AOC smears The Post as she falsely claims Hunter Biden laptop story is ‘half-fake’

This Congresswoman is peddling bullshit that everyone knows is bullshit.

Rep. Lauren Boebert Explodes At Ex-Twitter Exec For Shadow-Banning Her

This Congresswoman is exploding with valid and righteous indignation over mass censorship at Twitter, over the exact same story and many others, true or not.

Listen up, Democrats.

I started out my voting life believing you were the good guys. I even voted for that rancid snake Bill Clinton once upon a time.

You’ve been losing me for a long time and you’re just digging the hole deeper with exactly this kind of crap.

I have nothing but disgust toward AOC’s performance here, and pretty much nothing but admiration for Boebert’s.

I’m not going to vote for Republicans. But there’s absolutely nothing to gain from voting for Democrats now either.

It’s not even a question of lesser-evilism any more, and there’s your proof.

(In related news, as the pile of your money and mine that’s been dumped into the lie of Ukrainian democracy grows fast past One. Hundred. Billion. Dollars …

The only people even talking out loud about shutting off the taps are Republicans, most notably Lauren Boebert’s fellow trumper-dope Matt Gaetz.

It would be so easy to be better than them.

Why aren’t you doing it?)

Phlogiston, during the hundred years running up to the time of the Revolution in America, was a theoretical substance which the best scientific minds of the Western world studied and proposed as an explanation for why some things burned well.

In our post-Enlightened times it’s easy to laugh, but this shit was taken very seriously by great thinkers for generations, not all that long ago.

I learned about it here:

Have We Really Found The Theory Of Everything?

The video mentions even more recent once-universally-revered, and now discredited and unfashionable theories, such as the steady-state model of the universe.

All this can be viewed through the lens of Progress, of course. But for me, the lesson is something more like: The more we know, the less we know. Moreover, placing any deep trust in Science is placing trust in mortal men with mortgages to meet and careerist ambitions like tenure to pursue. Radical thinking about the true nature of Nature is very much the exception rather than the rule within the Academy.

Here are two very recent variations on a theme, the first very short and the second very long, from the same channel.

“Someone has to rescue the physics community”

Physics is in Crisis

These are all scientists, talking among themselves.

I am not anti-science, any more than I am anti-Zoroastrianism.

I am however very much against the idea that “Science” is better than any other religion. It is just one more way that the human brain tries to understand itself and its dim perceptions of the reality around it. Its claims to be impartial, based only in experimental ‘fact’, or more true than all other ways … are exactly what any other absolutist belief system claims. In this view, I have no faith.

“Follow the Science!”. Hmmm. No thanks.

Look where that got us, last time out. As Saint Fauci has taught us again, accidentally, there are everywhere we look one thousand false prophets for every lonely sage.

It took a beautiful decrepit 85 year old real journalist to do the work that your favorite millionaire cable-puppet would never dream of doing even if they had the chops.

https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream

Don’t let me tell you how to feel about it.

Just ask yourself what your reaction would be if Russia blew up an American-owned pipeline in Canadian waters and Lied about having any involvement in that act for the next six months.

Even though it would be obvious to any thinking person from the start that they were lying.

Analysis, as if any were needed.

I agree with most all of what Natali and Clayton have to say here. The one point I disagree on is that they call it an act of American “terrorism”.

Like “fascist”, that word has come to mean damn near anything, coming out of the words of sloppy and lazy people seeking a shortcut to express their distaste.

This wasn’t an act of terrorism.

But it was an ‘unprovoked’ and covert act of war.

Thanks, folksy Joe!

At the time of the Revolution in America, the ideal of Democracy looked very much like Progress.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It’s easy to issue a critique of even that. The Founders proclaim equality and some (mostly undefined) rights, but only for landowning white men in practice. Moreover, we have to accept that while these rights might be inalienable, they are not innate. They are rather gifts, from the Deist God, bestowed upon his chosen here in the colonies, and intended perhaps to be proselytized until the good news would be spread, and Equality would extend to “all men” in the real world, not just in theory.

Most of the guys who signed that Declaration owned other human beings, and in fact did not believe in Liberty for their chattel, much less Equality in any way but the most ethereal and abstract.

In essence, while the Fathers claimed most righteously to be founding a democracy, what they were really doing was making their world a better place for capitalism, and most specifically, for capitalists. For themselves and for their educated, owning class. For their inheritors.

We are living with the profound consequences of that split between the proclaimed ideal and the rather more brutal reality right down to this day hundreds of years later.

It was called the Declaration of Independence. It could just as easily, and more truthfully, be called a declaration of Exceptionalism.

The founding belief of what would become the Empire is that the chosen here on the sacred turf of the New World were both morally and systemically better than anyone else.

Better than the King and his capital-stealing taxes, for one. But not just the King. Anyone who was what we call today an ‘autocrat’, and also any people who still lived under one and had not yet been Liberated from their lives of darkness.

Everybody was equal, but only in theory. In practice, we had better ideas, better lives, and were thus just better full stop. We were just so dang smart, and clever, and innovative, and we thus self-evidently deserved all the good things that our Creator had bestowed, on us, as opposed to the darkies who picked our cotton, or the Injuns in the way of our manifest destiny, and our train tracks–or the Hindoos, or the Mussulman praying to something named Allah instead of Creator.

As we preached this new gospel, first among ourselves and then on the stage of the world, it was always in the name of Democracy, and never the more accurate label of capitalism.

It sounded nicer, and more egalitarian, even though it was something of a puppet show. Women wouldn’t be allowed to exercise their democratic franchise for over a hundred years. Gradually it was extended to them, and to the slaves of all colors who didn’t own any land. This too is often cited as a prime example of Progress.

But it wasn’t, in actual fact.

First of all, in 100+ years, Power had sorted itself into two Parties, which came to represent the interests of different parts of the Elite–the owning classes. Gaining the power to vote for either meant less and less to your own liberty or equality. Power could finally afford to let a woman or a black man vote, because they had fewer and fewer choices that made a damn bit of difference. They had the illusion of freedom without the reality of freedom. As Malcolm X put it, the institution of slavery never went away. It was just mainstreamed and extended to all the races (and genders, dare we say, in our woke age).

God had indeed blessed the Owners with a rich abundance of natural resources and ‘virgin’ land, with nothing living on it except buffalo and savages. It might have been enough. But by the late 19th century, the plucky little capitalist-‘democracy’ started to morph into an Empire, overthrowing governments in Hawaii and the Philippines among others, and always installing vast military bases wherever it conquered. Always in the name of spreading the superior ideal of Democracy, not in the more accurate names of capitalism and imperialism.

After the second world war, and into the one called ‘cold’, the masks came off. America was avowedly capitalist and imperialist and militarist, always still in the name of our ‘freedoms’, of course. We’ll fight the commies in Korea and Vietnam so we don’t have to fight them here!

It’s the right thing to do. We need to protect, we need to liberate, we need to make the world safe for capital, er … democracy. And as goes General Motors, so goes the nation.

You used to have to settle for an icebox. Now you get a fridge. You used to have to settle for Walter Cronkite, and now you have a smartphone.

One Nation. Under a blood god. Liberty for all. Justice for all, why not?

***

Today I listened to an American citizen who was born in China and currently resides in Bali. To Carl Zha, and a couple of his friends, who have a little more perspective on things than those of us who grew up more or less brainwashed in the heart of the Empire.

I found it enlightening.

IN-DEPTH: Chinese-Russian History with Mark Sleboda & Carl Zha

See also:

A Conversation About Imperialism with Dr Vijay Prashad and Carl Zha

The lies run too deep to be rooted out and seen as lies by the ordinary citizen trying to work, raise a family, pay a mortgage, inform themselves as voters, or any of that classic prole shit. They’re fish and the lies are water.

For me too sometimes. I despair, of demonstrating it sometimes–tonight I’m just a little tired to do it really right.

But. A taste.

You might recall that some 50 intelligence sources signed their names to a statement that the Hunter Biden laptop story was fake, and very probably planted by Russia. It “had all the hallmarks” of the evil commies and their devious ways.

We learned recently that it really was Hunter’s laptop, that it really did have incredibly damaging information on it about his father specifically, and that not only did Russia have nothing to do with it, but that those 50 spoox knew very well that the story was not fake, and absolutely were blaming Russia in a desperate and cynical attempt to get rid of Trump where all their other efforts had failed to do so. They lied repeatedly and deliberately, and with purpose, to you and me and everyone else; our own best and brightest were in fact the very ones trying to rig an American election in this wondrous birthplace of modern democracy.

If you know that much you’re already way ahead of most people.

But that was only the start. Here is where the lies begin to just spike off the charts.

Nearly every single fucking time in that 2016-2021 period that you heard a story about Russian “disinformation”, or “election meddling” or links to the Donald, or attempts to hack, or attempts to rig; whatever and whatever–those too were carefully crafted cynical bullshit, repeated ad infinitum by both truly evil ‘journalists’ and by their colleagues who were just hacks, teleprompter readers, those couldn’t be trusted to see a lie until it clocked them between the eyes.

The largest and most consequential of these eternally repeated stories, like the so-called “Steele Dossier”, were in fact created inside Washington itself, for purposes both domestically political (“Trump can’t be trusted, vote Hillary”) and internationally strategic (“Putin bad He try destroy Democracy!”). Many of them were engineered by the Clinton campaign itself. Collectively this effort has come to be known as “Russiagate”.

Each time a new revelation of this sort trickles out, the silence from ‘journalists’ is positively deafening. There are almost never any retractions, much less mea culpas. The vast majority of the real fake news stories are still up, without any updates, without so much as a red-cheeked author’s note.

What we used to think of as Journalism is dead and cold, just another bony appendage for the ugly Empire to wield as it sees fit. Journalists aren’t plucky young Woodwards or Bernsteins lionized by having Robert Redford play them in the biopic. They’re not mad prophets like Hunter Thompson.

They’re millionaires in cozy studios and they are paid to bend the truth, omit facts, utter useful idiot verbiage, and provide you with a bite-sized pre-packaged diet of fakery custom-built to keep you stupid and afraid.

They’re compromised sociopaths who have made a great deal with the very real devil.

Can I prove it?

Yes I can. Or to be more precise, I know a guy who knows a guy, and together they represent about 50% of the world’s journalists who actually still deserve the title.

The drive-through whopper of proof (five minutes)

The Red Lobster Crab Night of proof (an hour)

The Texas Steak That’s Free If You Eat It All of proof (portion of a book-length article in the Columbia Review of Journalism, which very curiously has received zero attention from people who style themselves journalists)

So there you go. Crap you’d rather not hear, served up a la carte and buffet style like Thanksgiving dinner at the casino.

Enjoy.

A year and a half after 9-11, this is one of the most liberal journalists at one of the most liberal papers carrying water for the big lie of ’03, and for the big liars who cynically foisted it on us for their own gain. It’s a screengrab from Glenn Greenwald’s show last night.

This is probably the very least among the many examples GG offers on the same theme, from the Bush years right down to today. I picked it because of the snide little dig at France, thrown in there purely to show you how witty and au courant the author wants you to think he is.

Here’s the thing. You can be both urbane and smart as fuck, hyper-educated; you can be hip and liberal and well-dressed and successful and pretty and relatable and spout all the correct opinions on social issues, and still be an absolute psychopathic monster–a servant of the Lie.

I really wish I’d figured that out sooner. Earlier in the episode there’s an even better example of the phenomenon, involving the esteemed pundit Thomas Friedman, and another involving one of your favorite CNN chirpers.

Break. Stop. Turn off the TV a minute, Alex V …

In my mind right now I am holding pictures of two women of color.

Yesterday, at one point in Briahna’s interview with the Ancient Sage, he turned things around and asked her a question.

At what point, he said, will even you, my dear, make a deal with the Devil? I hope it never happens. But the odds are that it will. Eventually.

I see Bri’s face trying to take that in and answer honestly, because she’s never quite yet been co-opted, but she knows all too well how tempting it is.

The second one.

I see, through the eyes of C-Span a Puerto Rican congressperson standing on the floor of the House. The bony finger of Nancy Pelosi is being waved in her face. The beautiful young Latina’s face is stained with real tears, because her white mama bear is telling her to stop with this humanitarian nonsense she’s been spouting and get in line with yet another military funding vote.

The real tears are being shed for the loss of her own soul.

Later, we see what she got in exchange for it.

She’s smiling this time, and holding on to the hand of a new, equally beautiful and rich boyfriend, who has made his own set of deals with the lovely and satanic liars. It is the night of the Met Gala.

The dress she is wearing costs more than any of her voter-peasants make in a year, but she didn’t pay a dime for it. It was a gift, not from the Nancy, but from a Nancy.

The dress bears a message. In bold red letters, the message reads, “Tax The Rich”.

The words are not there to have a meaning.

The words are simply there for branding, which is a thing you do to cattle to prove that you own them.

Which, now, she does. Get a piece of the rock.

I’m not a Sage yet, but I’m writing my thesis paper to get there. So I can tell you honestly, that I tried to sell out myself once upon a time–tried to sell just a tiny piece of my soul, in exchange for a tiny piece of the rock. I figured that was better than going all in like AOC, and also better than the economically brutal alternative.

I did it for one natural reason. I was very afraid of becoming what I am right now today.

Afraid, in other words, of being old and not having money. That’s how they hook even the best of us, with that specific and barely speakable fear. You feel it, or you felt it at some point. You’re a human in the Empire.

You’re … civilized.

In case you try to stop feeling it, they’ve put slave drones on the street to remind you. The problem of homelessness could be quickly and simply fixed across the country for about what it costs to shoot down a balloon. Why isn’t it?

Simply because the ranchers who own the homeless, and own you, and own me, don’t think having broken people scattered everywhere you look is a problem at all. Those wretched slobs are not a bug, in the capitalist software. They’re a feature.

They are there to bring you back to the fear, of getting older every day and having less and less money.

Go ahead, if you want, and foam at the mouth awhile about the immorality of laziness. Quote me the scripture as if you still believed in any other part of the Testaments old or new. Explain patiently that my ranting about why they don’t just give the poorest people tiny homes is just another paranoid conspiracy theory.

I have a patient explaining of my own, a like gift in return. From the conclusion of my sage thesis. It’s this.

The only thing we actually have to fear, is the Fear itself.

The one the bosses are so invested in us feeling, every day of our lives.

It’s been three years now since I hit the wall the second time, got spun around, crashed, burned, and listened to the awful silence of a dead motor, to the menace of napalm trickling out wickedly onto the pavement and threatening to damn my soul to the spot in hell next to the pallet of pellets. In a snowstorm, in a pandemic, oh jesus have mercy no.

I testify. I’m still here, and I am, in every way, better than I have ever been before.

The Fear too is a vicious and cynical lie, told for the sole purpose of mind control. It’s not enough, they own the labor of your body. They want your brain and your soul too.

Resist it because you love yourself and respect the miracle of the conscious life you’ve been given free.

I love you too.

To bed very early, and up rested at four. One reward for it was this.

I wish I’d caught it a little earlier, before the sun had washed out the impact of this moon quite so much. I wish I’d caught it with the new zoom lens, too … this is just a go-pro hip shot.

Maybe if I can push away the temptation of a nap, and the temptation to not stay up into the wee hours even without a nap (it happens), I can try again tomorrow with the big gun.

I spent my extended morning cooking, and my curry is, in the opinion of my very incapable palate (that’s a biological fact and not modest self-deprecation) approaching perfection.

***

Two bits.

If you think back honestly, before 2015 or so, you will realize that you didn’t passionately hate Vladimir Putin–or even spend any kind of serious thought on him–seven or eight years ago. On the other hand, you did hate him venomously long before he sent troops over the theoretical border into the Donbass.

Something happened between 2016 and 2021 to effectuate that change in you, and it didn’t have very much to do with becoming more informed, or spending any time critically evaluating world affairs with regard to Russia and its leaders. Just as a thought experiment, ask yourself Cui Bono? Who benefits, from your state of dudgeon over that particular evil one? In whose interest is it, that you view the Russian nation in much the same way your parents or grandparents did in 1955, during McCarthyism, during Duck and Cover?

This might help.

And, on a much lighter but still very serious note, I give you the estimable Norman Finkelstein, who has managed to make it to a very advanced age and is better than ever. Much, much better in fact. He was always smart and worth listening to, but used to come across as more brittle and dogmatic most of the time.

Here he is interviewed by Briahna Joy, and he is both deeply appreciative of her, and deeply critical when she starts to lose focus on the big picture. Not just her, either … generations of us, the lost children from his perspective as he faces his own mortality.

It made me pull back from all this bullshit daily minutiae and remember my own better self, and what this is all about in the end.

May it do the same for you.

Glory? It’s true that the wind spiked. But the temperature did too, so much that it outstripped the breeze. A seventy-one degree day in the first week of February is going to qualify as glorious even if it is accompanied by, let’s say, a plague of locusts, much less a little mistral.

Or norte.

I drove to a favorite parking spot out on the edge of the urbanity. There was one other vehicle there and it was remarkable, so I took a picture of it, intending to make it the centerpiece of this post.

Then I came home and accidentally deleted it before capturing it to my desktop. FML.

(Here I use the acronym, because spelling it out completely means something subtly different. Something it is not a good idea to say out loud. I believe in the power of language enough to avoid calling down curses on myself even in jest)

The thing I saw, and don’t have a picture of, was a massive box sitting on a van chassis, and pulling a cargo trailer besides. I mean a little bigger than the largest moving truck you can drive without a Commercial Driver’s License.

It said Renegade Vans on the side, so pretty clearly this was some semi-pro customizer’s own custom rig. Turns out they’re up in Alamosa.

The most shocking thing about it wasn’t really visible in the picture, but I saw it when I pulled out. On the driver’s front quarter panel was the model designation, and it said: E450.

A very heavy-duty Ford van. I guess I knew an E450 existed, in some vague way. But I’m much more familiar with 350s, big capable one-tons, and with 550s, which are serious work trucks that are (I think) all diesels, like those 26-foot moving trucks are.

I don’t know how well a 450 could haul that much weight, but clearly well enough that The Renegade was comfortable bringing it up one big range of mountains and down across another to get here.

It was a mashup of a tiny house and an RV, which sounds like utter perfection and a total ideal. It’s not though. I’ll tell you why.

As a tiny home, at least in the city, it fails because it’s on wheels and is thus verboten by the zoning dweebs. Theoretically you could build a legal house and just use this rig as a second home on the same lot … but in that case, having the space on wheels at all would be mostly a waste.

As an RV, it fails because it’s so big. Even without the cargo trailer, this isn’t the kind of thing you’d want to run up the road to the Cliff Dwellings for a pleasant afternoon of hiking. Even just 20 feet of longbed pickup is kinda sketchy in some of those curves. Also, I would doubt that the van chassis was four-wheel drive, and the pickup is.

It’s much better parked that driving. It is, perhaps the perfect semi-mobile home, maybe for moving between a rural summer lot and a rural winter one. It was impressive, and it was also useless, for my projected use case.

***

Bits of interest on That Other Topic

Russel B. and Jimmy D. Making Common Cause

Masks Do Nothing … Says New Study

One Simple Vitamin Protects You From COVID 72%! – Definitive Study

Hunter Biden ADMITS The Laptop Is His

The Hunter Biden Cover Up Explained in in Under 5 Minutes

***

Okay, and I don’t know if this is more FML, or less, but after all that, it turned out that I fucked up by thinking I fucked up when I didn’t.

Here’s the ‘lost’ picture.

Lady of the Mountain, please smile kindly upon the least of these your fuddled scribe.

“Noiny-noin Luftballons,
Euro-fag commies can suck my dick.”

–US Defense Secretary (a long time ago) Casper Weinberger, as ‘quoted’ in the National Lampoon

I read that, thought it was a good laugh, and tried to, uh, quote-tweet it long before there were tweets, to people i knew in my life who I thought might appreciate it.

To the best of my knowledge, no one ever did. I got a lot of blank stares, and mild disapproval that I was even mentioning that cocksucking existed. The subject usually got changed quickly. I don’t know if my attempted humor failed because they didn’t know the song, or because they had never heard of Weinberger, or because ‘euro-fag’ sounded homophobic, or maybe even just because what was funny to me on the page had no business trying to be funny coming out of my mouth.

Sometimes I really am about half-bright. It’s not easy being green.

So, balloons.

This afternoon I heard a little National Petroleum Radio and they were talking about this one out of China.

The intrepid reporter spoke with a Public Relations General who said The Empire was very certain that this was no stray weather balloon, like Beijing is claiming, but evil spy tech. So the questions proceeded to evolve from that unquestioned premise.

When I got home, Lee Camp was talking about it, and claiming near-certainty that exactly the opposite is true. That it was a weather balloon, because of course the Chinese have far more advanced tech for spying, and the whole thing was opportunistically turned into a propaganda piece by Washington.

