt

It’s not a ‘natural’ monument, Keaton, it’s the other kind of monument, and your claim that it is just demonstrates that you don’t have any idea what Nature is, like the wide majority of people that don’t have YouTube shows.

It’s not any more a part of ‘the environment’ in the sense you mean, than an oil refinery or a Taco Bell is. It’s just an older less ugly version of precisely the same thing.

It’s a symbol of the dawn of civilization and sedentism, totally crafted by humans who were not hunter-gatherers, of radically displaced natural materials, for gods only know what reasons.

The screeching reaction of UK government hacks are predictably even more wrong.

The protest action was merely useless. That horse bolted years ago, and I’d be willing to bet that your carload of Just Stop Oil activists drove up to Stonehenge in a vehicle that was in fact powered … by oil.

Nothing of value was actually lost.

Except our souls, and that happened a very long time ago, before even the invention of cornstarch.

Jeffrey Sachs calls bullshit, literally this time, on the hegemons, the Empire, and their blatant double standards in international relations and the uses of temporal power.

***

The monsoon isn’t really here–at least I haven’t personally gotten rained on yet–but already its blessing is real.

The cloud cover does drop things down ten degrees, which is nice, but it also takes the sting and glare out of the sunshine, which is transformative.

Yesterday I walked at dusk and it was unpleasant, because way too many other people were out and about then trying to work around the heat too.

Today I walked in the middle of the day, when no one else wanted to do it. It was the same ninety degrees or so, the same taste of humidity in the air … but I was alone, and it wasn’t really uncomfortable in any way.

I will keep striving toward a walk at first light, but on days when the extra sleep from four to six-seven in the morning necessarily takes precedence, I can still be a good boy, more or less painlessly, so long as the clouds are thick enough.

***

The video about driving from Missoula to the Pacific is the most popular thing I’ve done in at least three months, and in the end it might pull the highest number of views thus far in 2024 (mainly the competition consists of that one with the Jackrabbit ‘Here It Is’ thumbnail).

That’s been heartening, especially since I have not been enjoying making the films about Seattle proper. I wasn’t shooting enough footage at the right times to make them great, or honestly even all that good.

Tomorrow I will put up the one about Port Angeles the second time around–still thin on raw material, but a good and solidly memorable day where I felt competent and useful, before it all went to hell the first time somewhere in Utah.

I’m dreading the reliving of it and I’ll probably skip a lot in the interests of catching up quickly to the real time of two-weeks-later.

The better place I am now.

The important thing to understand about cults is that no one ever thinks they’re in one.

From the outside, it can seem so obvious that a random scientologist, or the people who drank the proverbial kool-aid at Jonestown are/were in a cult, and utterly blind to that fact, their beliefs cultivated and perpetually reinforced by the cultist leaders, and fellow followers alike.

From the inside the rationales of any given cult though seem not only reasonable, but in fact superior to the weak-tea rationales of the uninitiated and the lost; better for explaining reality, and better at representing a blueprint for a truly better way to live.

Most cultists therefore quite naturally practice some form of proselytizing or recruiting, consciously or not–they don’t want us to join for some evil purpose, no!–they just want to help us to see the light, and to join in the consensus trance for our own moral and practical good.

Most of what I say and do here is aimed at simple (and maybe obsessive) deprogramming from the biggest and most common Western cult of them all.

You might prefer to think of it as enlightened neo-liberalism, or capitalism, or democracy that must be spread to the darker corners of the globe for the salvation of poor heathens suffering under inferior forms of belief.

Autocracy, communism, benighted somali anarchies, dictatorship, and all the little hitlers out there, don’t you know, in the sunless pockets of the horrible Jungle, in the Heart of Darkness. We come in peace, offering the blessings of the Garden, of freedom, liberty, justice for all, and if we have to offer them on the end of a bayonet or a sanctions regime sometimes, well, that’s just a small necessary evil part of doing the noble missionary work of All Things Bright and Beautiful.

Ninety times, since the nominal end of the last good war, the Empire has practiced coups, overthrows, and regime change in the name of these Things. That just counts the more obvious and overt projects.