I believe that in the absence of hard facts, it’s a coin flip as to which Empire is lying, and it’s probably both of them, because that’s what Empires and their media arms DO. Incessantly. Even if there’s nothing to gain.

(Who blew up the Nordstream II? Well, just another unfathomable mystery, god dammit!)

I don’t care about what kind of balloon it was.

I do care that more was spent on jet fuel, and a missile, and a pair of F-16s to finally shoot the fucker down, than I have ever made in a year, and possibly made during my whole life.

Spent on a pointless show.

And not on the kid next to the pallet outside the Walmart.

Seriously, all ya’ll up there–fuck ya, up the ass, with 99 hindenburgs.

“Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.” –somebody smarter than me

I spent a huge portion of the day yesterday working hard on a piece of writing I can’t show you. Not yet. Maybe never.

In the process of writing it, I was given some sus divine visions from on high, about my true nature.

Including the fact that I am not clinically narcissistic, only artistically so, which … hey that’s pretty funny.

Also, that I have completely mastered writing in the style of The Village Voice, but that mastery is bad, because it is not my own personal authentic voice; takes no revelatory risks, is pointless … all that gradschool crap.

Only … I didn’t need a poetic hallucination to tell me that my Work is pointless. I know it in my bones, better than anybody.

I am conditionally comforted by knowing too that the whole Canon, and the entire human creative endeavor since at least the dawn of Holy Civilization itself, is equivalently ‘pointless’ in the absolutist view.

Explain to me, oh sus voice of alleged god, what is the Point, of the paintings of bulls on the walls of the cave at Altamira?

What is the Meaning of the David or the Guernica or the Iliad or Mr. Blue Sky by the Electric Light Orchestra?

I can tell you the Answers! because I have a multiple postgrad degrees (in Science!). But my erudite answers too, would be free of any ultimate Meaning or Point, or to put it another way:

But that would be, just like, my opinion, man …
(What is the point of The Big Lebowski? I’ll tell you. It’s a chick flick, except for hip guys.)

I understand completely that Art is supposed to be absolutely chock-full of meanings and subtle points, and I will even go so far as to say that maybe the best art has some. For all I know. But I don’t know anything, and tragically, honestly, I don’t think you do either; not–ultimately.

I will remember to ask the Buddha on the road about it, after I end him. But until then …

Terfs ain’t funny.

I promised you one more little bit on the gossipy RBN v. Marianne thing, and I’m delivering, but with a caveat.

The post-mortem of the feud itself was the least interesting part of this video.

Jay Fauntleroy, aka jaybfaunt, is technically a member of the RBN, and he generally shares most of their views. But stylistically he couldn’t be more different from his compatriots, like Rome, and like Nick Cruse, who took point for the network in going after Saint Marianne. He’s black, very poor, very humble, decidedly gay, lives with his mother, and apparently has Medicaid-funded dialysis treatments three times a week to keep himself alive.

He may love the nice white jewish boys of Due Dissidence, Keaton Weiss and Russell Dobular, even more than I do. They definitely gave him a reason to during this interview. While I normally prefer Keaton’s takes on their own show, during this guest appearance, Russell was a pure fire that just burned hotter the longer it went on.

I’m going to need to watch it again (and I will) to get the full impact of what he said, but the theme was an ironclad defense of the black pill position. A big middle finger to electoralism of course, but beyond that … the machine is a lying machine, and we’ve grown up in the lying machine fog from birth, and we can barely make out what’s a lie for the same reason a fish doesn’t see water.

My favorite part was his observation that the post-war period in America was the greatest florescence of actual democracy that the world has ever known. Not to say it was perfect–JFK and many others got killed by anti-democratic forces working behind the scenes halfway through it–Vietnam happened–but that for the average person, the society was one of real opportunity, relative prosperity, and an actual voice about how they were to be governed.

He didn’t say this, but it’s dovetails nicely. The Voting Rights Act was 1964. Meaning that a greater percentage of the population than ever before in history could actually even have a real vote. He did say: More than ancient Greece. More than at the writing at the Constitution. More than white women getting suffrage earlier in the century. Maybe not everyone, but pretty close.

Russell goes on to say that by the election of Reagan in 1980, all that was already behind us, and it was straight downhill from there for the next forty-plus years. I’m not a huge fan of reactionary good-old-days philosophies. But I think in this narrow case, just talking about the health of democratic values, he has a good case.

This was about the same time that the Dems decided consciously to step away from their support of the working class, and things like unions, in favor of becoming just a slightly prettier party of Wall Street and endless war. By the time Obama appointed his cabinet per a list he got from Goldman-Sachs, the demos was a joke and the transition to Uniparty rule, and an ever-spiraling gap in equality was complete.

Even a lot of traditionalist black people know it now, and that comes first on the long list of reasons why Hillary lost. Why would the country unite to legitimately elect that fool of a game show host to the highest office in the land? Because at least he wasn’t The Betrayer of all we once held dear.

And, in raw numbers, millions more people voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016 when he won. The reason the Biden puppet got in had little to do with ‘democracy’, and everything to do with being a little better at playing the rigged game.

You can blame me in part for it too, even though I did do my best for Bernie, who turned out to be nothing but a sheepdog herding the lambs back into the Uniparty’s Dem wing.

Which is what the actually woke, like DD and RBN, are fearing that Marianne will be in the end too. Woof!

***

In contrast to Russell’s black pill, I also heard a real anarchist talking today about white pills and red pills.

Michael Malice on the Jimmy Dore Show

Red pill is a big broad term taken from The Matrix. You took the red pill if you wanted to wake up to the horror of reality. (You took the blue one if you wanted to go on living the dreamy lie. Irony?)

Best I could tell, Mr. Malice offers a white pill which is virtually identical to the black pill, but with a third less nihilism and pessimism.

He and I would probably disagree on whether a Solution is even possible, much less likely. But we agree on one thing, and that is that if a solution exists, its name is Anarchism.

You might like what he has to say, because he is both Ukrainian and a devoted critic of Russia–even of Marxism itself. He prefers Bakunin to Marx, and that is a fine indicator that he’s a real smart guy.

***

I have some short bits on tangents from this one big theme about the Fog of the Lie, and waking.

Adam Schiff’s Endless Petulance Over Removal from House Intel. Plus, Matt Stoller on DOJ v. Google | SYSTEM UPDATE #29
Even for the average blue-no-matter-who intellect, it’s pretty trivial to see that Adam Schiff (D-CA) is a real piece of shit. Glenn Greenwald explains why, and has some good fun at the Adam’s expense.
I’m eventually watching pretty much everything GG is putting out five nights a week now. I would especially recommend the last ten minutes of his most recent interview with Matt Taibbi, in which Matt suggests that only the surface of the Twitter files has been scratched, and that the archive may well yet prove to contain what he calls “a whole alternative history of the United States buried in these files”.

Speaking of waking from the Matrix.

***

Live with Jimmy Dore! Viva Frei Live!
JD is of course a real American ‘leftist’. Viva Frei is a moderate Canadian populist, and the sometime sidekick of the even more conservative, and even more brilliant Robert Barnes. I first learned of him during the Ottawa convoy protests, and he and Barnes are also tight with the guys that run The Duran podcast. Spoiler alert: JD and VF agree on far more than they disagree about.

Will The U.S. Invade Haiti Just To Stop Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier?
If you’ve heard of Mr. Chérizier at all, it will have been a characterization of him as a gang leader and maybe even terrorist, on Vice News or some similar chunk of deep-state, ‘National Endowment for Democracy’ media. The US has already shipped tons of military shit to the puppety Haitian government in an effort to barbecue the Barbeque. One brave journalist brings you the other side of the story.

***

More than enough for now.

I posted a video earlier too. It’s not great like the ones linked above. It made me happy anyway. Because what matters is the Work.

There’s fresh internecine ‘leftist’ drama building up, probably the biggest storm since Force The Vote a couple years ago.

Essentially the argument is between people who want to try the Bernie thing all over again–running another presidential campaign from within the Dem party–versus people who have had enough of that shit and want to abandon BlueAnon altogether. Go third party, or just put energy into anything but electoralism. Preferably Revolution.

What’s interesting about this one is that there’s a significant racial component, and maybe a gender one too, to this debate. The antagonists are primarily black guys. The putative protag is a rich white Jewish woman who ‘spiritually advises’ Oprah Winfrey and others, for a living.

I won’t bloviate on too much. You either care or you don’t.

I’ll start the link farm with Due Dissidence again because the way they analyzed it drags in a lot of voices.

Second link: The smoking gun where the protag and the antags go head to head.
Marianne Williamson Joins RBN (Revolutionary BlackOut Network)

MW allowed her accusers twenty minutes to question her, and she dragged out her rather evasive answers so that fewer hard questions could get asked. Finally she bailed mad, right after using the unfortunate term ‘man-splaining’, and hosts starting bickering among themselves. The end-game interlopers weren’t even all sober. Bring your popcorn. Be prepared to tut. It was a debate with no winners.

Marianne Williamson Is DEEPLY UNSERIOUS
This is RBN all sobered up but no less pissed off.

“The State of The Progressive Left”
Very long RBN livestream in which the primary antag and a henchman widen the scope of the battle to include more rich white women lacking in class consciousness.

Overall the black guys are more or less in the right, but they don’t have an ounce of polite tactical skill to share between them. Probably they smoked it.

Overall I’d still vote for Marianne, if she were to lose her primary challenge (she will) and decided that she could stand up and fight enough to run third party anyway. (Highly doubtful.)

Lordamercy.

Maybe the Greens will cough up somebody who doesn’t suck. Maybe the People’s Party will get their shit together somehow. Maybe Kshama Sawant will back somebody credible.

November 2024 is a long way off. Maybe the nukes will be falling by then anyway and you’ll be reading this back by the greenish glow of a livid Golden Gate Bridge, Empire State Building, or grain elevator.

***

If you still crave more, the link with the killer lions from yesterday is to a DD livestream where they discuss, and tomorrow I’ll post one more of them, courtesy of the Jaybefaunt show, in partial fulfillment of the criteria, etc. etc. … After that you’ll be on your own and damn glad of it.

I guess I’m a humanist to a point. But there are limits.

Take a wild guess which side I’m on when it’s Wild Lions vs. Giant Fat Rich Killer Idiot.

Pretty cool that GFRKI’s crew was livestreaming it too–take that, reality TV.

Apparently you can see the video on Twitter, though it’s censored everywhere else. Thanks Elon.

Source: Krystal Ball CHIDES RBN, Outrage Over Tyre Nichols Killing, New Twitter Files Bombshell (Due Dissidence)

In the deepest stillness of the coldest, quietest starry nights, when even the coyotes have gone to ground in their dens, I stand outside and shiver to hear the sound of the owls talking to each other each in their turn.

I’ve never written better poetry. I’ve never heard a more mysterious and meaningful song.

The language is the word of life and of death, of the fleeting miracle of being able to hear at all.

Time itself growing ever shorter to the finite point of entropy.

Blood rushing heedlessly through sinew anyway.

Feather, fur, spasm, release.

Not very long ago, a lively, charismatic, brilliant and successful young black gay doctor named Jordon Trishton Walker went on a date in a trendy New York bistro.

Well … he thought it was a date.

Doctor Walker, it turns out, is a Director of Research at Pfizer, makers of fine vaccines and sponsors of pretty much every news show you watch. Maybe you’ve heard of them. Maybe you even have their vaccine in your blood.

How did this young man get to such a high position so quickly? Well like I said. He’s brilliant.

There might be more to it than that, but I’d only be speculating.

Anyway, in an effort to impress his date, Jordon intimately revealed that he was a genuine rich evil capitalist in the employ of a rich evil capitalist corporation, and went on describe in some detail the kind of immoral fuckery that goes on there in the name of putting profits over people.

But the poor boy’s date was the confederate of some undercover journalists, and was secretly recording his admissions.

Pfizer Exec ADMITS Company’s Evil Intentions For COVID Vaxx

Eventually the truth is revealed. Jordon doesn’t take it well.

Pfizer Exec TURNS VIOLENT After Being Exposed In Undercover Video

So … if you hear this story at all on your professional mainstream outlets, you will of course be guided into viewing it through the standard lens of everyday outrage.

Not at Pfizer. Not at the complete moral depravity of their Director of Research. Oh no. You’ll be groomed to be angry at the right-wing journalists at Project Veritas, who concocted the charade, and perpetrated it upon this shining example of at least two oppressed minorities.

Neither of which is defined along class lines.

Anyway, please do go right ahead and be furious with the bad right wingers.

All I ask is that you save up just a little rage, for what’s actually been done to you personally. Your very body and your very mind. Even if the brand of the jab(s) you got wasn’t Pfizer, because deep in your heart you know that these motherfuckers are all the same. Not just at the heroic vaccine companies either, but all the big corporations, and the government that they constantly cross-pollinate with too.

In the title, I promised to tell you the real reason we’re doomed. Maybe you’ve already guessed it, but just in case …

We’re doomed because Jordon Trishton Walker did everything he was supposed to.

He took his natural brilliance to the academic machine and became a doctor.

And then he got “a good job”, which is something of an understatement.

The good job was for a big company. He was so successful.

The company is big because it cares about money and absolutely nothing else.

He rushed to become a part of the problem. For a slice of that money.

He started believing all the lies of his adopted class, and laughing at the bistro with his new friend about how his life was going so well since he started reaping the rewards of his betrayal of all human decency.

He believed that this would make his new friend want to fuck him, because that’s a natural assumption in a society this utterly broken. It would not surprise me one bit if the engaging story of how he turned into a rich creep has already gotten him laid, more than once.

Witness the new generation of hope.

So what’s dooming us is that we all believe the lie about what we are supposed to do, told to us by the millionaires in the media, by our teachers, maybe even by our parents.

Succeed.

No matter the cost.

The Gospel Of Abundance. In the land of opportunity, democracy, freedom!

Liberty!

and justice for all.

First, a clip for one of my patrons, who really doesn’t like China. It’s potential good news from that perspective.

China Has 10 Years Left, Says Geopolitical Analyst

Right after watching that one, this one was suggested to me.

The Reasons Russia Invaded Ukraine

It’s pretty basic and obvious stuff to anyone who is paying close attention, but potentially useful to consumers of primarily mainstream media, like CNN, and what I heard someone refer to yesterday as “National Petroleum Radio”. (I don’t remember for sure, but I think Max Blumenthal gets the credit for that one, which made me laugh.)

Both those clips have the perq of introducing you briefly to Joe Rogan, who was never the monster he was made out to be, back when he had the audacity to discuss his own experience with The Virus, and explain the course of treatment he embarked on in consultation with his doctor.

The Establishment was furious with him for only being sick for one day, you’ll recall. His positions look better and better as time goes by–as we learn that the vax was mostly useless, except as a profit center–as we acquire the data about its too-often brutal side effects.

It’s a topsy-turvy world these days.

Nowhere is there better evidence for that than in recent events in Germany.

The Foreign Minister, the chief diplomat of that esteemed nation is a woman named Annalena Baerbock. Like Krysten Sinema, she’s a former leader in the Green Party who has remade herself into the worst kind of shitlib within a militantly (neo-lib, atlantacist, neo-con, take your pick) government.

In a speech justifying Germany’s belatedly caving to US pressure to send German tanks to Ukraine, she said, quote:

“We are fighting a war against Russia.”

It was a horrible, blundering, undiplomatic gaffe. It was saying the quiet truth out loud and changing the terms of the geopolitical game. I can’t find any mention of it in the big American press, naturally, but as the link suggests, people around the world are taking this ‘declaration’ of war extremely seriously. As they should.

It wasn’t so very long ago that Germany really did declare war on Russia. Everyone knows how it turned out. Baerbock’s statement can be and is being read as an acknowledgement that World War III has already started; that this new war doesn’t need to be modified with adjectives like “cold” or “proxy”. Even if it may someday be preceded by “nuclear”.

The famous doomsday clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was moved the other day to ‘ninety seconds to midnight’, the worst it’s ever EVER been.

These motherfuckers are not going to be satisfied until we all pay the ultimate price for their bullshit and feel the warm glow of becoming literal hiroshima babies.

Have a nice day, and don’t forget to vote!

The Pile was crammed into 20 square feet. It is now 25. A tactical defeat for me maybe, maybe a strategic win. It’s the same pile, just a little more spread out and available for chopping to bits. It feels right.

SYSTEM UPDATE #27
Glenn has it so right so often. There was no guest this time, just GG riffin’. It’s brilliant. What is a journalist anyway, and what difference would it make even if we could define one?

Debate: Kshama Sawant, Shahid Buttar, Imani Oakley on 2024 (BJG)
Four really smart people who are essentially on the same side I am, talking about the next presidential election and whether that matters at all. My answer is still no, but you can damn sure bet that I’d vote for one more Dem even in a primary, provided her name was Marianne.
Not because there’s any hope of her winning–the machine made sure that even Bernie got bitchslapped down–but because voting for her would actually be the tiny thumb in the eye of the System that Trump was, without the candidate being Trump.
Of the four, Kshama is the closest rhetorically to what I think and feel, and Shahid is the one I’d choose to emulate and identify with personally.

Christoforou Daily
A standard episode of the other other Alex, but notable for the opening clip. It’s of Tucker Carlson. I still think he’s a dweeb and on the wrong side in most ways. But he’s got a huge platform and he has this one very right. Again.
How nice it would be if I could say the same thing once in a while about some nice PhD lesbian like Rachel, or some vaguely ethnic suit like Don Lemon. I can’t. Oh well.

Pintle winches, by the way, are not a thing. But the phrase came straight out of dream life and was ringing in my ears in the first waking moments of my day. I offer the phrase to you one poet to another for whatever it is worth.

In the halcyon days of two weeks ago, Oleksiy Arestovych was the chief press flak for his long-time friend Zelensky, near the very top of the heap in the Ukrainian government.

Then another apartment building went up in flames, in Dnipro this time.

Oleksiy went out to meet the press, and for whatever reason decided to break with tradition and tell the truth.

Which was: that the leveling of the building and all the civilian deaths were not Russia’s fault–that those people died from being hit by a Ukrainian anti-missile missile.

Not only was he fired for truth-telling. He fell straight from the upper echelon all the way down to the Ukrainian government’s official kill list, and is now living on borrowed time.

In the meantime numerous other signs have emerged that Zelensky’s government is starting to fall apart under the weight of its own internal contradictions. The Defense Minister was caught paying extortionate prices, many times the going rate at a Kyiv supermarket, for food supplies. For the troops, you know. It’s unclear who he was paying the bribes to, or why, but it’s safe to say that this was no act of charity or even expediency.

As of this writing he still has his job, because corruption, unlike truth-telling, is an everyday occurrence in the plucky little country of liberty-lovers that so many Americans still wave flags for.

This is where your billions are going. Down a doomed rathole and into the pockets of opportunists both at home and abroad. To the Zelenskys and the Raytheons.

Not to the poor babushkas on your TV. Not to your own grandma either. They’ll just have to make do.

So this is my own thumbnail version of recent events in America’s latest war–proxy war, economic war, sanctions war, whatever you want to call it, in this early period before it goes hot. I’m no expert. I’m just paying it too much mind.

If you really care about this shit (and there is no reason why you should, or should not), there’s a master class in it available pretty much every day on the non-mainstream portions of our beloved Internet. You could start here.

Or you could make some curry, pay some bills, write a thank-you card for those nice Christmas gifts … sort your mind and free it if you’re lucky.

I’m trying to do both and all.

The results are decidedly mixed.

4 Out Of 10 Americans Delaying Medical Care Over Costs

Specifically:

• In 2022, 38 percent of all Americans said that they or someone in their family put off seeking medical care or treatment because they couldn’t afford it. If you’re in a room with three random fellow Muricans, one of you will not be able to afford care.
• The percentage rose by 12 percent over 2021.
• Gallup started asking this question in 2001, and 38% is the all-time high since then.
• But just wait ’til 2023!

The article in the video goes on to state that some fraction of that 4 in 10, here in the greatest country in the world, have some form of “health insurance”.

But insurance isn’t health care.

Since 1948, health care is supposed to be a universal human right, and is in fact recognized as such by most of the world’s governments. Including the government in bad, bad Russia, for Chrissake.

In fact, The U.S. stands almost entirely alone among developed nations that lack universal health care.

If we had had that human right during the pandemic, 335,000 American lives would have been saved. But please, do go on and get worked up over a drop in the bucket like 9-11.

There was only one bit of health care that was ‘free’ the whole time, and that was The Jab. Gosh I wonder why that might be? I wonder how much Pfizer stock was held by DC elites, the whole time, too …

We live in the heart of Empire. It’s a seriously fucked-up place, and that will continue to be true no matter which half of the Uniparty takes control of the House, or the Senate, or the Presidency. People used to sound credible, claiming that the Dems were at least a little bit better, sometimes, right? Surely better than the evil Donald, at a minimum!

I, for one, now dissent from that homily.

100 billion for the money-laundering op in Ukraine? No problem, baby. A trillion a year to the Pentagon? Ohhhh yeah. Crash right through that debt ceiling one more time!

Caring about homelessness, or health care, or the income inequality gap yawning wider every day?

Fuck off, you god damn peasant. Who, and where, do you think you are?

***

Kshama Sawant will not seek re-election to the Seattle City Council.

This is very bad news for people living in Seattle, but maybe a win for the rest of us.

“During her campaign, Sawant said that, if elected, she would donate the portion of her salary as a City Council member that exceeded the average salary in Seattle. On January 27, 2014, she announced that she would live on $40,000 of her $117,000 salary. She places the rest into a political fund that she uses for social justice campaigns. As of September 19, 2021, she cited her current city-allotted salary as $140,000, while she continues to take home $40,000 of that amount.”

Just try to imagine a Nancy Pelosi or even an AOC doing the same. You’ll hurt your head if you do.

“On January 19, 2023, Sawant announced that she would retire from the city council at the end of the year, instead announcing that she would be launching Workers Strike Back, a national labor movement.”

Needless to say, the link is obligatory: https://www.workersstrikeback.org

Anarcho-syndicalism now.

***

I used to really admire Greta Thunberg.

But like Michelle Shocked, and Aung San Suu Kyi before her, she’s gone, headed up around some bend in some river of life or mind that is tragic. Tragic in the lost way, tragic in the evil way … it’s not clear. But she’s gone and she ain’t coming back.

For now I’m going to just admire Rebel News instead. Those are the guys trying to interview her. At Davos, of all godforsaken places.

For now. I’ll admire them. But even them I won’t trust to be solid and cool and right forever.

Kyle Kulinski … David Doel … Alexandria and Bernie too.

I hardly knew ye. Or me.

We’re all headed around the same bend eventually. Laughing as we drown or fry. We are the babies of Hiroshima.

In the later hours of the evening yesterday I spent several hundreds at the Bezos combine, a thing I had been meaning to do since before the Solstice.

The single most expensive thing was the diesel heater at about 190, plus another forty for a proper jerry can.

About as much in total went to a real zoom lens and a tripod.

120ish, for a medium-high quality manual coffee grinder, which I hope will be a one-time expense. It cost twice as much as any electric grinder I’ve ever bought, but those all last a year at best, and my theory is that there is just so much less to go wrong with a hand crank.

Then a batch of small purchases. The cheapest item was five dollars, for a short-handled 1/8th cup measure, which is what I use to measure out coffee (three scoops to the french press). Except that this one will live in the baking soda bag, which will make cleaning water jugs more efficient and less messy.

It was a major accomplishment which required a lot of last minute checking of various reviews and instructional videos to be sure I was spending wisely. If you care to watch along, I will recommend this one:

Hotboxing my Truck w/ a Diesel Heater – Solo Overnight

This is a 15-minute video from our old friend Mav. He tries out the heater in the dumbest and most careless way possible, punching a hole in the side of his pretty truck to no good purpose in the middle of a Minnesota winter, but sleeping cozy at 72 degrees nevertheless. How hard can it be?

Eight hundred and twenty-four Thousand views.

Life is just not just, god dammit.

In the morning of this underappreciated holiday, we down here were treated to a quick-hitting and quick-melting snowstorm. They say that northern Maricopa county, and maybe even Scottsdale, got a taste of the white stuff as well. It’s setting up to stay cold all week but mend its ways toward the weekend.

It was eight degrees warmer down in Cruces and that made me start to think about looking for a job there. Idly thinking, but still. Doing the purchasing project made me feel productive and also got me thinking about realistic options for the generation of grubstake.

I don’t think I chipped even one square foot off the 20 of The Pile, but I’m okay with that.

In the morning snow I made a week’s worth of hummus from scratch. As sunset approaches the dusted hills glitter in the full struggling sun.

Is Climate Change A Real Threat? With Bjørn Lomborg – #063 – Stay Free With Russell Brand

Poor Russell got punked.

This Bjørn fella is a Danish economist, really sunny and cheerful. He peddles hopium instead of Russell’s standard copium, and all of us, including RB, wanted to believe him when he said:

1) Climate change is no big deal. If you look at it like an economist, ‘we’ will only be four percent more worse off at the end of the century because of it.

2) The way past that minor inconvenience isn’t about solar panels or wind farms (he’s right so far), but through “innovation” in things like “fourth generation nuclear” (I’m guessing he means fission over fusion, but who knows).

3) Fewer people are dying of climate events than ever before. More people are being lifted out of poverty than ever before.

I’m not going to take all that point by point, but my desire to Believe was consistently hobbled throughout, by the pretty obvious flaws in those arguments. RB pushed back too, clearly trying to understand with good will, right up until the moment (51:19) that he accidentally discovers that all of Bjørn’s projects, books and think tank included, are funded by evil mastermind Bill Gates, and responds with a literal “Holy Shit!”.

Holy shit indeed.

It’s a dealbreaking fact that should have been sussed out long beforehand by one of Russell’s chirpy and pretty Gen-Z interns. It wasn’t. It makes the whole dialectic of the interview essentially pointless.

Follow the money, like Deep Throat famously said.

Bjørn may not be a bad guy, overall, but he is a lavishly paid stooge of the elites, and as such, we the viewers would be fools to take a word he says at face value. And in fact, we (at least 120,000 of us on Rumble alone) and Russell too, did get played here.

The problem is that there are way too many lavishly paid stooges sprinkled in amongst the well-meaning liberals of the world, and it’s a problem that’s gonna kill us all, one way or the other.

Each one of them believes themselves to be on the side of the good, and believes that they have good money and a comfortable life today because of it. We went to school. We worked hard, harder than the Qanon shaman ever did in his life. We succeeded, and made a better world while we were at it. We deserve the life we have, and so does Bjørn.

So does Delaware Democratic Senator Chris Coons, as he speaks so charmingly and intelligently to his fellow attendees at Davos.

But that’s a topic for a whole ‘nother show, and as for me I’m just going to leave it there and get on with my Sun Day. After all, the Niners are playing the Cowboys today for a spot in the conference championship game, and a man’s got to have his priorities straight. Eventually.

I wrote the Velma bit just in time, because today the DD guys took it on and of course did it more comprehensively, and just better. Among other things, the remake is animated too, not ‘live-action’ as I mistakenly assumed from only hearing about it and not ever seeing it.

Not that any of it matters, but since I brought it up, I might as well own my mistake.

This morning I slept from three until eight and it was good. ‘Better’ in this case would be managing to crash earlier than that, getting up at the same time, and just having a longer rest. But … maybe five hours will set me up to do just that. And … maybe five hours was all my body really needed.

On a tangential note, “I Went Back To California. My Home Town Looks Like A War Zone“.

The hometown is San Bernardino, and the hometownie is sort of a witless dick at certain points. But hey, he got 1.7 million views out of it, whereas this will be read by about five people, and I was inspired for reasons of my own to watch the first 13 minutes of this to massage my own confirmation bias … in the direction of …

The real America as a ‘third-world’ place, at best, or just a late-stage capitalism shithole.

We did it to ourselves. We can’t make it here any more. This isn’t some unique insight from an incisive malcontent. Read the comments underneath the war zone video. Everybody knows.

The answer isn’t voting. The answer isn’t staying in school so you can someday afford to rent somewhere better than the real America. The answer isn’t green jobs, or jobs period. It’s not Velma or the Lone Ranger either, not red or blue, not jesus or dope.

Not leading, nor following.

Maybe there isn’t an answer.

But I can make one up.

Pilgrimage to Helloutta, and doing the Work. This is my fictional philosophy.

Back roads and belletrism are the only cracks I know that actually take away the pain without leading down to the entropic gutter of Berdoo with the rest of the remarkably unelite.

There’s a fine line between Debut Collection and debt collection, but enough said about that.

The days of rain behind kept fighting the sun ahead all day. It would have been officially glorious, except there was ice in the wind and it was up over 20 mph for a long stretch.

Tomorrow should be a day of glory. Perhaps feeble glory, but … we’ll see.

I stayed inside again and while I did continue to watch too much junk (still on season one of the Lone Ranger), something inside me decided to at least partly break the trance of paralysis and make my rooms a better place.

The bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, the storage spots are all in perfect order.

There is only The Pile left to address. It’s pretty much the same pile I’ve been struggling to master for years, but it’s so very small now, and, ah, Operationally Encircled as they are so fond of saying in the current war.

I just measured it for you and it’s taking up 20 square feet. Everything else is organized to a high state of minimalist polish. Everything, at least, that is present with me here in San Vicente. The Sand Rock house is a whole different story. My goal is to make This Pile small enough to fit in an average sized box before March 15th when I can’t stay here any longer, and then to use the seed of that box to remake my life all over again up there, taking a scythe to those weeds, and aiming for the same state of polish for them as well.

It’s probably a job that will never really be done.

But I’m doing it.

An Interview with Tara Reade

In case you don’t recognize the name, Tara Reade was the first person to come out as an abuse victim of Joseph R. Biden. There are eight of them now, as you have probably not heard.

When she did, that was the end of the Me Too movement and the liberal injunction to Always Believe Women, because the nominal supporters of that kind of thing overlapped exactly with the Biden voters, and the media backers of the Democratic Party. To that constituency, beating Trump was more important than whether Old Joe was a creepy molester or not. So women who came forward were called Nuts and Sluts, secret right-wingers, and any other foul thing that might serve to shut them the fuck up. Sort of like what happened with Hunter and the Laptop.

Anyway, if that kind of cognitive dissonance has been a bother for you, here’s a golden opportunity to fix that.

Listen to her story in her own words and judge for yourself.

Or walk on by. Either way.

I’m not in the business of telling you what to do, or how to think. I’m just laying down alternative viewpoints that credibly challenge the conventional Fox/CNN/NPR/MSNBC narrative that they spoon-feed you all day every day. I call it The Work and it’s all that matters, to me.

Along the same lines, I think I saw a pointless Johnny Depp remake of The Lone Ranger a while back.

As with the Beave, the original was better. Not good really, if you try to dig into the core values, but a source of very simple brainless satisfactions, if you don’t.

Near the start of the very first TV episode, I did find, and appreciate, this:

***

I was thinking about old oversimplified media values versus new pointless media ‘values’. Last time I was in the truck I heard on NPR that HBO or somebody was doing a show called Velma, a live-action remake of the Scooby-Doo cartoon. But this one is told from the point of view of the Velma character (of course it is), who is now Asian and bisexual (of course she is). All real edgy hip stuff.

The gibbering critic on NPR hated it, and said that “both sides” of the cultural divide hated it too, though for differing reasons.

What I hate is the fiction that there are two sides to the culture. It’s the same lameness that claims there are two sides in Congress. Noam Chomsky used to talk all the time about how these false narrow dichotomies are the foundational basis for the Manufacturing Of Consent.

I thought some about Star Trek too. Once upon a time it was comforting to imagine that kind of sci-fi future, because that future could still seem plausible, even when it seemed unlikely.

Most hardcore Star Trek fans are also hardcore Democrats, and this is not accidental. The series imagines a future where there is no income inequality and no racism, et cetera, et cetera. Underlying it all is the Lie of Progress.

I’m not sure where Trek stands on abortion. Presumably there would be a Super Pill, so that no one would have unintended pregnancies, and there would also be universal health care as a human right, so that the pill would be free. Plus, women would never need to worry about being able to feed a child, or worry about having to pay for its shoes, or dental work, or college; worry about it ending up suicidal or homeless or both.

The problem of access to an energy grid is solved by warp engines or some shit, and the problem of movement is taken care of with transporters, so vacationing in Space Italy would be a real thing for more than just the relatively wealthy. Hop on the pad and have lunch in Turin, why not?

I still let myself be comforted by those post-capitalist myths sometimes, but mostly I see that as a weakness in myself, a self-delusion I’d be better off without.

The years count down.

We now continue with our regularly scheduled program already in ‘progress’.

I may have ten or fifteen or twenty days. If divine luck is with me, 10-15-20 years. No guarantees.

I have been spending that short precious time wastefully and tragically.

Mayfield was in Wisconsin.

***

Leave It To Beaver ran six seasons. I was born into the middle of its run and only ever saw it in re-runs. It was pretty wholesome, by which I mean it never asked any hard questions, and ran on platitudes that were at best neutral and at the worst a kind of low-level brainwashing.

For a while there was a rumor that Beaver died in Vietnam. It wasn’t true, but I can see why someone would want to start it–it would have been a perfect metaphor.

Long after Vietnam was over, nostalgia started kicking in and there were sequels to the original show, and even ‘movies’. Hugh Beaumont, Ward the Dad, never got to cash in, but everyone else from the founding show did.

The later versions were pretty much a horrifying mix of the original insufficient values, with a thick layer of post-revolutionary cynicism slathered on top.

For example, in 1989, one of the more successful sequels had an episode where the Cleavers flashed forward in a dream sequence to the far-off future of 2014.

In this one, Eddie Haskell has gotten away with arranging a ‘boating accident’ for his wife and collecting on the insurance. His ill-gotten gains attract gold-diggers, one of which Eddie brings to the Cleaver home for Thanksgiving.

Everyone seems to be quite aware that Eddie is a murderer, but the only thing that gets said is by a much older Wally, who says to Eddie that the bimbo is just using him … as if that were the crime to be concerned about.

Eddie tells Wally: I know it, and so what, pal? In twenty years we’ll all be dead, but at least I’ll have a smile on my face.

The showrunners let that hang in the air for a moment without any challenge, and in doing so imply that this is now the moral of the Cleaver story–“Let Do What Thou Wilt Be The Whole Of The Law”. Which is of course the first commandment of Satanism. Instead of being an ugly little punk we’re supposed to hate, Eddie is now the spokesman for the show’s values. We are still supposed to hate him, but this time because he is the only one to have transcended the corny virtues of the fifties.

So I thought that was pretty fucked up,

This episode is also noteworthy for a small and very early part for the actor who would go on to become The Joker, among other things. Joaquin Phoenix is young enough to still be using the first name ‘Leaf’, for the credits.

• That’s his real life sister acting next to him.
• I’m not linking it because I would prefer you didn’t waste your time watching it like I did, but the title is there is you’re feeling the same kinds of madness I am these days, and
• If you want something slightly less toxic you might check out the story of how June and Ward met.

The reason I haven’t felt like waxing political is that things are so utterly hopeless in that realm now.

Nevertheless. I went back after I wrote yesterday’s first paragraph and finished watching the rest of the DD stream. At the end of it the Google Overlords suggested I watch a video on a book called The Dawn of Everything. I did that.

The essential argument of the book is here:

A New Understanding of Human History and the Roots of Inequality | David Wengrow | TED

At the very least, it was compelling enough to get me to make my first vid of the new year. So that’s something.

Though … It reminded me that hopelessness is also the rational response to the situation on the ground, not just politically, but also … philosophically. Socio-economically … maybe not quite yet spiritually, but …

This post makes me sound more depressed than I really am. Maybe/Probably; I am no clinician. I don’t feel hopeless, even though I look out at the world and find it so.

I unbagged the camera. I shot some footage and I talked somewhat coherently. And the work is all that matters.

So at a minimum I fought the rainy day to a respectable draw, and I chose to call that a win.

Also, I made hummus yesterday and a big curry today. Both of which stock my fridge as we speak.

“Progress”.

I haven’t felt like doing any politics for days on end. I still don’t. But it’s time to clean out the stash of the URLs for the best and most relevant pieces I’ve collected early in the new year. I suspect that lancing the boil will permit me the luxury of starting the new week off in the morning with more belletrism. So let’s do this.

The main thing I wanted you to see was from today. It’s a part of a livestream from the Due Dissidence gents. It will explain to you, if you should care to learn, exactly why the cream of the cream of the Democrats, known fondly to her Instagram fans as AOC, will never again care about any issue that actually affects your life, and why electing seven more Squaddies won’t get you one step closer to a better human experience in the heart of Empire. Why, in essence, the uniParty controls everything, and the fact that it has two wings is purely theatrical, designed to provide you with the comforting illusion that you live in a democracy, that your vote matters, that voting blue will save you from hordes of toothless white Trumpers coming for your Wimmenz …

Point by point they take apart her lying cynical use of ‘progressive’ tropes to justify her own failures and sellouts. It’s a masterclass in exposing the mechanics of actual evil and how it can so easily co-opt the best of us.

Enjoy the soothing taste of the black pill, if you can find a way to do so.

***

Left & Right AGREE On Cuts To Military Spending!
(agree rhetorically until it comes time to vote)

Elitist Corporate Media Attacks Populism, Briahna Joy Gray on Dem v. GOP Dissent | SYSTEM UPDATE #19
(BJG goes on GG’s show and the best kind of hijinks ensue)

Biden’s Own Classified Docs Scandal & The US Govt’s Game-Playing With Secrecy, w/ Aaron Maté | SYSTEM UPDATE #21
(it’s different when Joe does it because the secret documents have an old man trophy Corvette next to them)
‘
CIA Shill Sean Penn’s EMBARRASSING Spectacle At Golden Globes
(in case your faith in fake leftism is starting to slip and you need help, ask Sean and feel better)

Finally, try putting the following into YouTube search:
joe biden 1997 speech on nato
There is no good and full and clear version of it that I could find, but the chopped-up snippets that are available are still pretty creamy and sweet in light of events, 30 and 35 years on. Try this one for a quick fix.

After the sleepy mess that was yesterday I crashed very early and was up for Saturday at six this morning.

It was an uncommonly productive day.

I realized before the sun came up that it was going to be sunny and glorious and well above sixty degrees–but also that after this halcyon, it would drop to 40 tonight, and then stay in the forties, day and night, for the next several rotations. With rain besides. Lots of rain. Maybe even a little snow.

No real relief for it in sight even on the 10-day forecast.

So I loved the sun while it lasted. I dragged carpets out and whacked them. I worked my way through the little rental house, deeply cleaning and weeding. I set my space up to be as productive as possible in the dark days to come.

I took a bath, and tonight for the first time in decades, I’m going to sleep in a sleeping bag, just to make sure it does the same job it used to do, under ideal conditions. Testing of the gear.

I listened to the playoff games too. The Niners advanced. The Chargers fell off their horses in spectacular fashion.

None of it signified as much as the beaten temple carpets and the slow aching semi-conscious seiðr of intentional daily living.

Ten-thirty. I’m crashy and I’m glad I am. The REI Polar Pod, tall version, calls to me like a Sirena.

In the whole of this vast land of my heart, there is no Lower East Side. No Bowery nor SoHo nor Hell’s Kitchen.

You might find something roughly of the sort, clear up in Denver, over in Dallas, or Cali for sure, but not around these parts.

We have slivers of Bisbee, and Jerome, and Nob Hill de ABQ, and Congress Street over to Tucson. Mostly though it’s Duncans, and Demings, and Pie Town and Kanab.

We do have temples, by which I do not mean those garish monstrosities so favored by the saints of the Latter Day. I mean the shifty one on the texas corner of Gila Street, and the one down below it called the Church of the Javalina. I mean Big Lake in the snow and Lake Roberts in June; the inner sanctum of the barbed wire cattle-gated compound in Sand Rock and the Turquoise Room. I mean the old Martanne’s and even the new house that chilaquiles built, and Don Juan’s Drive-Through Burritos where lingereth still the coyote spirit of Carlos Castaneda.

But no Mud Club. No CB-GB’s. We ain’t got population for that, now. No coffeehouse worthy of an actual Dylan or a Patti or a Mapplethorpe or even so much as a single lonesome Joey Ramone.

I walked my child self over empty mesas that I didn’t even know were Yavapai land until they built casinos on them years later, and thus I was imprinted and inoculated against the impulse to rush to the Meccas of Bohemia. I did finally make it to the City Lights by the Bay, and once I could afford it I went back there again and again, searching for something or someone that I hadn’t already done.

But I didn’t belong there, much less in New York, because I belonged to the mullein leaf and the datura blossom and the gnarled alligator juniper. I never even seriously considered moving permanently, and although I hung out in Portland for nine whole years before a Girl ripped it still beating from my chest, it was long before the place gentrified into Portlandia anyway. I worked at the library and I had a studio apartment for two hundred dollars a month half a block from the Quality Pie in the part of town that has been hardest hit by migrations of the rich, the cool, the overeducated and the blessed. I couldn’t afford a park bench there today.

The point is … I could never have been as darling decadent as AF Palmer or as level-headed and sane as Barbara Kingsolver or as radiant in the soul as our beloved Candy Slice. I just wasn’t gonna be Faulkner or Kerouac or Francis Ford Coppola or Steve Earle; not even Charles Bukowski drinking hard in an LA bungalow.