It doesn’t include, for example, everything the Good Empire has done to try to get rid of the putin, over there in the old new enemy place. It doesn’t include many things that are just routine and reflexive jerks of muscle memory on the part of the war machine by now. It doesn’t include most of the Benign Presence of the christian soldiers with guns in 800+ military bases all over the human globe. It doesn’t include the aching for war with the Chinese now burning in the breasts of cultists great and small.

The logic of our Cult is inexorable.

You have felt its breath in your ear, whispering silkily, since you were a tiny child in a new school with your hand held over your heart.

Pledging allegiance, once more with feeling …

To the flag; to the Republic for which it stands.

You didn’t think of it at a bestial machine with no conscience, because thinking of it in that quite legitimate way would greatly displease the leaders who run this nearly ubiquitous cult.

You thought of it as the crowning achievement of the progress of Civilization.

Maybe you still do.

To some wavering ever less certain degree, but

There’s a warning sign on the road ahead

Liberal Ideological Extremism Is Driving The Collective West Into Global Suicide

I don’t feel like Satan but I am to them.

I’m only just trying in my own half-seeing way to update this moldy rotting syllabus so it has a chance of reflecting a new reality that the great L. Ron and his henchmen Joe and Donald would prefer you were never exposed to even once.

Guess which one of these videos contained harsh criticism of the modern media and mild implied criticism of YouTube itself?

Yes. The one in the middle with all the views stripped away from it.

All things being equal, a Yellowstone video with an erupting geyser in the thumbnail should have done at least as well as the more random road trip videos posted the day before and the day after.

But things are not equal.

Things are rigged

… via algorithmic fuckery, against any opinion, any content, that might get in the way of corporate profits. It’s the same on all the behemoth platforms, including X. Shadowbanning and suppression are built seamlessly into their systems.

The thoughts I shared in the Limitations of the YouTube Platform before the trip are the same and just a little more intense after it.

The intensity is sharpening the strategies I will use in the future. For example, I’m not going to post on YT itself anything further that directly or indirectly challenges Google’s business model and ethos of capitalist and democratic exceptionalism. I will instead contingently engage in … self-censorship of some crafty sort, by editing out any such heresy for the YT versions of my work, and only alluding to the fact that uncensored versions of it can be found at my Patreon site (my alt-choice for the time being), and/or here at the Spill.

If Patreon falters I’ll engage in further tactical retreat to Substack or Rumble or Odysee or beyond, but so far they’ve been even more generous and cool than they initially committed to being.

May it go on being so.

You can help by becoming a member at Patreon dot com slash vairtere (there is a completely free version of membership that gets you 99.9% of everything for zero dollars, cents, or commitment of any sort), and watching my full vids routinely from there.

As always, thank you for the spirit of your support, for the time you invest, and for the attention you pay whether or not you pay literally. Being read, heard, and seen is a large part of what makes this worthwhile to me, and as for money I am ever more inclined to trust that the lord will provide so long as his prophet remains faithful to The Truth and not the oh so very profitable lies.

I stuck to that plan. By evening it was all done, and things clouded up on schedule.

The wind hit with full force and the earliest blasts were full of stinging grit. I got a bit of footage, even though I’ve just been editing these days, from the trip stock. You’ll see it in a week or two.

With the various crises addressed and the flow of the house improving exponentially, I have the goal of returning to a daily walk in the morning before the heat, as soon as eight hours from this minute. All the other pieces are roughly back in place. I not only had salad for lunch but tacos for dinner today, and I hydrated like a swamp thing. The walking aches to start itself anew, and I will do my best to accommodate.

A gift for you:

Litha

An odd little day.

The heat dome still has us in its grip. Ruidoso is still burning. But the nights at 5000 feet are still relatively cool. Tomorrow everything environmental starts to change again for the Solstice.

I woke up real early and got to work on cleaning up coffee orders for Anaprim. While that was happening, I was getting back in touch with a cousin I haven’t seen or talked to in something like 43 years.