I am instead a Vairtere,a product of las cruces, the crossroads, where being the bright one met habitual grinding rural poverty, and a night at a club meant underage pickup trucks with a case or two of beer and a box of shotgun shells riding in back, headed up into the National Forest to a drunken campfire that would with luck be far enough out to evade the long arm of John Law, or some pack of self-appointed Elders if one among us turned out to be a turncoat or a rat, for the good of our souls, out of concern for our dangerous experiments with ditch weed.

For one brief moment early in this morning, I did feel like a real writer, somehow able to shield myself from the cold fact of another day with no paycheck, and feeling the feeling of it anyway.

Then life broke the trance, and I was again my self, like Stanley Kubrick after reading the savage reviews for Barry Lyndon, though still a bit more broke than Stanley ever was.

I liked the feeling of being real.

But neither that good feeling or the reverse of the medal feeling matter much in the end.

There is only every day and every moment.

There is only the work.

It comes in spurts and it’s limited to certain narrow band widths of endeavor, but
God Damn
Some Times
I am a Genius.

I have noticed that when I make that pompous assertion, behind closed doors and even to those I should be able to trust, there can sometimes be a rather violent umbrage taken to it. Not a shouting umbrage. Just a quietly rabid fury, as if in claiming to be so smart, I am accusing them of being dumb.

I don’t understand people any better now than I did half a century ago in some archaic millennium.

Or to say it another way, I have zero genius when it comes to the endeavor known as interpersonal relationships.

No, my genius lies in stringing words and images together with such deftness and richness that it would make a Tucson Barbie blush.

In the admittedly unlikely event that she were … ever actually to read it, watch it, Witness it, y’know.

The text for our sermon today comes not from Goddess Patti but from her spirit daughter, Amanda Fucking Palmer, lyricist for the Dresden Dolls. It is called:

***

The Perfect Fit

… I used to be the smart one
Sharp as a tack
Funny that how skipping years ahead
Has held me back

***

I can’t trap a mouse
But I can pet a cat
No I’m really serious
I’m really very good at that

I can’t fix a car
But I can fix a flat
I could fix a lot of things
But I’d rather not get into that

I used to be the Bright One
Smart as a whip
Funny how you slip so far when
Teachers don’t keep track of it

I used to be the tight one
The Perfect Fit
Funny how those compliments can
Make you feel sooo… full of It

***

I’m not exceptionally shy
But I’ve never had a man

That I could look straight in the eye
And tell my secret plans

I can take a vow
And I can wear a ring
And I can make you promises
But they won’t mean a thing

***

Can’t you just fix it for me?
It’s gone berserk
Oh fuck I’ll give you anything
If you can make the damn thing, Work

Hello, I’m good for nothing
Will you love
me
just
the
same?

***

(Once you’ve listened hard and taken It to heart, there won’t be any more need in your life for sermons.)

Permittez-moi the indulgence, of engaging in a bit of Seiðr even though I am neither qualified nor sanctioned by blessing to do so.

The prophecy states that eight weeks hence, I will be nominally cast out of the Temple.

The reason given will be, according to Actualhuman Resources, ‘Custodian’ is a non-exempt position, and as such, if I don’t use my large accumulated vacation benefit, I will lose it–because the new fiscal year is set to begin on March 21 at 4:25 AM local time, which is the exact moment of the Spring Equinox.

So off north into the sandy rocks will I go with a recalcitrant growl.

Events both eerie and poignant, disconcerting and unforeseen, will delay my return for more weeks than I have vacation time to cover. Their sweep will take me far to the Eastern Ocean like a flooding river, and back all the way to my natural Mangas home like a Dorothy tornado. It can’t, I mean it won’t be able to, be helpt.

When at last I do click my ruby slippers and return … the Temple will have transported itself two-tenths of a mile south to the other side of this hill. The tiny shift in geo-location will not be the only change, or even the most incomprehensibly magical.

The seiðr foretells that when I get back, I will not just be the custodian, but the actual Owner of the Temple. I know it’s hard to understand what that could possibly mean. Who among mere mortals can own a Temple?

I rub my eyes. I wake to sleep and take my waking slow. Hung. Over.

Perhaps unlicensed Seiðr was not my brightest idea. Did I never learn anything from The Sorceror’s Apprentice? (It’s a rhetorical question. I did not. Don’t take your life lessons from fucking Disney products.)

Upon receiving the keys to the magic kingdom and taking putative possession of the relocated Shrine–and this may be the weirdest part of all–I will live happily ever after.

I am dosing myself with two Naproxen now. I am making the coffee in the same old French Press I got in the post-Flatiron days. It’s metal. It’s sturdy. Probably it will outlive me. I hope and pray so, anyway. If you are young and bright and deserving and addicted to caffeine like you’re supposed to be, I may leave it to you in my will.

This is what old land-owning men do. They leverage their assets against posterity and count on the greed of generations to come to build them a legacy. Don’t fall for it, kid, not from me or anybody. You’re better than that. Be better than me if the world isn’t as fried as my liver by the time you reach this ripened age.

There’s a character arc in there somewhere.

Lovely and salvific mountain sunset of New Mexico, but from the parking lot of a Walmart.

I remember a very similar situation from exactly half a lifetime ago, looking up at the Flatirons from the Target in Boulder. There’s something vague and numinous to be learned about the juxtaposition of God and Moloch. It’s as true now as it was then.

Speaking of Truth. I am making the fateful decision to amend ‘janitor’ into ‘Custodian’, because that word can mean so many more things, and is thus decidedly more poetic. The Custodian at the Southwest Temple, and in particular custody of Gifts.

Which is not to say that there are no toilets to be cleaned or dishes to be washed, too, in spite of the promotion elevation.

So next we must consider what makes Barbara Kingsolver a Real Writer and what makes me just a custodian.

(I never said she was better. I just said she was Real.)

The main thing is that Barbara gets paid well, and consistently, to write.

I make a little bit here and there, but I would argue that if only blood relatives buy your books, then any claim one might make about the Reality of one’s vocation is a little suspect.

Did I say the main thing? I did, but I was wrong. That’s the whole thing.

The day I actually make my living three months in a row by selling my scribbles is the day I will be plausibly allowed to call myself a Real Writer too.

Not that I will so call myself, of course, even then.

I’m officially neutral on the word ‘Writer’.

I stand in firm opposition to Literature and the stylings of the literati.

What I stand for is the schism shard called anarcho-belletrism. I am particularly but not exclusively fond of it because I made it up. One’s own children are always the prettiest and smartest.

Now this Temple where I custode, it’s a shrine of a Goddess.

The Goddess has many attributes, and is said to be “associated with love, beauty, fertility, sex, war, gold, and seiðr (a form of magic which is related to both the telling and the shaping of the future).

Seiðr practitioners are of both sexes, with sorceresses being variously known as vǫlur, seiðkonur and vísendakona. There were also accounts of male practitioners, who were known as seiðrmaðr. In many cases these magical practitioners would have had assistants to aid them in their rituals”.

I assist ritually by keeping the stove fed and the laundry freshly dried upon the rack. Sometimes I will perform a curry, or a batch of hummus. Quite often I will create a gift, and place it reverently into the custody of a safe niche in the chill montane wind.

Is it any wonder that I love my job?

Writing from threefour days ahead from behind; on a little ketchup run.

Sometimes Wrongside Tracks is a very strange place to me, even though I’ve lived in it all my life.

Early on, at this particular manifestation of it (ay chihuahua), there was the night of Gollum Girl stumbling down from the weeds on the hill, talking about how her boyfriend had just shotgunned somebody, and asking in her crazy voice if I knew where The Director lived.

There was the birdseed poop incident.

There was Robert from next door wanting to run a new sewer line through this lot, and then his mother’s weird email threatening a ‘subpina’ … look lady, I’m just the renter, but I think your tactics are about the stupidest thing I’ve ever had the misfortune to witness, not counting the daily routines of Deans and Chairs.

About the time I was supposed to be filling this space of the 9th with words, at 4 AM on that very dark and very cold morning, I was up early and well rested. I heard a vague noise on the porch and swung open the door to investigate. There was someone there. I never really saw him. He started in by saying he thought this was Rebecca’s house. It’s not; it hasn’t been for a long time if ever, and I would guess it was some kind of awkward and pointless lie that was trying to break the literal ice … or, some kind of justification for even being on my porch in what was still the middle of the night.

As I was closing the door in his face he was chattering about how he’d give me twenty bucks for a jump start.

There was no stranded car in sight. I checked afterwards.

If I had to guess, I’d say he lived in the complex of way too many people living in way too small a space with way too little money, just down below me. He probably did have a dead battery, and someplace to go, and looked around and saw exactly one house with lights on inside, and took his shot. He had to clamber over the porch rail to do it, because the gate was hooked from inside and still was when he left, so … yeah. So … no.

It shook me a little and made me think about integrating my gun back into my working kit. It’s still sitting in a box up in Sand Rock where it has sat for a dozen years. Time to clean it? Maybe, maybe for reasons right, or wrong.

Shook me mainly because I wasn’t really expecting there to be anyone out there, in spite of the little noise I heard.

Shook me for some days. Led to this gap I’m filling, in some weird metaphysical way I’ll never understand.

Then this morning, which is actually the 12th in real time, the Stove People called to say that the money they were supposed to get for the new stove was apparently in dispute. Mister James asked me if I thought my landlady was ‘pulling a fraud’. Basically I laughed in his phone face. “Look, dude, I’m just the renter … “, but even if she was, what percentage could I possibly have in concurring with your lame suspicions of criminal activity? Do you not understand how the world works? Do you think I’m stupid, bro?

Send me a sub pina, you witless tool.

***

I tell you all that to tell you this.

I am the anointed Janitor of the Southwest Temple, at least for the next eight weeks, and this

Is my origin story.

I want to talk to you about The Good War, 1941-1945.

When most people use that phrase, I think what they have in their subconscious minds is an image of skeletal prisoners being liberated from German camps. The emotional response evoked by that imagery cuts right to the heart of what it means to be human, and it justifies in the popular mind (and often even in my own, honestly) a belief that the war was fundamentally Good.

Nevertheless, as rational beings we are compelled to look deeper and think hard about what lies beyond that emotional response. So … a few facts.

In late-1930s America there was no understanding at all of what was going on inside Germany, or the camps. There was also no appetite for yet another war of any kind. The vast majority of Americans wanted no part of it, and in fact it was very common for public figures like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh to be radically pro-German, and even pro-fascist.

President Franklin Roosevelt was inclined to intervene against Germany. But he had no good rationale for asking Congress to declare war (as was still the practice, in those crude simple times), especially in light of the view of the People that too much young American blood had been shed in the name of European squabbles a generation earlier–and fuck Europe, if they had learned nothing from it. So the US stayed out, and they were right to stay out, by any reasonable metric of right and wrong.

Meanwhile, half a world away, Japan was furiously struggling to build an Empire of their own. The Japanese weren’t fascists in any meaningful sense. Just imperialists who wanted China to be theirs, for a start. Roosevelt pursued a policy of ruthlessly strangling their ambitions with economic warfare–maybe “sanctions” is the right word. Japan had no oil of their own, and without finding a source of it, they were doomed to being a runty little island nation and never fulfilling any of their expansionist dreams.

Desperately starving for oil, Japan in late 1941 launched a coordinated series of attacks on places that had it.

There was still no justifiable reason for the US to go to war–with anyone.

But … since America was the only place in the world that might effectively object to their conquests, Japan made the fateful decision to also destroy their ability to effectively object, and bombed the American fleet anchored at their colonial holdings at Hawaii. (Which the US had invaded and stolen from a lawful Queen about 50 years prior.)

At the moment the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, the cold war against Japan got hot, and could suddenly be termed Good, for one reason and one reason alone.

It was purely an act of self-defense.

Did this give Roosevelt the additional right to declare war on Japan’s half-ass ally Germany?

It did not.

But he didn’t need to, because in the stupidest strategic move of his whole life, Hitler saved him the trouble and actually declared war on the US himself. In the amusing words of one historian, the Fuhrer’s decision was “puzzling”–a majestic understatement.

So World War Two in every phase can now be legitimately termed a Good War, for the sole and simple reason that it was, for the first time in America’s history since revolutionary times, a really and truly defensive war.

***

America is said to have defeated Germany in Europe, and there is no doubt that Normandy was a turning point. I’ll hold off for now on debating whether the Russians were a more decisive factor, but there’s a compelling case to be made.

In the Pacific, the nobility of the American victory was badly stained, when the new president Truman committed a pair of horrific war crimes against the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Again, there’s debate available on the morality of it–personally I favor the argument that Truman did it because if he didn’t, the damn Russians would have beat him to Tokyo as well as Berlin .. but again, that’s a tangent.

In any case, stained by whatever, it was by lesser or greater margins a “good” war, on the grounds of self-defense alone.

Sadly, it was the Last Good War. In the almost eighty years since, the baby Empire has waged dozens, or hundreds depending on how you count, of wars that were and are in no way good. Bad wars, proxy wars, covert wars, political assassinations, regime change operations, ‘police actions’–and not one of them Declared constitutionally by the congressional representatives of the people.

My point is this.

You may not have been old enough to have strong feelings about Korea, or Vietnam, or any of the marquee Bad Wars of the thirty-year period after the Big Good One. To the extent you have feelings now, they’re probably based on either the Rambo movies, or Apocalypse Now.

But to the extent that you …

–were moved to tears by the false propaganda about Kuwaiti babies smashed in their incubators and screamed for Bush the Elder to wreak vengeance for you, or

–cheered our brave troops as they marched on Baghdad based on the idiocy of the Bush II lies about phantom WMDs and some bullshit connection to Al Queda and 9-11, or

–were disappointed in Biden for abandoning those poor women of Afghanistan to the Taliban, after 20 years and trillions of dollars spent in a country the US never had any business in in the first place, or

–fly your little Ukrainian flag to this day on your lawn or next to your twitter-handle; because freedom, because democracy, because liberty for our fellow non-Asiatic pale kin, while saying nothing ever about Yemen or Syria or Somalia or Libya or any of the horrors perpetrated daily by your government that far exceed anything Bad Vlad the Putin ever did in his life ..

I would just ask you to stop. Think. Do some minimum amount of research, before you jump on board with the next war and the next war and the next Endless. Fucking. War.

Is the proxy war in Ukraine a “good” war? No. It’s not defensive.

If you want to try to make the case that ‘we’ have some obligation to defend the Zelenskys, or the much more sympathetic Afghan women, or literally anyone anywhere in the world at any time, I will just say …

The burden of proof for that is on you. I’ve told you what I think, and exactly why.

Where do you draw the line between compassion and becoming the Police of the Planet, and how CAN you draw it logically when your rationales have been spoon-fed to you by the lying Machine itself, and over and over again by cynical appeals to the emotional reflexes of your lizard brain?

How many times have you sat in front of the TV and been beaten over the heart with images of western Ukrainian mamas and babushkas outside their gutted apartments. “Lots”.

How many times have you been similarly gutted by images of children whose limbs were taken off by Ukrainian rocket fire, or colorful petal mines designed to look like toys, in the Donetsk of eastern Ukraine?

Is it two times? Is it zero?

What is that mismatch doing to your cognitive processing; to your opinions and the very way you see the world?

Why is it that you clap and cheer every time another ten, or twenty BILLION dollars gets shipped to Raytheon and Halliburton via the money-laundering operation in the deeply corrupt, nazi-tainted puppet state in Kyiv?

Why REALLY do you think you have the right to wish Putin dead and expect your government to grant your wish, no matter the expense of it in blood (not your blood) and treasure (yes, our treasure) and no matter that as you crow back lustily at the NPR announcer-drone, you’re driving by an armless veteran with a tin can from the last Bad War … or just an economic casualty of capitalism who might just be your brother’s brother?

Now do that same equation over again. Take Israel and Palestine, and come back here and tell me all about how “wull the Israelis have a right to defend themselves, don’t they?”

Oh yeah, you really got me that time. Hoisted by my own self-defense petard, that time.

Good Lord in heaven and Jesus wept, people. (Don’t forget to take a breath, Alex.)

When South Africa jailed Nelson Mandela, was that a good and justifiable act of self-defense?

When the settlements in Gaza are burned and bulldozed, is that Good? Or is it genocidal apartheid?

Is it the victims of eighty years ago … running the open-air death camps of 2023 …

Is it the nice man who became the first black president, building the slave cages for Mexican kids, so that Trump could fill them up, and doddering old Joe can make sure they stay filled to this day …

Yeah. It is … a lot of that. Bad War, and a lot of Bad Civil War, beneath the radar.

Sometimes I despair of ever even making a single dent in one brick-brain of that impenetrable fucking Wall of Lies.

***

Turn your face toward heaven, into the first dawn after the Solstice. I bring the Good news.

The Good news is that bringing down the Wall is not exactly my job. Nor even denting it. Not only is no one paying me to do it, but I am not obligated morally to do it either.

I get wound up and pissed off at density and willful blindness and self-serving brainwashed political opinions … mainly for the fun of it, I think.

So using a word like Despair in that context is ultimately not much more than self-indulgence on my part.

I am not a prophet. I am not a Holy Brick Denter blessed of God or anyone.

I’m a simple and objectively humble belletrist. From the French, belles lettres, beautiful letters.

But what is Beauty … ?

Oh, no you don’t. There’s been more than enough philosophizing for one god damned day. This is the Good news part

and anyway, THIS is beauty.

I’m in the grocery store and I need eggs. “Need”. So I look at the top two shelves where they keep the good shit and I see that the cheapest certified Organic ones are $7.99.

The cheapest good stuff is these. Not organic. Free range though at least. Sooo pretty, upon opening the carton. Brown eggs of all shades, and the others, it’s hard to see, but pale blues.

And two dollars less.

I make a quick command decision.

In the pan the yolks are a stunning orange. In the homemade breakfast burrito: divine.

Six bucks is still absurd and unreal for a dozen eggs.

But I made the right choice this time, and I am working, in my broken foolish way, to learn to do that with a little more consistency.

I wish you heartfelt good luck as you pursue that same agenda for yourself, in the supermarket, at the ballot box, in every fleeting moment of your one true miracle of life.

Heya. I’m AlexVairtereLLC.

I realize that my name, my penchant for vagueness, and my style of self-presentation can all be confusing. So let me start over.

Heya. I’m AlexVairtereLLC, and my pronouns are hit/ler.

Now I know what you’re thinking.

You’re thinking, why didn’t I say those were my preferred pronouns?

Well, because that’s hurtful. Maybe you’re now thinking, “Yeah, but not as hurtful as that guy gassing jews and other marginalized peoples!” But that’s just your privilege showing. Let me say it as gently and politely as I can–but you don’t get to be judgmental about how hurtful things are to me.

I read it in Seventeen magazine. Read it for yourself.

My pronouns are not a preference. There is no choice or option about them.

My pronouns are a fact.

I was born this way.

I deserve to identify however I want, and to just be who I am.

Add that all up, divide by zero, and just be nice to me. It’s so easy. It takes more muscles to frown you know.

Before you say, “Oh that Alex. She sure loves her coffee,” just think of how that misgendering might make me feel.

And say instead: “Oh that Alex. Hit sure loves ler coffee”.

It really is just that simple. (But do please make an effort to pronounce it all clearly, so you don’t sound like you’re from West Virginia, ’cause people will just laugh, for all the worst reasons.)

Thank you for hearing me. I feel validated.

As a token of my gratitude, let me share another article. I read this one in Cosmo.

It could be very helpful to you if you are trying to discover the existing truth about your own pronouns.

Maybe you’re a ze/zir. Maybe you’re an ey/em. Maybe a Mx … or maybe just maybe, you too are an out and proud hit/ler like me. I want you to feel comfortable with any of those facts, if they are your facts.

Every one of us is entitled to our own facts, and understanding that is a critical step in working toward a real Revolution in social justice–something that will make a far bigger difference than which Republicrat or Demican ends up being Speaker of the House, or President, that’s for sure.

Take that one to the bank, walk up to the counter, and before you cash it, ask the twelve-buck-an-hour non-union Tellerperson how they prefer to identify.

Little everyday things like that can mean so much, especially to the poor and oppressed!

You say you want a revolution

Yes. I’m for it. Generally speaking.

Well, you know. We’d all love to change the world.

That sounds … vaguely cynical, or … dismissive or something. What’s your point?

But when you talk about destruction …

I didn’t.

Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright?

I don’t. I see no evidence of that at all.

You say you got a real solution.

You must mean all my rants about green anarchy. Which would be a solution, but not a qualifying real one because … barbed wire. Zoning commissions. Private property which is said to be “owned”, and like that.

Well, you know. We’d all love to see the plan.

“Plan”?

Oh, shooby-doo-wah, oh, shooby-doo-wah

…

You ask me for a contribution.

No, I put up a Patreon page. You can contribute, but you can ignore it too. Most people do. Most people won’t even have the common courtesy to even read this.

Well, you know. We’re all doing what we can.

That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said so far. I can relate. Progress.

But if you want money for people with minds that hate …

I want money for a tiny house in Helouta. It’s kind of the opposite of hate, inside my head at least.

You say you’ll change the constitution.

I don’t; I won’t. I will however continue to rail against the pricks who want to water it down even worse than it has been already under Bush, under Obama. The fourth amendment is gone, baby. They replaced it with a “Patriot Act”. Now the censors want to kill the First. They actually cheered when they threw that dumb orange man off Twitter. There’s your “minds that hate”, right there. A lot has happened since that fool shot you.

You tell me it’s the institution.

The System, yeah. The Empire.

Well, you know. You better free your mind instead.

How come it has to be either/or, John? You should try some Russell Brand. He’s into both and that’s sensible.

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao …

I carry pictures of cats and that’s about it. I got no love to spare for Chairmen. Chairpersons. Whatever.

Don’t you know it’s gonna be
Alright
Alright
Alright

Let’s take a break, bro.

***

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too

Fuckin’ exactly. Like I said: Anarchy Now.

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man

I can imagine. What you’re describing is anti-capitalism. Anyone who wants to agree with you for real is going to have to put in a little work demolishing capitalism, at the level of institutions and at the level of their personal lives.

Which basically means that neither you nor me nor they is going to go very far beyond “Imagining”. Let’s be honest.

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us

Thanks for the permission … You are, were, a dreamer, not, as we say these days, that there’s anything wrong with that. And I am not a joiner. But I have some musings.

The reason you are so insistent that things are gonna be alright alright alright is that for you, toward the end, they were.

I’m happy for you, and a little envious … though I know it cost you a lot, too.

You turned your wife into your Goddess and joined her FemDom Cult of Yoko. You withdrew from the world of fighting for things and just Imagined full-time, under her spell. Sounds like it must have been quite luscious.

Down far below the overheated penthouse, out on the chilly street, that was never an option mere mortals could afford. They … didn’t have the possessions, so to speak, the assets, to make it possible in the first place, much less to hand them over to your queen.

You are allowed to call me a dreamer too if you want. Even if my most of my nights, hell, days too, are a tale of dreams interrupted.

I wake up cranky and go straight for a steaming cup of the best legal drugs.

I plunge the french press and I say I want … a revolution.

Sometimes what I say is even true. Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Again, the daily news cycle:
The Republican Side and The Democratic Side

Both good takes, both worth watching, but …

Ultimately as irrelevant as McCarthy himself.

Both also the creative produce of the DueDissidence team …
… who additionally have on offer something far more useful.

Jordan Chariton Plea(d)s for End to Progressive ‘In-Fighting’, nineteen minutes of pure gold–not just as political analysis, but in some twisted backhand way, as life advice.

Jordan Chariton is a ‘progressive journalist’. He’s not on the level of a Greenwald or a Taibbi, but he has done some excellent work on under-reported stories like the ‘crisis’ of water in Flint, Michigan, and his work is clearly under-appreciated–I remember him fuming out loud for quite some weeks about not being able to get the attention of Michael Moore, who is from Flint himself.

When Jordan sticks close to reporting the story, he’s a valuable resource to the informed citizenry. But when he reaches for that next Glenn/Matt rung and tries to evolve into a top-shelf Thinker too–the results are mixed, and all too frequently a little cringe-inducing, as is the case in his recent opinion piece.

Keaton Weiss and Russell Dobular of Due Dissidence seem to agree with that opinion, possibly because in their own ways they are budding top-shelf thinkers themselves, in spite of their subscriber count on YT only recently struggling up from the hundreds, into the thousands. They’ve been very helpful to me for quite a while, and I’m going to do my best to tell you how they were again today.

They start out just breaking down the basics of Chariton’s article. It’s another call for peace on Jordan’s part–he’s done it before–a pleading on the one hand to the Kyle Kulinskis and Sam Seders and Cenk Uygurs, a pleading on the other to Jimmy Dore and Hard Lens Media and the Grayzone–to stop bashing each other online. It’s one big old ‘Hey guys can’t we all just get along!? … we want the same things, right?’ …

He’s upset that the heartwarming optimism of 2016 and the first Bernie campaign has descended into a circular firing squad of everyone trying to prove that they are the true heirs of the radical Left, and that those other guys are a bunch of sellouts and fakes on the one side, or ‘grifters’ on the other.

He’s mostly right about that, but his understanding of how and why it happened and continues to happen, while almost nothing else does happen, is a little dim and nearsighted.

He ends with the hope that progressives will redirect all that angry energy into achieving goals we all can agree on, like a Green New Deal, or Medicare For All.

(IS pushing through a ‘green Jobs’ program, or an insurance scheme instead of health care as a human right–are these things a step in the right direction? Sure. Are they the be-all and end-all of a shared progressive vision? Hell no. But lets leave that aside for now.)

Keaton picks up the scalpel, or maybe the machete, first. “Jordan”, he says …

There will be no real Green New Deal. There will be no M4A. Not in your lifetime, and maybe never.

There’s a reason why Bernie 2016 was described as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and that’s because it was.

The opportunity was poisoned from within the blue party, staggered, came back staggering in 2020, got a second dose of the same poison, and died. The poison’s chosen puppet will never allow a real M4A bill, even that half-measure, to arise and be signed. He’ll toss out lesser bogus promises to the blue believers like so many chunks of dead baby pig–student loan debt, anyone? And he will spread the poison to anything that really changes anything. What is the federal minimum wage after two years of total Dem control, Joe? Same as it ever was. I’m paraphrasing, embellishing, running off on rants that deviate from what Keaton really said.

He does say: The railroad workers couldn’t even pry seven sick days out of the Corruption that is Biden America. You think by voting in a dozen more AOCs, you’ll suddenly or even eventually have universal health care? Wake the fuck up.

I ask: How can anyone, in good faith, argue with that self-evident truth?

There’s lots of cohering tangents in the video. Watch for yourself. One tack they didn’t ever take is this: In failure, Bernie did sell out. He votes dependably to wash the military-industrial complex in billions. He doesn’t say the word ‘Yemen’ any more. Smart people run channels pointing this exact kind of shit out in detail. Are you wagging your finger at them for that, Jordan? Are you siding with the people who criticize them for doing it, the incrementalists who pin their hopeful tongues to Bernie’s ass or Alexandria’s latest PR stunt?

Yes, you are.

A call for a cease-fire is a call for people more honest than you to shut up and sit down, and take it.

So fuck you, and No.

***

Keaton drops the mic, the machete, with a thud. Russell picks it up, and gets serious.

Russell says: Coming together with a Cenk or a David Doel is not a worthwhile project.

Because in the end, we’d only be holding our noses to no good purpose.

Then he tells the story that pushed me into writing all this.

One day, Russell says, I was out on the street with a petition in my hand, a petition to get Alexandria Ocasio Cortez on the ballot. I approached a huge hulking guy, six-four, with crazy white hair, wearing a denim jacket, and asked him to sign. This was in the hopeful days, before she even had the chance to sell out.

And verily doth the madman spit back to me:

“Talk to me when you’re ready for a real Revolution, MotherFuckah!“

I swear to god, that wasn’t me.

I swear to you, I am ashamed that that wasn’t me.

***

Deep in the dying light of the dying year, I finally figured out what I’m going to say to the next JW, Mormon, or Moonie that befouls my porch. It goes like this.

“I understand your faith, that it was God who created man.

Understand, that my faith teaches me that it was exactly the opposite.

There’s one other irreconcilable difference between us.

You are spending your precious life coming here, to try and get me to become an apostate to my faith.

I am spending my life without any care in the world, about what unlikely thing YOU have chosen to believe.

Good day.”

***

I wish I was also bold enough to scream truth about Real Revolution to innocent signature workers too. I’m not. I’m condemned to politeness, and conflict-avoidance.

But the crazy man who was–he emboldens me, nevertheless.

I am bolder today than I was before I heard of him, not just bolder in my political convictions, but bolder more generally. My spirit is lifted to the light of the year of our Lord, Two-Zero, Two-Three. What it means yet, no one knows. Hey there, Mister Blue … the rest of the lyric will be written in each passing hour and day.

So thanks, crazy dude. Thank you Keaton, and Russell. Thanks for not lying to me and expecting me to slurp it up like a fucking drone.

I appreciate it.

No fame, career, money, physical beauty,
power; nor that hate-madness neither.

I do have, through no effort of my own, a small loose band of people who love me, at arms length yes, and yet even so about as unconditionally as it gets in real life.

I have earned: an old truck, a tiny pile of dime store equity, and come September, the most crude and basic of government pensions.

Thus it is a simple matter for me to take stock, whereas Tom couldn’t do it even were he inclined to try.

Success!

Twenty-seven degrees. Five a.m.

***

Jimmy Dore on McCarthy’s Speakership Bid … | System Update (Greenwald) #14

You can say any bloody nasty thing you want about the Republicans and be right.

But it’s quite hard to see how the Dems are the lesser evil, and easy to feel the ways in which they are in fact even worse.

In the big wide open world there are a million ways to slice up “Us” and “Them”. One of the reasons that cults continue to be appealing is that they provide a simple and global way of defining those categories. There are good Believers. There are wicked non-believers.

There are, for example, you and me and Old Joe and Bill Clinton and AOC and MSNBC and Ana Kasparian in the first camp. On the other side of the wall, red-staters, white supremacists and other assorted racists, MAGA trolls, Q-anon, Mitch McConnell, the guy in face paint and buffalo horns sitting in Nancy’s chair a couple of january-sixths ago, Putin, and Satan himself.

Nevertheless. For reasons of my own, I have decided to disassociate myself from the Cult of the Good People.

Not because I have any intention of joining the ‘other’ side, as defined from inside the CotGP.

I can be and will be an apostate from Us.
I can be and will be apostate from Them.

Left and right are virtually meaningless now. The corporations and the state are wedded in holy matrimony and the ring is fascist gold.
Lead, and follow, are both unacceptable choices if the mission itself is a death cult.

Get the Helouta is The Way.

I was standing down in Jerusalem town one day. Dawn was breaking.

Let me tellya, let me testify, every son of god gets a little hard luck sometimes.

Tuesday was frozen and so was I.
I didn’t even cook. I didn’t even write:
I went to bed at nine and woke up at four on Wednesday, which is now,
and came here to make my penance, typing onto the cold white screen under the bright moon.

Solid droplets glitter on the ground outside.
I fielded texts from landlady, asking for the extra money
in exchange for the additional time. I slid away sideways from the specific obsession
about the one cult and listened to stories and opinions about cults more generally.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that my experience with the one
probably affected me more than I ever thought. I moved on, the heat of my soul
melting the ice of it, and the ice of other forms of parental madness,
but that expenditure of hot energy could never go toward anything truly better
than making
a puddle.

It’s a pretty puddle and maybe a little tragic from
this angle or that,
But there isn’t much point to indulging in either damp theory.

Pick up the puddle pieces
Put them in my pocket.
Be ready to walk down the hill
as soon as day breaks.

As soon as it was the 2nd, just after midnight, the snow started coming down for real.

It was still coming down in the morning, and the world was powder-coated in a couple inches of white. Everything but the StarLink dish, which uses the electricity it needs anyway to also keep itself de-iced.

It snowed on and off all morning. Around noon things were improving a little, so I went out to get milk for the coffee and a few other things that were running low. Coming back, around 2:45, I took this shot down the promised land street.

Five minutes afterwards, it started up again, just as everything had melted, the fresh getting laid down on streets that had nearly dried.

I am addicted to a drug called the Weather.

I don’t intend to quit. But there are other less savory addictions of course, and with them, I am at least trying to taper off.

Almost Disfellowshipped

I am no fan of the hiss of an Interstate, but I like the sounds of trains, and don’t usually mind them even blasting loud and close.

I can be driven half-mad by the sound of someone else’s damn dog mindlessly barking two blocks away, but I will embrace the sound of the birds that don’t belong to anybody, even the ripping violent sound of a raven screaming right over my head.

There’s no particular rationality to any of that.

I don’t really mind the depression of the darkest darkness on the shortest night of the year, or even the real pain of being half-drowned in it some years, like the one so recently passed.

But the light is slowly returning and that feels pretty good too.

A waterfall of caffeinated love flowing down out of some mythical mountains.

***

Before we can get very far into all of that, though, there’s a logjam of housekeeping that needs to be cleared first. It has seemed that same way to me at most points in my life … But before I regress into solipsistic digression again, permit me to just vent and clear one jam.

***

I. The Fallaways

How one elder finds out “The Truth” is not the truth.
Most of this hour is a story of growing up In, and a long slow fade to all the way Out. At the very end, he talks about how he sees the world now.
It’s ridiculously Pollyanna and politically just ignorant, but it did give me a fresh perspective. It’s been a long long damn time since I was Out myself. But … I am very much still a Doomer, and I am very much still a believer in the tenet that ‘bad associations spoil useful habits’. Furthermore, I’ve extended what constitutes “bad” associations into most all associations, and become something of a whack job introvert.
Realizing how and why I got that way was a little bit shocking and a little bit disturbing.

Exclusive Interview with Former Elder who Wrecked Watchtower Doctrine from the Platform
Edging toward the comedic.

Kurt Metzger – Jehovah’s Witness Drama – This Is Not Happening – Uncensored
Actual proper comedy. The only reason I’m posting this one is that I know Metzger from his latter-day gig as the default sidekick on The Jimmy Dore Show.

II. Caesar’s Things

Norway Defunded Jehovah’s Witnesses: Here’s Why
I watched a whole lot of things related to The Witnesses in the world, including coverage of the murder-suicide at a Kingdom Hall suburban Denver on Christmas Day a week ago, and the one where the Pennsylvania Attorney General did a round-up of pedos who were former or present JWs. The case of Norway deciding to stop giving free state money, while continuing to fund all the other churches in their country as per usual, is a different kind of deal.

III. Overlap
For decade after decade after decade, the sheep were taught that “the generation of 1914” would absolutely not fade away into death before Armageddon.
As it became more and more obvious that they would, the Governing Body found itself in the position of having to redefine the word ‘generation’. The goofy way they tried to do so led to a whole lot more people than ever before just getting fed up with their prophetic shenanigans and jumping ship.

The Overlapping Generation Teaching

Overlapping Generation – Jehovah Witnesses Weirdest Doctrine (featuring adorable baby goats!)

III. Why 1914 Anyway?

607 BCE and 1914: Why these dates matter to Jehovah’s Witnesses (2021 reboot)
A mighty fine explanation of the brittle math that led to that fateful year in the first place.

IV. The Watchtower: Roots, Shoots, and Those in Cahoots
The ideas and beliefs of Charles Taze Russell did not spring into existence in a vacuum, or come revealed straight from heaven in the Joseph Smith fashion. This historical take starts with “Millerism” in the early half of the 19th century, traces its evolution straight up through Russell and Rutherford, and pushes on even further into more modern strands of the same core theology, including the strand led by one David Koresh of Waco, Texas.

***

I hope I’m done obsessing over this for a while.

Then I can get on to different housekeeping, and maybe finally break out into real productivity for a change sometime in the days and weeks to come.

“So it comes as no surprise
That he’s left. His home. So young.
Still looking for some kind of Paradise …
Poor fool thought he had to go all the way to Kingdom Come.”

—Kevin Welch

Or more precisely to the crossroads at Helouta for which there are only vague directions.

Headspinning: So little wonder that the thinking produced by
the spun scramble of my superfine brain
looks a lot like pork, in cello-phane.

I work hard at what I think matters and walk the cold blocks to etch the pig postcard or bring you glad tidings about the pumpkin in the creek. There’s no job and the poorly hidden truth is that of course I don’t dare to want one; don’t know if I could even pull off the dumb stunt of being an employee any more at this point; I fear making application because really I don’t want to know, either.

You can say that makes me a coward, that I’m wrong or morally lazy or broken. You can tell me I’m just like the father and point to the mark of Cain I got from him on my forehead. You can shake your head and wag your inner finger and you’ll get no argument from me about any of it. You win and you’re right about all of it, except the parts about the Ukraine, Palestine, voting, democracy, the MIC and the PMC, policing the rest of the world, the deep state, the nature of good and evil, unions, disinformation, censorship, succeeding, obeying, and what makes a man a man.

They don’t have to give you a reason for why when they say no (and neither by the way do I). They don’t even have to have a reason, any more than they do to fire you on the other end–something not quite normal, in the cut of his jib that one–I made them uneasy. I didn’t try to but I did anyway, and they brought down the disfellowshipping banhammer and sent me a form letter to remember them by and I do, still. (I see them now in a haunted dream, all lily white and squeaky clean, never knowing want and never no need–their shit don’t stink and their kids won’t bleed–their kids won’t bleed in their damn little war and we) Can’t make it here.
Any more.

At some point the downward X line of liquid resources available will cross the upward Y line of what is purportedly essential, while on another screen the glowing numbers of subscriber count or views-today will not be rising high enough to cut the steel math, and no more pellet stove, carne asada, or quarter-tank of Fire Chief. Kevin Welch has another song called Too Old To Die Young and he gets it. I chose the live version of Paradise because of the way he fucks it up right in the middle of a song he’s been singing for decades and how could I not empathize with that plus those lyrics?

Look, I’m fucking it up in the middle right now even though I’ve been singing this song for decades, too. No that’s not right and yes it is, too.

They call this day the end of days, but that’s only because they’re talking in terms of the brutal empire fiction they call a Year.

You know and I know, my friend in jesus, that there’s no such thing as a year. There are only chunks of rock in a void; planetary revolutions that paint seasons, and there are tragically few of them no matter what we do about it.

What to do. About the woodland I will go, to see the mullein-stalk clothed in snow. Not even Solomon in all his glory, I know you know.

If I’m good enough and the batteries don’t freeze and I make it back I’ll show you the picture of it right here because the work is all that matters. To me if not to you as well. Everyone has their own axe to bear and cross to grind and shortlist of what to bother reading. Just grind like you mean it and I’ll keep trying to bear the same.

How to Respond to Jehovah’s Witnesses Series – “They are just imperfect men”

But lets face it. At the point I’m beating a dead lion, and crying over spilled choices. Enough of that shit. Anybody with a lick of sense and open eyes can easily figure out that god is a story, and a story invented as yet another tool to control your mind with, in a whole bag of tools for the same purpose, like the tool called Ari Melber or the socket set labeled ‘Kardashian’.

Don’t consent to letting them be used on you. Free your god damned mind. There is no salvation anywhere, but if there was, its name would be

Anarchy.

***

It was too cold and damp to go for a walk today, but I did it anyway, for a Work-related purpose. I needed to get these pictures.

I like turkey, I love lamb, and when I am out stalking the elusive perfect breakfast burrito, I’m usually going to order it with bacon.

For the most part though I’ve always been perfectly aware that continuing to live as a carnivore is pretty incompatible with the main thrust of my values.

Some activist recently put up these little postcards on the co-op bulletin board.

I saw them a week or two back; didn’t really think much about it, but for some no-doubt-divine reason, I went for that walk to capture them and bring them here.

Yes, it’s propaganda, and I don’t know if all of it is even true. But if I went out and did the research and could come back here and tell you for sure that chickens can only count to four … so what? The subtext and the real message would not change.

I think the one that really got to me was the last one about pigs and belly rubs. This may well be because I would really, really love a belly rub right now myself. I’m going to linger in that longing ache for a moment. Pardon me.

Okay, back.

So a baby pig can recognize its name long before a baby human can.

But the evil System profits mightily from chopping up that semi-sentient baby pig with a name, wrapping its remains in a body bag of plastic (hey, there’s the plastic again!), and selling it to you and me because we think maybe a proper chili verde would be just the thing for dinner.

Listen, I often do just that, so I’m not shaming hypocritically.

But I’m looking at his little Wilbur face right now–or maybe Hers–and I’m not resisting the feeling of being horrified … with how I live, by how we all live, routinely.

I talk a lot about what the System and the Empire do when they put human beings into the Meat Grinder–half a million dead Iraqi kids being “worth it” to the ironically named Secretary All Bright, the homeless at the traffic lights of the world’s richest country, and all of that–but it’s a little more personal somehow, when it is me walking down the meat aisle and making a choice to favor this chunk of Wilbur’s body over that one. You know I want a fresh kill, and not a corpse that’s starting to look too much like a corpse.

Anything good on clearance?

No. Good has very little to do with it. The savory tang of the simmering pot aside.

***

Am I about to rush to vegetarianism?

I doubt it. At least not for those admittedly compelling reasons alone.