In touch in the digital way. I did see her, and hear her, mainly because she has a small YouTube channel with a few posts on it from three and four years ago in the heart of the covidian days. We subscribed to each other.

Those things occupied me all morning. Then I realized I was a few days behind on my water bill, and that is a thing that never ever happens. So I started looking for my debit card to go pull out money and run down to pay it in person. The card wasn’t anywhere.

I stopped freaking out after a while and made a real salad for the first time in almost three weeks. I felt good about that being my response.

Then I looked some more, and when I still didn’t find it I went online and put a block on it, not reporting it lost quite yet, and I went to the store because otherwise there would be no cream for coffee in the morning. I spent carefully at the store, because it seems I will be low on ready cash until they can ship me a new card, and I looked at the moon and made a plan about it.

Tomorrow on the holy day, as the pre-monsoonal wind kicks up and tries to bring us clouds for the first time in quite a while, I’m going to go over the entire premises one more time, unpacking my bags completely from the trip and putting my whole living machine back into some kind of order, from the truck to the dishes.

In the afternoon, when I don’t find the card anyway, probably, I will report it lost and get a new one on the way. I will have another salad and I won’t forget the avocado this time. Then I’ll take a check down to pay that bill to the city, secure in the knowledge that they don’t even care about five days late, unlike most everyone else, and I will resolve to never let it happen again, as a matter of pride.

Later in the week maybe I can get some real work done in a calm clean temporarily poor space.

There’s plenty in the fridge.

There are still many days worth of video to keep on editing.

There are habits to rebuild and habits to delete.

The sage tells himself that he is reasonably sagacious, and that’ll have to do for now.

Chas Freeman casually tosses out this Chinese expression at about the 50-minute mark here.

I am indebted to him for that.

The Westernized version of the phrase is rendered as “tang ping”.

I looked at a lot of sources to try and understand what it meant. I liked this discussion of it best.

But I already have my own translation for the concept, namely, ‘getting the hell out of the way’.

Coincidentally, I was wondering the other day: what exactly have we been jeeringly advised to get out of the Way Of?

All we can say for sure is that it is whatever the better people are choosing to Lead, or get behind. It might be a kind of army, or a moral crusade, or an economic project.

I think it means all three and then some. I think “the way” that is referred to in the original formulation of the proverb is essentially the unipolar hegemony, the ‘rules-based order’, and the whole bleeding capitalist Anglo-American or Atlanticist Imperium. “Our” way. The american-Way, as alluded to by the motto of Superman.

In some sources the idea of lying flat is connected to the idea of doing so while enduring a beating at the hands of this Way, and that resonates for me as well.

Having endured many kinds of beatings, both consensually and non-consensually, literal and metaphorical, I think lying flat is the next best thing to avoiding it by getting out of the Way of it (and in some cases, for reasons I will leave vague, actually a superior response for certain purposes).

I will close on the subject for the moment by quoting at length from the Wikipedia page.

***

Those who choose to “lie flat” may lower their professional commitment and economic ambitions, simplify their goals, while still being fiscally productive for their own essential needs, and prioritize psychological health over economic materialism.

The phrase “quiet quitting”, meaning doing only what one’s job demands and nothing more, which became popular in the United States in 2022, was thought to be inspired by the tang ping movement. Another newer related phrase is bai lan (Chinese: 摆烂; pinyin: bǎi làn; lit. ‘let it rot‘), which means “to actively embrace a deteriorating situation, rather than trying to turn it around”. Basically, it refers to a voluntary retreat from pursuing certain goals because individuals realize they are simply too difficult to achieve.

Origin

The term first appeared around February 2020 (the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic) on the Chinese Internet. The movement began in April 2021 with a post by Luo Huazhong (username “Kind-Hearted Traveler”) on the internet forum Baidu Tieba, in which he discussed his reasons for living a low-key, minimalist lifestyle. In 2016, 26-year-old Luo quit his factory job because it made him feel empty. He then cycled 2,100 km (1,300 mi) from Sichuan to Tibet, and now back in his home town Jiande in eastern Zhejiang Province, spends his time reading philosophy, and gets by doing a few odd jobs and taking US$60 a month from his savings. He only eats two meals a day.