But there are other reasons.

Before this storm, I stocked up on groceries. At the Albertson’s I stumbled across a whole rare organic chicken, and it wasn’t violently expensive. Maybe four bucks a pound, $15 total.

I brought it home, watched some videos, and put the bird into my dutch oven. It lives now in clean and cooked pieces in a storage container in the fridge, waiting for my hunger and pleasure. The bones, the skin, they’re already at the landfill by now.

In my experience it’s really hard to find good organic meat at all, and hard to justify the expense of it even if you do.

But even the often fruitless searching and the money isn’t quite enough to push me all the way there.

I’m trying with a mighty effort to simplify my life and to get the hell out of the way.

Meat … is complicated.

That chicken was the one and only thing I’ve used the oven for in the many months I’ve been holed up here.

In a truly simplified life somewhere out of the way, I’m not sure an oven justifies itself. I mean … maybe one of those cute little things that sits on a woodstove and folds up out of the way … but really? Meh.

Even mucking about with doing a bird on a cooktop isn’t very efficient. You’ve got the paper towels to pat it dry. You’ve got the blood and juices befouling countertops and sinks and posing hazards. You’ve got to keep a meat thermometer around (thank god the landlady’s drawer had one in it). Compared to something like a chickpea curry masala and rice, it’s just a lot of time and bother, relatively.

A lot of time, money, equipment, and fuss.

All on top of the image of a living thing that once counted to ten embalmed and resting in the mausoleum of my refrigerator.

It’s Overkill.

***

I used to think of The Hell Out Of The Way as a place.

I still do. To a point.

More and more, I see it as a process.

It’s going to continue, I think, to be worth it to haul around five or ten pounds of bulk Equal Exchange coffee beans, and a grinder and a kettle and a French press, at a basic cost of something like fifty dollars a month.

Probably the same for sending $135 to Elon every time the calendar comes up on an 11, so long as I have $135 to send.

Probably a truck, and tires, and gas, a big kit for an arched cabin, and a check to Dreamhost and Protonmail and the pharmacist.

Is chicken worth it? Is pig meat? Is an oven? On these things I’m leaning more toward a no.

Pile the moral cost on top of the actual cost on top of the time it takes to get the money and the time it takes to invest it judiciously in flesh-eating and gas for an oven, and … I’m just not feeling it, at the end of 2022.

Thinking, in this warped anarchic way, is all I have to offer you out there in the world.

I hope it’s enough.

In the meantime, let’s check in on what Gabor Mate’ has to say on the subject of Enough. Try to ignore the surrounding chirpiness and listen to … the meat of it.

Trigger warning: If you intend to live life as a Good and Faithful Slave, reading this post may be an Unforgivable Sin! or cause athlete’s foot or something.

I spent some time, due to a quirk in the YT algorithm, diving into what the latter-day apostates were saying of late about the rather battered belief system I was raised in, the one offered as The Truth by the witnesses of Jehovah.

I have no interest at all in getting down into the doctrinal weeds here or discussing how many Special Pioneers can dance on the head of a pin.

I’m just going to offer a few pointers, annotate and embellish them a bit, and leave it at that. First pointer:

Why I Left Jehovah’s Witnesses – Former Elder / Pioneer

You don’t have to watch a single second of it to begin getting a sense of what this man has to say. Just look at his face for a start! Does this look like some dimestore Antichrist with an evil faith-wrecking agenda to sell you?

Listen to a few seconds of his drawly voice and your vague intuition of his sincerity will be confirmed. (Disclaimer: Sure, he might be an angel of darkness masquerading as an angel of light … and I might be too. Proceed at the peril of your soul.)

His story kept my attention all through. His falling away journey started with a list of questions he had, regarding some inconsistencies and contradictions in the teachings–questions he felt he needed to be able to answer, when he knocked on someone’s door, or a congregant came to him for the knowing counsel of an Elder. Getting no satisfactory answers from the approved materials, he stuck a toe into the waters of doing his own research outside the limits of approval. Which is to say, he dared to use the Google to find out what non-believers had to say about the unanswered questions (this is a major sin in itself), and once he started to encounter some true alternatives to Truth, the trajectory he’s on today was pretty much inevitable.

Toward the end of the video, he starts to hint at some things having to do with the organization itself and the pretty horrifying path its leaders and ‘Governors’ are embarking on.

There’s a procedure in place, for example, for when someone comes to an Elder with a story about a child being abused. What is step one for this, according to the Elder’s Manual?

Rule one is no cops. Rule one is: you immediately call the Watchtower Legal Hotline.

When you as the elder call, you are specifically forbidden from asking who you’re talking to. You don’t get any names, but you are absolutely required to give yours. You never know if the person you’re reporting the crime to is a lawyer, a paralegal, or the elder-janitor at Bethel who happened to be near the phone. Regardless of who it is, or what they think you should do, you do what they say and you don’t ask questions.

What this does is take all the legal burden off the organization, and places it onto the shoulders of the poor dim elder out in Bumfuck who is only doing what they told him was God’s divine will.

God’s divine will almost never tells the elder to report the abuse to any secular authority.

As a form of legal insurance for the Watchtower Society, this is perfect genius.

As a good idea for the elder, not so much.

It seems that there were a pair of elders in Illinois a while back who did everything by the book, like they were supposed to. They’re in jail now.

The sentencing judge said basically, “You’re telling me you committed the crime of failing to report child abuse because a voice on the phone told you not to? How stupid are you, boys?” And the gavel came down.

It’s hard not to feel a little sorry for these well-meaning too-trusting faithful dipshits. But only a little. They were, after all, pretty much just good Germans for Jehovah instead of that Adolf guy.

We can safely save our real ire for the people and policymakers on the other end of the phone.

I also learned that there have been massive structural changes recently to the internal workings of the Society. Essentially, ‘Watchtower’ has been re-organized into seven different puppet corporations, and none of them are legally under the supervision of “The Governing Body”, who are god’s chosen leaders. Say what now?

This is a game attempt at insulating the old white men at the top of the food chain from personal liability for exactly these kinds of crimes and immoralities, at a time when they know that Satan’s lawyers are coming for them with blood and dollar signs in their eyes, over this abuse and cover-up scandal in particular.

The horribly immoral rules were nobody’s fault, you see … technically … judicially …

Tell it to the raped kids, Brother This and Brother That. Tell it to theoretical God and pray for mercy on your theoretical soul.

***

The other main piece I have to share is a lot more fun.

A Brief History of Watchtower’s Failed Armageddon Predictions

Most Witnesses know that in 1914, the founder of their faith, Charles Taze Russell, waited with a cadre of apostles in white robes on the Brooklyn Bridge, waiting for the inevitable moment that they would be lifted up in Heaven to sit at the right hand of God. The story is told with a kind of forgivingly vague amusement, like a tale told about one’s misinformed grandfather. The guy was no Elijah, you know, but his heart was in the right place.

When Russell died heartbroken in 1916, the politics for control of the organization began. But whoever was at the helm during the years that followed, one thing was certain. Over and over again, the publications continued to prophesy hard and immutable dates for the catastrophe of the End Times. 1920. 1925. When a date once more failed to bring the crisis, it was advanced a few years, but always with perfect certainty that this time would be the one. It will come as no shock to you that it never was.

Eventually, the struggle for leadership was completed and a man named “Judge” Rutherford emerged as top dog, directly beneath Jehovah in the org chart.

Rutherford was an open anti-semite, who once also proposed that after the Resurrection, uplifted peoples who used to be black would show up with new and improved white shiny faces befitting their now-godly natures.

Under his leadership, the Watchtower Society gradually began to hedge their bets on the question of specific dates. The absolute certainty and precise times were still there to the discerning eye, but never again would they fall into the embarrassing trap of declaring “For Sure For Sure”. It was all ‘to the best understanding of the elders’, qualified and conditional.

This new method of predicting using probabilities reached it’s zenith around the same time the Witnesses knocked on the door of my parents and quickly converted them into hardcore faithful slaves. The new story was Oh It’s Going Down Soon This Time Baby, almost for sure by 1975 and maybe sooner. We didn’t know if we could wait that long.

But sure enough we did, again.

The failed 1975 half-prophecy was also based on some rude maths that required the Earth to be no older than six thousand years old, or maybe forty-two thousand in later versions of the tale, which … let’s just say that’s problematic scientifically and leave it at that.

The practical effects of the belief hit much closer to home.

I was under ten years of age when that was written. A young person. In ’75 I was a teen.

They promised me as a fact that I would never grow old, in the Wicked Old System.

I have some retroactive bad news for them.

The above quote and dozens like it were used to try to shape what those ‘young people’ did with their lives. More on that atrocity in a minute, but as an aside, note the early emphasis on the 1914 generation and the importance of its passing away as a hard limit on the timetable for Armageddon, in accordance with Russell’s own dictum that “Millions Now Living Will Never Die”.

I can’t say for certain whether there are “millions” of 109-year-olds still around, but even if that were the case, it sure won’t be for much longer. But that won’t matter either. There will be some revelation of new bullshit that makes it okay to keep the faith in the clearly delusional greybeards that still run and have always run this show. Beards, as in, “no sisters need apply”, nor faggots either. Here, have a token black bro and a cartoon render of an Asian chick, and shut your impudent trap.

Atrocity, personal ‘atrocity’.

My parents believed that the end was very near indeed, and so too they believed that there was no point in making plans, or a career, and very specifically, there was absolutely no reason to do anything crazy like go to college and maybe learn to question idiotic self-appointed authority.

They were adamant on this point. God strongly disapproves of college. I heard it preached from the podium. I heard it all the time, and even from people I loved and was supposed to be able to trust, that my soul would be far better off if I became a full-time door-knocker, or went to the magical place called Bethel where the truly good slept and toiled and ate and lived and died.

College was anathema. You hear about celebrities stooping to corruption to get their kids into better colleges?

Oh, no, baby.

We forbid your sixteen-year-old ass from accepting that scholarship. That nobody but you worked toward getting.

If you can scrape up the money yourself, and you hate Jehovah that much, you can go to the community college down the road. Go down your selfish evil path alone, boy, and answer for it at the Judgment, which is … well, we don’t know exactly when anymore, but for damn sure any day now.

That all changed in the blink of an eye when my mother’s second husband turned out to be, of all heinous things … a college president!

And such a good man. Our worldly savior, in point of fact. Brave, noble, kind, a decorated Patriot.

Suddenly college was not evil. Suddenly it was the apotheosis of all that was good in the world. It was the only path, to a normal, happy, abundant life as an American citizen.

Just. Like. That.

Headspinning. The shortest verse in the whole Bible reads:

Jesus wept.

For four days it got warmer and nicer until yesterday it finally kissed sixty, Fahrenheit.

Then the night was full of cloud and the heat was kept in by that blanket.

Early this morning it was mid-forties and beautiful. The wind kicked up but there was no chill edge in it.

Around noon the clouds dropped down to the deck and the sky looked like winter, but it still wasn’t. The reports claim that it is raining, but I’m here. To tell you. It’s not at least not yet. Punctuated the air is with threats of it, and I’m sure there really is snow on the unseeable mountains. But on the hill we’re holding the line at 40 degrees, it might hit 45, and even in the darkest part of the night, they say, it won’t quite freeze.

At least until the First when the storm is reinforced.

Radiant glory of sunshine doesn’t return until the fifth allegedly.

That’s a lot of time to hunker down and get things done.

I hope I will.

I’d like to sleep naked up in the tent in December, with nothing up in there but the pillowtop, the vent hose pumping warm fresh air in, and my 9mm Beretta just in case a leader or a follower comes to Out of the Way with malign intentions, whether they are overtly malign or is as more typical, cloaked in some variant of their acquisitive civility.

That would be a night of simple joy, although stained with the knowing that in time I would need smooth warm flesh and the scent of perfume to share it with to make the joy complete.

Sometimes though all you need is a few pints of plain water to sluice out the tub. But they need to come on top of the gallons of viciously hot water that make a tub useful in the first place. I haven’t worked any of that out.

Except the mattress, the sheets, and the ammunition.

Tonight as the storms try to tiptoe south without being recognized I will do what I can to push the little complicated dream forward.

Matt Simon, author of A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies.

A podcast I caught on the local community radio station today, to sort of follow up on yesterday’s tropes and just tell even harder truths.

Sometime around the turn of the millennium, humanity entered what the anthropos call The Anthropocene Age.

What it means is essentially that there is no part of the Earth’s surface that is ‘virgin’ or wilderness anymore, no place that is free of the catastrophically bad things we’ve done to the planet

Matt Simon talks about pulverized tire dust from Europe drifting onto Arctic ice, and microplastic fallout raining down on the unsuspecting heads of indigenous people deep inside the African continent, and how the stuff we made so thoughtlessly has ended up inside our blood and our brains–no matter if we eat organic exclusively, no matter if we recycle like good citizens.

To tie it back to yesterday’s post … we get sold on perma-straws to replace the ones that ended up so photogenically in the noses of sea turtles. We get sold electric cars on vaguely the same premise. But the problem ultimately isn’t what we’re sold, or what we buy. It’s worse. It’s that we are bought and sold a such a furious brainless pace.

It’s that we’ve been conditioned to consume and consume and take the path of least resistance to ‘convenience’, and things that are supposed to make us happy.

The problem is industrialism, colonialism, and rampant late-stage capitalism, and all the things you and I have been taught to believe around those false gods.

And believe it we do.

100 billion more for Ukraine, everybody, while people are sleeping out in sub-freezing temps in New York tonight, trying hard not to die. And a free Slurpee with every purchase, amen.

The Real Truth About Christmas.

Thanks for saying it so smart, Russell.

There’s a lot in that one about advertising and how it results in a kind of complete invisible mind control in the long run, not just of those stupid people over there, but of you and me and the best of us too.

On a similar note:

Canada Uses Santa To Push Vax On Children

And again related: Yes, They DID Say The Jab Stopped Transmission

The last one is a friendly reminder of what They all told us at the time, and a comparison to what they’re saying now.

They lied and lie and later down the road they say: Oh that’s not what we said …

Here’s the proof of the contrary. Enjoy, and a blessed solstice, festivus, and 2023.

The voice of William Faulkner is the inscrutable voice of God the Artist, and as such it is never heard.

Not directly. If at all.

It is omniscient and omnipresent in space and time. It has chosen to follow the classical modernist advice to write what one knows, and it knows one county in Mississippi with perfect intimacy. Within that known county, it sees everything and imparts what it sees to the reader without apparent intermediary. Which is the Devil’s own trick, except the voice is not the Devil’s voice. Like I said, it’s God’s.

***

The voice of Scaachi Koul says:

“Hey. I’m really imperfect. I am edgy, difficult, cool, and completely normal. Just like you-
-and thus, I am relatable; let’s relate.”

I was only ever in her audience once, and it was today. She read a piece on This American Life. I happened to be out doing some “last-minute Christmas shopping”, which was nothing at all how it sounds. I bought meat. Drink. A facial cleanser from the clearance rack randomly. Every bit of it was for myself.

The piece she read is called “Single Bells” and you can listen to it here. (As the title suggests, it’s about her first divorced Christmas).

It’s good. I don’t know how old she is, but she’s a better writer than I was at her age. See also her website, where the titles of her essays speak volumes about her concerns, approach, and voice. Likewise for what she calls her ‘debut collection of essays’, which she named “One Day We’ll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter“, except on the cover some of the words are crossed out and the alternative reading is ‘one day this will matter”. Alright, okay …

***

One time I heard another writer say something along these lines.

‘They tell you that this is America and you can grow up to be anything you want to be. But that’s bullshit. No matter how hard I worked or how much gumption and resolve I had, I had absolutely no chance of becoming a linebacker for the Rams’.

I forget if this writer was physically slight, or a woman, or what, but there was some reason that made that assertion perfectly logical. And, as a bonus, true.

But it goes a little deeper than that.

Another time, I heard another writer say something like:

‘If you grow up with the advantages of being raised by a loving, average family of modest means, in let’s say Wyoming, or Texas, you can grow up to become a lot of things. Maybe a developer, or a financial services manager, or a chef or a teacher or a shortstop. But even so, there is one thing you will never, ever stand a chance of being, and that is the drama critic for the New York Times’.

Maybe that’s exactly true and maybe not, but the gist of it certainly is. The future d.c. for the NYT is not only going to be a person who takes The Theater very seriously, but a person whose parents do too. Those same parents are going to have to have a lot of leisure time and disposable income, and probably live not far from Broadway, and very likely Manhattan itself. Not Manhattan, Kansas, see?

Any high-level cultural employment is going to be the same. The daughters of diplomats become diplomats at a much higher rate than the daughters of plumbers. The sons of senators will go into politics much more often than the sons of bus drivers.

This was once *less* true in America. Edward R. Murrow could grow up out in Idaho, go to Boise State, and end up as the most important and revered Correspondent of his generation. Eartha Kitt could be a literal post-plantation slave, catch one break, and make the most of it to become an actress, a singer, an important civil rights activist, and the best Catwoman if we’re being honest.

Of course, for every Eartha there’s ten Betty Sue Loudermilks whose names you don’t recognize at all.

And, nowadays, the gates of culture and society are ever more fine-meshed and stratified in any number of ways.

If you want to go to New York and make it big in show biz, and you don’t have any money, you may very well have to live in a bus shelter for a good long while before you make it, or don’t, because renting the smallest closet is just too expensive. Bob Dylan and Patti Smith never had it easy. But they did have a fighting chance, in that America.

If your tastes are more about climbing the ladder in some corporation, or non-profit, or government agency, it may be essential to serve a long unpaid internship, and if the folks back in Kentucky can’t afford to float you in the big city for six months, or if the folks don’t give a shit, or they’re meth heads, or dead–good luck, kid. It’s not that you have No Chance, in the fabled land of opportunity. But you’re trying to thread a camel through the eye of a needle. You’ll need a hell of a lot of talent or luck or both.

One more.

One of the founding fathers, John Adams I think, said that his generation were revolutionaries, so that their sons could be merchants, and their grandsons could be artists.

And that pretty much ties it up in a bow.

***

All idealizations aside, my voice is not in any way the Faulknerian god-voice. I was never going to be that good.

My voice is a lot closer to the sound of the Scaachi-Koul, with many significant differences, like F and M, Canadian and American, young and old, woke and still dreaming. Maybe I’d transcribe my own sound … like this.

“Hey. I’m really imperfect.

I used to be totally convinced I was edgy and cool, but either I’m not, or I’ve stopped giving a shit about whether I am or not, because I’ve got bigger problems.

Difficult? Oh yeah, that’s … fair. In an understated way.

Normal? I’m sure it looks that way, to most people most of the time, but only because I used to also be real good at hiding my suppurating abnormalities, my diseases of the brain and soul, my native crudeness and predisposition to as many kinds of failure as there are. I hid them because I was afraid they’d evict me, fire me, and the very first time I gave them a chance to, by staying in one place more than two years, that’s exactly what they did anyway, when my lying disguise failed and the anarchic misanthrope beneath was exposed to the view of my tasteful betters.

Relating!? Oh sweet Jesus in a bag of dicks.

Unless you are family, or a lover, there is a good 98.6% chance that I’d cross the street, drive a mile, ford a creek, or live in a literal van down by the river to avoid relating to you even briefly and politely.

This extreme and maladaptive conversophobia has had major and sometimes catastrophic consequences for both my life and my art.

In life, I don’t initiate. So the people who get close to me have to come at me and after me, again and again, and that’s generally a symptom of the ways they too are broken. In the seventh house, the one for relationships, my Sun, my Self, conjuncts Pluto, a small and dark and radioactive body that represents tremendously unstable power, a toxicity that sometimes wobbles its way unsteadily into a nuclear fusion of joy but much more often explodes without warning and with all hands lost.

I mean if, you know, you believe in that astrological crap.

In art, well, I gave that Theater an honest shot long ago and I knew right away it was not to be. For all the reasons discussed already, I am incapable of collaboration.

When I practice Belletrism like I am right now, I do it from behind the microphone and the fifty thousand watt signal drifting up the Columbia River Gorge, from behind the Panasonic G7 camera, from behind the endless blank digitally wordpressed page, so that you can hear me (or Hollywood Evansaint Macavity, or Alejandro Vairtere), but with no backtalk. You choose to listen, or much more often not to listen, but the option to respond is mitigated, or it was never, by design, there at all.

I set the sounds and images adrift in the stream not for an editor, or a hungry audience, or a recognized publisher who gladly forks over a fat advance, or an A&R man waving a contract. I launch the fragile poetic paper boats in a whisper for reasons even I don’t understand, and I send them off with a prayer that they be a cause for wonder or joy or a simple shocked moment for anyone who lives closer to the ocean than to the spring and the seep and the cienega I dwell among in these remote uplifted mountains.

Doing the work is all that matters.

I murmur a fragment of a song in your ear and the voice sounds like: ‘and so this is Christmas’ and so it is.

It is morning.

You go gunning, for the shot that stole your thunder.

You fight til hit is daunted. But they catch you, 84 miles south, and do their damndest to put your ass under.

Then you love a little wild one, and she brings you only sorrow. Such a pretty smile; you’ll be on your knees tomorrow.

Now.
You swear and kick, and beg us, that you’re not a gambling man. Heh. Whatcha doing back again in Vegas, with that handle in your hand?
Your black cards can make you money. Naturally you hide them when you’re able, but down here in the land of milk and honey
you must put them on the fucking table.

And here you go
back, jack, do it again
Wheel turning ’round and ’round

You Go Back
Jack

Do It Again

Daybreak was well underway, but the lamp post sensors on the main street hadn’t got the memo yet. It was pretty. It’s out of focus because I took it before I made coffee and my eyes were still bleary.

That’s a belletrism joke. I woke up early because the stove-fixing guys were coming to this rental house on the hill.

I go to the stove-fixing store pretty often to get pellets for the stove. Each time, I notice that they have a permanent hiring sign up like all the other places. “Installers and laborers”, it says. So I was not only hoping to get the stove fixed. I was observing what their job really was, to see if I might like it.

They left. The stove wasn’t fixed and neither was my employment situation.

The last time I had a job anything like that one was right about 25 years ago. It was mostly driving and delivery, of doors and cabinets and stuff like that, in Albuquerque. It looked sort of like a regular 40-hour job, but they had hired me in through a driver’s temp agency. I think they did it that way a lot, in order to check out the talent before committing to an employee.

One day I was in the warehouse with my job partner for the day, a lifer type with the company, pulling out the orders to load up prior to delivering, and he asked me how come I wasn’t interested in doing this job permanently. Which surprised me, because I’d never said a mumbling word about anything of the sort to anyone ever. I was doubly surprised because his sense of my sense was pretty much right on.

I don’t remember what I told him exactly, but it was along the lines of there being nothing to learn from the job, tomorrow or next week or next month. This confused him, and he started in on telling me what a great gig it really was, and how much he enjoyed it … basically recruiter-pitching me, probably on behalf of his, our, bosses. I said less and less. I shrugged. I let the conversation wither and die, because it was pointless. I had no intention of humping cabinets for nine bucks an hour for the next decade, and there was no way to say it politely or inoffensively. The job was enough for him, but that would never be true for me.

A few months later I won out over 42 other candidates and was crowned Reference Specialist of the Montoya Library, and I was happy.

It think it paid 18K a year or something horrible like that. But god damn there was a lot to learn, because the World Wide Web was brand-new, and I had never seriously been online before–think of it–and most of the students hadn’t either. I learned with fast joy and within a couple of days I was specializing in bibliographic instruction, which meant talking to whole classes at once about how to do research via this fancy Web Net thing.

I was still years away from owning my own computer or renting my own connection. Further still from being employed as a “Webmaster”.

Today I am writing this at “home” on an extremely capable laptop running Linux, which is the only operating system left that’s worth a damn (sorry Cupertinians), and publishing it via something called The StarLink (yo Elon).

Pretty fuckin’ amazing when I stop and think about it.

Which is exactly what I’m doing, and it is tangential to my point.

After careful consideration …

I don’t think signing up to be a stove installer is the right thing for either me or the universe right now.

There would be something to learn, which is why I was even considering it. But the useful learning would burn itself up in a matter of weeks. Then all that would be left would be drudgery for bad wages, and a rekindled hatred for anything resembling a boss. Not to mention, based on the morning’s experience, a bad taste in my mouth for my co-workers.

Stove Fixing Dude’s initial comedic bit (the first of an apparently endless set) was about the many failings of “Indian drivers”, and things went sharply downhill from there.

I drove a lot on the Rez.

I’m well aware of the specific ways in which they generally speaking suck.

But Jesus H. Christ, man. You’re here to fix the fucking stove. You’ve known me five minutes. For all you know my mother is an “Indian”, and I’m going to beat you to death with a tire iron for insulting her in your shitty jokey paleface way.

Again, habitually, I digress.

Mostly, I wanted to talk about why I’m going to keep looking, for a Job Opportunity, without applying for this one.

There is a broader point here though.

The point is, I fucking hate the majority of rich people. Jealousy? Maybe a little. But mostly I hate what they had to turn themselves into, to get rich, by the rules of this rigged game, and what else they had to sacrifice to winning too, whether they see it or not.

It was in her role as U.N. ambassador in 1996 that Albright uttered the most infamous words of her career, in an appearance on “60 Minutes.”

The show’s correspondent Lesley Stahl asked Albright about the effect that sanctions were having on Iraqi society, saying, “We have heard that a half-million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Albright responded with chilling equanimity: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”

This creature was literally fine with child sacrifice to the demons of capitalism and hegemony.

Although she will always be known as evil, it will always partly be because she was arrogant enough to say the quiet part out loud to Lesley Stahl.

But all the good blonde little Lesley Stahls of the world just let it ride, because their bread wouldn’t get so well-buttered without exactly these kinds of sacrifices. The Machine couldn’t go on grinding away to their benefit, without the Madeline Priestesses stuffing Iraqi Hansel and Yemeni Gretel into the fireplace by the hundreds every day.

So mostly I hate the rich.

And then I have to look over at my fellow poors. They’re drunk and stumbling around in the street cursing at midnight. They’re snoring through their blackout comas at three in the morning while their malnourished dogs go loudly insane. They’re showing up to work the next morning and yapping idiotically about the “Indians” or the blacks or the Jews. They’re voting more and more dependably for the Orangeman–or for Hillary, what’s the difference? Or even more dependably just tuning out with another twelve-pack from the Walgreen’s, self-medication at its finest.

They’re not easy to love either and it’s high time I admitted it to myself.

An ugly system makes mostly ugly people and they in turn produce a mostly ugly society.

The whole thing keeps me from calling myself a humanist, or an optimist either.

People rich or poor are the horse and the System is the cart and putting one in front of the other makes no difference either way.

Lead this shitshow? No thanks.

Follow it? Oh hell no.

I need to just keep coming back to the quest for the mythical place called the Hell Out Of The Way.

I need to find it and then maybe I can become a decent prophet or at least give decent directions to the place.

I need to trust myself to find a way to fund the quest that doesn’t kill my spirit dead.

***

A cryptic update from some hours later on the same ‘day’. This is not the stove you’ve seen before.

There is video, of the transmogrification.

So ends the long unfocused 22.

Dearest Alejandro,

Random HR Drone

***

I honestly don’t get these people.

I have a nice paranoid theory about the one reference that never got back to me contacting them independently. He was after all a kind of spook. But

1) Probably I’ve been listening to too much TwitterFiles, and
2) What the fuck difference does it make anyway?

Here at the Solstice I’m not waiting to hear back from anyone, anymore. Except for the pellet stove repair guy, first thing in the morning.

After he fixes the augur, we start again fresh.

(I wrote this into the description box of tonight’s video instead of here where I’m posed to.
Yeah he’s a rebel boi-e-e-e-e-e-i-o …)

“Blackhole Sun, wontcha come, won”t you cuuum … ”

I’ve never been diagnosed, and I may almost certainly be sort of undiagnosable.

Sometimes I’m sure I’m spergy and other times I’m sure that’s not it.
They tell me I’m a Virgo. I say yeah, Virgo Sun but conjunct Pluto in the Seventh, which it IS a planet so fuck you Neil DeGrasse and pass the ammunition.

Whether or not I’m bipolar, I am definitely coming up out of a blackness and therefore sounding a tiny bit manic even to myself. Just like the seasons are, in these days of winter’s solstice.

On the way home from shooting this I stopped off at the Buzz and it was *not* Tranquil. It was absolutely jammed and I waited in line for twenty minutes while the lone barista/cashier struggled valiantly. Dale man, stop squeezing the eagle so hard and hire. Hire me for example. Or don’t; it may not be a good idea for either of us. Dafuque do I know.

Behind me during the whole twenty minutes, two professors chatted while the lady professor’s dog tried to snatch the gluten-free brownie from my hand like a canine grasshopper. Even though I was lifting up into that joyful manic phrase, their conversation was black as sin for me. Apparently this is the first day of their break. The talk was full of money and the lack of it. The talk was full of phrases like “my best self” when it was transparently clear to me that neither of them had the slightest clue what their best self was yet, or where it lived, or where it had lived.

I tried not to listen. It sort of worked.

See the problem was not with them so much. They were bright. They were earnest. They cared, they said things that made them seem caring and altruistic. I’m sure their mothers loved them and maybe daddy too.

But even so I could only barely stand it and I rehearsed my order over and over again to myself to try to keep from the torture.

“Coffee. Large. Hot. Lightly roasted. To go. Splash of milk.

Am i … forgetting anything?”

No. I am not.

And maybe that might be my real diagnosis.

DCIM100GOPROGOPR0328.JPG

Hit it, Billy.

Shakedown 1979
cool kids never have the time
On a live wire right up off the street
…
With the headlights pointed at the dawn
We were sure we’d never see an end to it all
…
And we don’t know just where our bones will rest
To dust I guess
Forgotten and absorbed into the earth below
…
That we don’t even care, as restless as we are
We feel the pull in the land of a thousand guilts
And poured cement, lamented and assured
To the lights and towns below
Faster than the speed of sound
Faster than we thought we’d go, beneath the sound of hope
…
The street heats the urgency of now
As you see there’s no one around

***

And that of course is the way we like it, u
Sually.

Your rice is done right and steaming.

“Borrowed from Hindi मसाला (masālā) / Urdu مسالا‎ (masālā, “spice(s)”), from Persian مصالح‎ (masâlih, “affairs, materials, spices”), plural of مصلحت‎ (maslahat, “affair, policy, best thing to do”), both from Arabic, derived from صَلَحَ‎ (ṣalaḥa, “be fit, competent, usable”)”.

C’est vrai. Masala makes the base of good rice usable and it’s the best thing to do.

I start with a wide and enameled pan or pot, and I start with oil. My habit is to use avocado oil because of the super-high flash point of 500 degrees, which gives me plenty of room to find a way to fuck things up and still not ruin it all.

Get it warm, but not super hot.

The first thing is, could be, whole spices, left to roast and toast in the oil for a while. If you’re a pro like that, try some cinnamon, or clove, or cardamom that way. Myself, I’m both minimalist as a cook and mostly anosmic from an old medical condition. So I skip straight to step two.

Cut up an onion, a couple cloves of garlic, and some ginger root. Start them frying slow and leave them be that way until you think they’re about to be overcooked. I only recently realized that the fresh ginger is essential to that long curry afterburn taste, or sensation. So I got some and it’s a regular part of it for me now.

If you’re doing it like a virtuous expert, you’ll have soaked some garbanzos alongside the rice, and they’ll be cooking by now too in another pot, although a precooked can of them works just fine. Or maybe you’re not a chickpea fanatic like me and will omit them completely.

I have this big enamel pot where the lid is also an enamel frying pan. So last time I used that lid to fry the aromatics and the big pot to cook and then drain the beans. The pan got scraped into the pot, leaving plenty of room for …

Whatever you like. In my case, a can of coconut milk (yogurt works okay too), a can of diced tomatoes, a jar of green chili, and whatever else you have laying around and like. Clean out that fridge. In my case this time that included a couple of old carrots, a leek, some scallions, a handful of fresh basil, some celery, some peanuts, and a whole lot of chiles de Arbol. In addition to the now-cooked chickpeas.

Other possibilities include: cabbage, cashews, potatoes, snap peas, broccoli, cauliflower, bell pepper, shrooms, shallots, fish sauce, shrimp paste, and broth of whatever description.

Put them in the pot in the order of how long they’ll need cooking. Carrots = early. Basil = late.

Let it roll, and while it’s rolling this is the time for any other spicing. In the Asian cuisine the possibilities are endless. I’ll put my full collected list at the end*, but in the minimalist spirit I usually stick to the basics, like cumin, salt and pepper. You can also get premade pastes (which generally go in at the frying stage), or any variety of “curry powder” (which is a term almost as vague as “huevos rancheros”).

You’ll be ready to ladle it over the rice when you’re satisfied with the textures and taste, or when you’re too hungry to wait any longer.

So far this is vegetarian and even vegan. You are soooo good.

If you’re a sometimes-sinner like me, the very simplest thing is to boil up some already cooked sausage. I get twelve ounces of organic chicken andouille at the co-op here for six bucks even in these inflationary days. I might add turkey instead, but I generally don’t because to me storing it requires precise low temps, and cooking it is a whole separate and complex operation. If you have a method of doing meat in the same original pot, that doesn’t overcook everything else, I’m listening.

So there is one other big cluster of ingredients and techniques to detail–I mean cooking pinto beans as the basis for burritos and tacos. And there’s also using the garbanzos to create homemade hummus. The pintos and chickpeas are the other things I currently stock in bulk, besides rice. (Empty fourth bucket with probably be quinoa, once I figure out something outrageously delicious to do with it.) Burritos are even more important to me than curry. Hummus is what I eat for not-meals (and I’m getting better about eating it with vegetables instead of crackers).

We’ll see how ambitious I am about documenting all of that here.

In the meantime, enjoy the mega-list of spices, and three videos on curry that inspired me in various ways.

TASTIEST CHICKPEA CURRY | quick recipe!!
I think I want to try his rice flour idea, partly because I have other ideas for that ingredient too.
Watching it again reminded me that, yeah, raw chiles (de Arbol) should go in with the onion/garlic/ginger.
Also, it seems Aaliyah is the new Judy Garland.

BEST Chickpea curry recipe | Chana masala | Vegetarian |Vegan curry | Cook with me | Food with Chetna
She loves her blender, this one, which to me just makes work and dishes. Not to mention that incredibly messy and weirdly designed pressure cooker … But she’s authentic and flexible and looking at her food makes me hungry even if I’m not.

Chickpea Curry – 5 Minute Dinner
I feel the need. The need, for (fake pointless CHIRPY) speed. Lime? Maybe. And maybe rushing is a kind of minimalism for time. Bigger maybe.

* The definitely anti-minimalist list of potential spices:
bay
cinnamon
cardamom
coriander
pepper
salt
clove
cumin
‘chili powder’
turmeric
fennel
cilantro (even stems)
ginger
lemongrass
fenugreek
mustard
melon seed
(thai) basil
garam masala (and, there’s a lot of other Indian ones with obscure names that I’m too noob to have cared about … )

For the most part, if I’m going to bother, I’d rather get fresh as opposed to dried, much less powdered … )

I’ll talk about that part tomorrow. Theoretically. Likely.

A Saturday, the 17th.

It made it up to 45 degrees today, but it was a gloriously sunny 45, the kind of day on the edge of winter that gives me another reason to love this place, Place broadly speaking. It was also as a bonus uncommonly windless. Tomorrow they say it will be momentarily unsettled and cloudy, with even a slight chance of a flurry.

I was well-positioned to fix a very small problem that had grown to massive proportions in my head, or maybe my heart. My spirit. To the extent that I could fix it, I succeeded; to the extent that there’s no way to fix it, I’m still recovering from the mess it left inside me.

I was going to give you all the minutiae and detail, but in the end they don’t matter.

This does though.

“The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which our democracy has never recovered.”
–Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1604139690629730304?cxt=HHwWgMC44ZWjhsMsAAAA

In 1992, Congress passed a law that said: Release it all, yes, all. Every damn thing related to the assassination, come clean and dump it. You, uh, have twenty-five years to do it. No nonsense now. The deadline is firm.

Eventually and incredibly enough, 2017 finally did roll around. Trump did authorize a release.

But under pressure from the cartoon villain Mike Pompeo, the release was not complete–still some stuff redacted or hidden away completely. (Maybe in that closet at Mar-a-Lago too, in case of a need for leverage.)

Hero Joe Biden to the rescue!

Biden put off the release, because “Covid”, whatever the fuck that had to do with it. A couple of days ago on 15 December, he let go of a little more of the pile of files, but again parts of it were heavily redacted, in direct contravention of the law as passed.

What we know for a certainty now is that the 3Letter agencies were lying through their asses when they said they had no previous contact with Lee Harvey Oswald.

Why would that be a thing worth illegally lying over? I can think of a few reasons …

But the major one is just that they lie and they lie and they lie about everything, to keep you and me stupid and feeling like we might be the only ones feeling uneasy and at a loss about what to do.

Whatever it is you think, about Murika being so much better than those shithole countries, because Our Freedoms, because Our Glorious Standard of Living, because oh Lord Democracy–it’s bullshit.

Oh yeah you’re free all right. To play ball with Moloch like a good Do-Bee, or to go live under a crumbling interstate bridge. To get an experimental medical procedure called The Jab, or get fired. To parrot the right opinions or get muzzled by the corporations who are all in bed with the people who did Kennedy, and Kennedy, and King.

“Our” opportunity, our standard of living, wouldn’t be possible without a war machine to exploit all the poors of the world.

And as for Democracy–RFK said it all. As does Biden, every time he keeps withholding the truth and trying to vaccinate you against that truth and what it really means by drip-feeding you the half-truth, so that by the time all the cards are on the table, if ever, you won’t care much anymore and you won’t have eyes to see that 1963 and 2023 are proof that nothing’s changed.

My darlings, John Kennedy was no revolutionary, no communist, no socialist, not even a leftist in the historical sense. Like FDR before him, came from money, believed in the System that lifted him to power, and was a hardcore capitalist.

But he was just dangerous enough to stand up for the possibility of actual freedom, and real democracy.

So they killed him. Just like they killed dozens, hundreds of others, who stood for those things too, all the days of your life and mine.

“But your flag decal won’t get you into Heaven anymore
We’re already overcrowded from your dirty little war
Now Jesus don’t like killin’, no matter what the reasons for
And your flag decal won’t get you into Heaven anymore”
—John Prine, most likely before you were born

It may interest you to know that the term ‘conspiracy theory’ first appeared in 1964, planted in the pages of the New York Times by some faceless machine bureaucrat servant of evil, and applied to anyone who felt the official version of the murder didn’t wash.

But if the conspiracy was real, then they’re just theorists, right? Not loons. Truthdiggers, at least as good as Don Lemon, or Chris Hayes, or insert your favorite corrupt pundit here; at least as good as the people who benefit in every way there is to benefit from carrying the lie forward every night on a thousand different subjects, paid well to gently wash your brain and provide reassurance that you’re one of the good ones, and that your country is still the best.

That progress exists, and giving proof through the night that our flag … was still there. Land of … thFree!

This is Home and … you’ve been so brave. So brave, now Sleep.

Sleep.

(This episode titled ironically, by the actor Tim Robbins.)

Rice. Brown rice. Organic brown rice. Yes, very healthy. Generally.

The major caveat is that rice is very good at sucking up arsenic from the soil. Normally the amounts are small and it’s at worst a modest problem. However, rice grown in Texas and the southern US is a potentially dangerous exception.

It turns out that southern rice is usually grown in fields that used to grow cotton, which of course isn’t food. So to poison insects in these cotton fields, they used a lot of arsenic. And the arsenic is still present in the soil twenty and thirty and forty years later at high levels. Meaning that no matter how organic it claims to be or even is–you don’t want it, because the high arsenic levels will end up in your pot and then your body. The soil was fucked over and will continue to be regardless of the ‘greenness’ of any latter-day cultivation methods.

California, like most of the US West, has some naturally occurring arsenic. Asian rice generally has none, but their standards for ‘organic’ aren’t as verifiably stringent either.

There are things you can do to reduce arsenic levels, and I do some of them, with my California rice from Lundberg Family Farms (not a sponsor). Here’s my process.

***

Use relatively fresh rice, two years old or less. I buy in bulk through Azure and keep a big food-grade bucket full, with the date noted on it, and then a smaller glass jar that holds a week’s worth or so for ready use.

Soak it overnight. I do two cups of rice at a time, with around four cups of water.

In the morning, drain it and rinse it. I use a large strainer for this. Put the rinsed rice in your pot.

For every cup of brown rice you started with, add 1.5 cups water to the pot, give it a stir, and bring it all to a boil.

After letting the boil roll for a minute or two, reduce the heat to a simmer and cover the pot. Leave it to simmer for the next fifteen minutes or so at least.

After a while, take a spoon and dig a hole in the middle of the rice all the way to the bottom. You’ll probably see some water down there. What you want is for that water to be very-nearly-but-not-quite gone. Keep simmering until it is so. Then remove it from the heat completely.

Let it rest for at least ten minutes to let the remaining steam do the remaining cooking.

Fluff it with a fork if you like, but you’re done.