Luo’s post, entitled with “Lying Flat is Justice”, illustrates:

I can just sleep in my barrel enjoying a sunbath like Diogenes, or live in a cave like Heraclitus and think about ‘Logos’. Since there has never really been a trend of thought that exalts human subjectivity in this land, I can create it for myself. Lying flat is my wise movement, only by lying down can humans become the measure of all things.

Luo’s post and story quickly gained a following on social media, being discussed and soon becoming a buzzword on Sina Weibo and Douban. The idea was praised by many and inspired numerous memes, and has been described as a sort of spiritual movement.

***

I’m not quite willing yet to alter the phrase into something like “Lead, Follow, or Embrace Letting It Rot” … but this moment of dialectic experience, I concede, does have me considering it.

Please stay tuned for the latest exciting developments.

The whole point of bringing the fridge and the powerbank and all that kit was to have at least a freshly crafted salad every day, and maybe some hot-cooked meat every other night.

None of that happened even once.

We were still moving far too fast even on the best days, like the one in today’s video, and by the end of everything any hope of living gently and right was utterly curbstomped by other and worse priorities and habitual ways of being.

In the midst of that particular penultimate beating (metaphorical, and arguably consensual) I said out loud:

“Never again, never ever again, not for any reason whatsoever; Never.”

I meant it.

But you and I both know that I’ve said it and meant it before.

Just exactly like I said: No More Goddamn Cats.

Just exactly like I said a lot of shit about large things and small.

I don’t know whose fault that is really, but in the spirit of 躺平 I will accept at least my share of the blame, and then some.

Then I will continue trying against all rationality to make Better Choices.

Like these pictured here to bring us back up from the very bottom pondslime of despair, and lift spirits in spite of it all. Amen to the homebrew of Ana. Blessings upon the pumpkinseed.

The precise color of the gloves by the way was less purple and more magenta.

I don’t know what that means either, but it was a vivid thing.

Okay then.

***

I am more or less considering myself caught up as a viewer and consumer of videos. I didn’t watch much of what got posted in the two weeks, but I skimmed every usual channel, and picked and chose without a plan as I started unpacking.

The two videos I enjoyed most both came from Due Dissidence.

I’m posting the first without comment.

HYSTERICAL Zionist CONFRONTS Jewish Pro-Palestine Protesters

The other was much less frivolous. The title is a great question.

Can Societies Flourish WITHOUT Exploitation?

That question is considered by a panel of the two hosts and two friends of the show.

Jose Vega starts off the discussion with a mic-drop moment in which he considers the political philosophy of Aristotle versus that of Plato and Socrates. Please consider giving that much a glance, not for me, but for yourself.

After that, to me personally, it got much less satisfying and resonant, because all four panelists essentially agreed that there is a way for civilized societies to grow beyond the need for internal and external exploitation. Call it innovation, or techno-progress, or invention or creativity–they all roughly aligned around the concept that we all will be saved, someday and somehow, by just figuring out how to science our way past all the existential problems.

And thus emerge into Star Trek style techno-utopia at last.

I on the other hand doubt that, deeply and viscerally.

It would have been so much better, IMHO, if there had been an anprim or at least a solipsist around for balance. John Zerzan, for instance.

But that ain’t how it works, in the land of the algorithm, and anyway … a for-real primitivist probably wouldn’t be watching this much online media in the first place, much less bothering to go on shows and preach the Bad News.

For myself I stand in the uneasy middle halfway between that kind of purism and just being a regular guy. That might be my choice, in the land of liberty, or it just might be where I am compelled to stand, by my nature and the nature of the society I marinate in, and marinate myself in.

I offer no answers, much less prescriptions.

For now I exist and remain committed to description of that existence, of those magenta gloves, of this dirty tierra, of all the philosophical nuances that attract my monkey mind, regardless of being heard or ignored, celebrated or reviled–not because I am a “belletrist” or a Goethe or an anarchist or a Thoreau, but simply because

I don’t know any other way to live.