***

The other method I sort of find plausible, especially for reducing arsenic levels even further, is to boil your rice like pasta, with 8 or 10 cups of water for every cup of rice. But I haven’t tried it, because I’m trying to do everything as simply and minimally as possible, in conditions where it might cost a lot to haul in water liberally. For the same minimalist reasons, I don’t use oil or salt or anything else, even though plenty of sources recommend one or both.

Salt and other flavors will come from the masala or curry sauce that pours over the rice.

I’ll talk about that part tomorrow.

The work is all that matters now.

***

Biden says U.S. is “all in on Africa’s future”

The words chunking uneasily out of your mouth are too little too late Ol’ Son. You were shitting that bed on the regular before I was born and those poor blacks are never going to believe a word you say ever again.

Multipolar future for Africa & the Middle East

I’m sure they’ll take your money but the strings you’ll try again to attach to it this time are a dead currency and worth about as much as your lying, cynical platitudes.

***

This week, Glenn Greenwald launched a new nightly news show on Rumble.

His early attempts at high production value are kitschy and crude. Purely in terms of the look of the show, from the graphics to the camera angles, it looks like what we used to try to pull off in high school TV production class, It’s awful. And moreover, Glenn, I have never ever understood why anyone would ever wear a tie without having to wear a tie. It’s a symbol of strangulation and a marker that says, it’s okay guys, I’m serious and totally on board as a team player within the system.

Which you clearly are not, which is why we love you dearly, no homo.

Presentational absurdities aside, this show is fucking brilliant and you should make it your new 7 PM EST nightly news choice.

Each of the initial four nights has been an A+ for content and analysis. But if you just want a little sample first, I suggest checking out the Wednesday night show, which recapitulates the strong points of the first two nights and then goes on to practically apply them and tell you why it all matters.

I’ll be watching tomorrow, and watching as the second week starts on Monday too. I won’t tell you what to do, but you know what I think.

***

The work is all that matters now. Politics is tangential and sometimes even a distraction.

Building an infrastructure both logistical and digital to support the work is essential, even though it always seems to take too much time. It’s not easy, to fit in the soaking of rice every night, or to make it edible every day. It’s not easy either to keep my mind focused and on track and full of purpose.

I’m one human and deeply flawed.

Nevertheless, I have a job to do and I know roughly what it is, and recrimination is nothing but an even more useless distraction from it.

I’ll try to remember that.

Last night I ate ramen, but it should not be a cause for worry because I did it ironically, at least for now.

In the same spirit as going to an Indian casino for Thanksgiving–an act most likely to be filed under A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.

I used to believe in the temporizing gray area of lesser-evilism, but as my life moves toward twilight I grow more obtuse and willful. The blacks deepen and the snow whites grow rare but not less glorious. More. It’s a hell of a way to live.

The pic was clipped from a video by the bad-ass Primo Radical.

In my pious and inflexible old orthodoxy, I say to you again: Everything, yes everything they heap vast tons of money into influencing you to believe, too often with complete success, is a god damned lie told in the service of the end boss, Moloch.

This includes of course propaganda about domestic economics, and geopolitics, but also homily advice on what to wear to work, and the cranberry relish recipe they play on NPR every year. Yes that’s what I’m saying. The recipe is a lie designed to force you into believing things about what good consumers do for the holidays. But never mind that. It’s a throwaway.

The major difference between almost-2023 and 2004 is that back then, you could toss the truth out there offhandedly, so long as you did it with some credibility and style, and in the pages of a periodical not many people were likely to read.

Nowadays, if you want to take your chances and go around telling truths about Emperors, or clothes, you better have your own website for it, and have either millions of readers (like Russell Brand) or very nearly none (like me). Otherwise, down comes the banhammer, or in the wily pre-Elon Twitter style, the shadow-ban hammer.

Primo got his next to last strike on YouTube five months ago and went silent before they silenced him. Now in the darkness he’s on fire again, but only on Rumble, where he can be safely dismissed by the good smart people of the PMC as a fringe kook, or a “right-winger”, which nowadays means simply anybody who doesn’t swallow gallons of media sewage every day and spit it back out on anyone unlucky enough to be in range of their foul, creepy, and misleading second-hand opinions. They splash “right-wing” on RB, on Glenn Greenwald, on Jimmy Dore and Primo too, on anyone, no matter how ludicrous the labeling. It’s the new cry of “Fascist!” by all the people who gladly serve the modern essence of present-day literal capitalist fascism.

(Which isn’t to say there are no real and dangerous right-wingers. Only that the sheep who baa Wolf have done themselves a mighty disservice by flinging the term around until it means nothing.)

To jam-shift gears on you somewhat, I offer Mr. P. Radical’s interview with a man named Keith McHenry, who co-founded an outfit called Food Not Bombs.

I put off watching it for a while because it sounded like another tepid interview with another aging activist. But I was floored by Keith and the scope of his work, and the depth of his thought. This is what real practical living anarchy looks like, and he’s been at it for forty solid years.

I’m tempted to be ashamed of what little I’ve accomplished over the same span, but I counsel myself again that shame is useless, and that this entabout or at least shouldn’t be about, all me all the time, because that’s dull and unsexy and it’s my job as a belletrist to seduce you.

By the end of the hour it was somehow heartening instead of depressing.

Or maybe the light is just getting ready to return again for a while.

Anyway and whatever the reason the storm is melting back and the scowl is melting with it. I can’t promise you any flawless optimism about anything now or ever. Only that despair has been pushed back an increment or two, and that my voice is cracked but found.

Moves like a fist through traffic
Anger and no one can heal it
Shoves a little bump into the momentum
It’s just a little lump
But you feel it
In the creases and the shadows
With a rattling, deep emotion

It can be healed, mate. But the fist always rises to abrade the wound wide open again with a steady flow of faceless traffic trauma.

Nobody inside any given car is faceless and it can be proven with a simple glance in the rear view mirror at the roof top tent. It’s a paradox. Can a line of cars go down this slow? Yes and down and yes and down mostly except for those tap bumps on the accel pedal into the break light.

This moment there is a mammal under my parked truck, scampered there out of the frozen midnight stars and abiding without snow under its paws for this while. I watched it go.

I can’t help it. I wouldn’t begin to know how if I could. Every one of us is a mammal and maybe even that mammal.

Genuine emotion will always rattle

us.

The cool, cool river
Sweeps the wild, white ocean

Ocean of wind, sea of cloud, tropical until crystallization into sleeping epiphany. Ba
ja.
Then inland. Higher.

Yes, Boss–the government handshake
Yes, Boss–the crusher of language
Yes, Boss–Mr. Stillwater,

Mercenaries of Nicaragua. Boardrooms full of back doors; humanitarian missile silos. Boss will always, find a way to thrive cha-ching, and no man knows the day and the hour and the cost. Pentecost and Eisenhower warned you Man who did Korea himself. Language as a weapon to fight back with? The same language they wield? Absurd.

Not untrue.

Crushed like grapes fermenting messy and inexact. Wordslinger also finding its inexact blurt of unintended consequence for the boomerang swings chopping the air in both direction ways.

The face at the edge of the banquet

So what? What the fuck are you fucking looking at? I learned to love the edge.
There is an illness called putting up Christmas trees
and another one which is being genetically incapable of understanding why people really put up Christmas trees.
Very little is understood about either. Follow the science but blindly. Murder the baby spruces in the name of Jesus, but get a permit from the Forest Service before you commit to the act.
(The cool, the cool river The cool, the cool river)

I believe in the future
I may live in my car
My radio tuned to
The voice of a star

This living in cars
is not for pop stars
any more than living under the truck is for the skunk. MalibuWhoWho. Paul would do it slumming Santa Fe. A girl in trouble is a temporolicious thing and a lady of the canyon is something else, else again. Reset the navigation beacons that’s what the winter solstice is for and the odometer never runs backwards. There are times when it seems too cold to go out for a drive, and one skunk is glad for that.

A radiotelescope in my Impala as unlikely as it seems. (Mammal.)

II.

Song dogs barking at the break of dawn
Lightning pushes the edge of a thunderstorm
And these old hopes and fears
Still at my side

In your side rather, like a thorn, of crowns of course or a spear of water gushing, but other than that I’m witcher.

They will always be song dogs to me now. And the edge again. So blessings.

Anger and no one can heal it
Slides through the metal detector
Lives like a mole in a motel
A slide in a slide projector

A mole is a mammal too even at the Red Roof Inn. For all I know one is living under the living car. The cool, cool river sweeps the wild, white ocean. Possibly wide. Definitely wide too. About a hundred dollars.

The rage, the rage of love turns inward
To become prayers of devotion
And these prayers are
The constant road across the wilderness
These prayers are
These prayers are the memory of God
The memory of God

This next part is the religious part. My qualification to comment is limited because I lost touch with Him years ago and neither of us ever got a twitter to speak of. Like so many souls I intermittently idly miss.

Love I’ve seen it rage or maybe surge but rage isn’t of love? These prayers are though the sometimes constant sometimes inconstant road, but the very definition of wilderness is that there is no road across it; just saying. I have memory of god but that’s not what these prayers are about either. I have loved this song from day one but I mean c’mon.

And I believe in the future
We shall suffer no more
Maybe not in my lifetime
But in yours, I feel sure

Your belief is mistaken, Narrator, unless perhaps you speak of the life past lifetimes. Where there’s breath there’s life and where there’s life there is the suffering, of chill moles, of stray cats, of the poor here and the poor there. Far be it from me to judge your feelings of certainty or anything else, but when I say far be it I’m speaking pure rhetoric and impure metaphor. I’ll judge the shit out of you or anyone; I do it all the time and so do you. We just do it quietly for the sake of diplomatic and civilized etiquette. I feel sure. Say persay when you mean per se.

Song dogs barking at the break of dawn
Lightning pushes the edges of a thunderstorm

And these streets
Quiet as a sleeping army
Send their battered dreams to heaven, to heaven

Songdog and lightning is the central perfection that no heaven can hope to achieve. It is born of the work we do you and I.

Streets do send and what they send is battered. Beyond that the less said the better.

For the mother’s restless son
Who is a witness to, who is a warrior
Who denies his urge to break and run
Who says, “Hard times?
I’m used to them
The speeding planet burns
I’m used to that
My life’s so common it disappears”
And sometimes even music
Cannot substitute for tears

I have broken, I have run. They will tell you there’s such shame in that, but the ones who tell it that way have never been warriors. They were given 4F exemptions for fallen arches or manic-depression. They hid out in college or Canada. They got good jobs with the government and started the next war and the next. I won’t deny my urges because they are all I have. My urges are the only foxhole buddies I have ever known and my best imaginary friends.

My life is common my gaze, not so much.

I have cried and I have sung and the burning’s just begun. It will consume everything we know.

Maybe not in my lifetime, but in yours. I feel sure, sure.

III.

I’m this darkness before the dawn. The ice that knocks and the wind that hurts but this entabout me.

Who denies his urge to break and run? The better people maybe.

We all of us cry just the tears don’t always fall sometimes the lids just brim.

If a snow morning dawns bright but no one is there to see it, does it glisten while you listen? Double clutch. Mmm yeah gotcha. Sliptyre Catch is a town up by Mangas Spring half a mile onward.

If poetry isn’t a mirror it is nothing at all.

The empiricists have a theory about when the longest night is. They have theories too about the wind, but I never yet heard a right one rustling in the leaves. Yes they measure.

It don’t measure up can I get a witness?

Everybody needs a good cult, but you can’t have mine.

First they told us that the vaccine would prevent you from getting the Rona, even though they knew it wasn’t true.

Then they said, well nah, you don’t get vaxxed to protect yourself … you do it to prevent transmission to others, who may not be strong like you.

Which was also a willfully told lie. There was never even any data to support the notion that the jab prevents transmission, much less a study, and it turns out: it doesn’t. Of course it doesn’t.

It’s the same with masks. Fauci first said no, wearing a mask might do more harm than good, don’t do it. Then he said he lied with good intentions–if everyone needed a mask, then medical staff might not have them. Then he said oh god yes mask. Double mask. Cloth masks are great; then cloth masks are useless …

Lies upon lies upon lies.

Near the end, they finally retreated to saying: well alright. The best we can say is that getting vaccinated might make your inevitable experience with C19 … less severe. You might not up and die.

To which I say, well that’s nice. But the same can be said about the stuff you called horse paste. The same can be said about monoclonal antibodies and a whole lot of things.

Things you the government full of capitalists didn’t pay for and never will.

But you paid for that one thing, right? You paid for people to take the jab. That and only that. Not cancer, not blood pressure medication, not food allergy testing, not any kind of life-saving medication or procedure. Just Pfizer’s vax. Just Moderna’s jab.

Why do you suppose that is?

It was a giveaway to the pharma companies, in exactly the same way that the farce called Obamacare was a transfer of wealth not to people, but to insurance companies.

They lied and then they mandated their lies, and started firing nurses, firefighters, truckers, all kinds of average Americans because they were skeptical about the lies.

Those Americans were right to be skeptical, but all being right got them was the derision of fools and a pink slip.

I don’t care if you’re the kind to wave “Science” in my face along with a disapproving finger in Walnut Creek, California; I don’t care if you’re an angry anti-vaxxer in Tittyfuck, Alabama–none of that shit matters.

What matters is they lied, that they have always lied, and they always will lie about Everything, so long as the lie is in service of profit, American exceptionalism, and Old Glory waving proudly on the fourth of July.

Iraq and Ukraine. Libya and Syria. Pfizer and Moderna and who killed JFK, MLK, RFK, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton and the Sanders campaign, twice.

Vietnam.

Not codifying Roe into law for fifty years.

Not passing the same universal health care the rest of the planet has, ever.

Running endless propaganda about the critical importance of voting, when there are no real choices.

Promising to forgive student debt or release low-level drug offenders or bring the minimum wage up above eight laughable bucks an hour.

Preaching hope and change with no intention of changing anything ever. Networking for eight years, grabbing your stack of Benjamins, going windsurfing with Richard Branson, and puppetmastering the blue party from behind the scenes for the benefit of the class of donors that you are now rich enough to be a part of. That’s how the game is played.

Yes Bush sucked. Yes Trump sucked. But if you think Barack and Joe are lesser evils, even a little bit, you’re choking down another system lie. Out here on the flyover frontera on the wrong side of the tracks, things go from bad to worse no matter what the name of your Senator or the color of its tie.

Go see if you can find out the number of times Bill Clinton took a ride on the Lolita Express. Or Hillary for that matter.

Then tell me to shut up with that tired old story about what was really on Hunter’s real laptop.

The planet burns and that’s obvious, but it’s harder to see that for the average lunchbucket in the home of the brave, it’s all been burning and twisting in agony since his father was in the second grade, since Teddy Roosevelt climbed San Juan Hill.

The fire is fed by people’s bodies and their minds, and it smelts bricks of pure evil gold, with good paychecks as by-products for those who are smart enough to keep their eyes on the prize and off the body bags, singin’:

You don’t dress for the job you have
Oh no
You dress for the job you want

I punched the alarm and slept for another two hours from nine to eleven, thus ending my chances for the A.

But I did get right to work when I did get up, and the ladder went on without any fuss at all. The fuss came after, in trying to get the cover on.

The cover got on, almost perfectly, finally. Still one little kink to iron out. Video got taken, maybe too much video.

As 4 PM rolled around I jumped in the tent-folded, almost perfectly covered truck to head out and lay in my supplies for the storm.

It went pretty well. B+. I didn’t get pellets because I didn’t anticipate an early closure of the chimney store on a Sunday.

It’ll work out. It’s midnight now.

At seven this morning, they say, it will briefly drop below freezing before crawling barely back into the forties for the day. It’s supposed to start coming down at 10, and around noon the rain will become snow.

So I’m thinking that even if I get up at eleven again, I can still make it to the pellet chimney store without having to deal with anything frozen. If the forecast is right. Which is no sure bet at all, but I’m taking it anyway. It will remain a frozen hellscape through Thursday at least. My plan is to stay inside for those seventy-two hours, and work on Important Things, like video editing and my ongoing minimalist reorganization of everything.

Having the RTT done (to this point) has my mind racing in a thousand directions. Mobile desk, mobile chair. And then heating, and Heating What Exactly: will a canvas bush tent be my office, or will I make something out of the bed of the pickup? I dunno.

Sanitation.

Cooking and cleanup.

I like thinking about these things, and smart strategies for solving them. Actually solving them is really hard!

But I did that today. I should have got that fucking A for that alone. Says the entitled whiny bitch-student in me, to the vestigial professor also inside me …

I’m crazy, my darlings. It’s not always in a good way either.

Slept real good. But got up inappropriately late.

By the time I got outside it was glorious. Up over sixty degrees, and 67 in the house with the drapes flung wide to the sun.

I got to work. Tent work. I was reasonably productive.

The tent poles for the window coverings are finally sorted out. The leftover pieces of the build are put in their special junk pile place. Finally, the ladder is almost there.

I got a scrap of video for it too.

But at four o’clock, with the darkness starting to come down, I was hungry and not in the cook-it-myself way. So I cleaned up and went walking. Less than a mile from the co-op … god I’m going to miss this place.

Tanked up at Javalina on the way back. Now, it’s Dusk. Of a Saturday. A couple of weeks ’til the solstice, when the welcome change to again slowly lengthening daylight wraps around itself.

The first real storm, herald of winter proper, is said to be barreling down upon us, arriving Monday morning and lasting into Tuesday.

So tomorrow the Sunday, I will get up a little earlier. I will finish the ladder, take the Full Glory video, maybe tack the bedliner into place at long last, fold the tent back down and batten all hatches against what lies ahead. Then I’ll prep everything else. I’ll get the food I won’t walk to drive or walk for. I’ll get a couple more bags of stove pellets, and like that.

At the next dusk I will be back in this cottage and ready for the cataclysm.

On Monday early they say the winds will spike first. Then the snow will come down and down all day and into the night, into the Tuesday before tapering off and leaving the world draped in silent crystal.

In some ways I wish the storm would last much longer, many days, and in some ways it will. Temperatures are not going to recover quickly. We crawled into the sixties fahrenheit today, and probably will tomorrow too, but after that it will be quite a while before we see anything that balmy or easy.

I don’t want to go anywhere. I’m home, it is temporary, and I want to cherish home before it goes away forever too soon.

Just like life, come to think.

I met a nice guy today. Like most of my neighbors here on the Hill, he’s Mexican*. He has inherited property, next door. But the interesting part was his day job. He’s a welder, and he spends his weekdays working for the Man, the Migra, down on the border.

Patching holes. In the border fence. With his big welder. Holes cut by people from his culture of origin. Over and over. They cut ’em. He patches ’em.

He seemed … a little defensive about it.

I would be too, if I was him.

Or more properly, and for better or worse, I would never be in that kind of situation in the first place.

He’s just doing his job, right? Just feedin’ la familia. Good pay for good honest work, more or less.

Nothing wrong with that, ennit?

No reason at all, to be defensive. I guess.

***

Anyway, the reason we got to talking was that I spent the day in the driveway, putting some of the finishing touches on the roof top tent. Specifically, it is now carpeted with vapor barrier, and there are sheets on the bed. Even a pillow in a pillowcase. I documented thoroughly with the camera, so you’ll be seeing it.

Tomorrow, weather permitting, I’ll tweak the last things like the ladder and the rainfly rods, and maybe nail down the bedliner finally. The cut scraps of vapor barrier carpet will help.

And then my attention will turn to the next steps. I have the Starlink. To use it in this context, I’ll need electricity. I have a box of electricity. It needs some testing, but I think it’ll do nicely.

And then some kind of beginner chair-and-desk arrangement.

With that much, I can wander out into the desert, the mountains anywhere, anytime, and work, or sleep … write and shoot and edit.

I have potential solution kits for things like eating and hygiene too, that could extend the capability of the base rig beyond day trips theoretically.

These kits are kind of bulky, because they were not intended for a truck-only rig, but for a trailer.

I have a trailer.

It’ll need more work first though, and that means February at the earliest.

In the meantime I want to see about miniaturizing and seeing how far I can get with just the truck. By ‘how far’ I mean in time, not space. Probably the limiting factor on the length of trips will be water, eventually. Drinking. Dishwashing. Handwashing. For cooking.

I’m in the habit of keeping ten gallons around, but I don’t know how many days that translates into. And the ten gallons are typically secured inside a house. Mobilizing them may be complex, especially without the trailer. But solving the complexities sounds like a kind of fun that interests me.

In time I need to make money. I’m no longer counting on the next video breaking out in viral blooming. I need a job that isn’t the moral equivalent of welding the border. They are more scarce than they would seem to be.

I need the money to buy four walls and a roof someday.

I have four walls and a roof, but they’re in Sand Rock instead of on the lot here in San Vicente.

It’s all very complicated.

But I’m a Sorter. The Sort is the raw material for belletristic endeavors of my kind.

***

Catching-up companion piece, the very last one, posted under 25 Nov if you care to. My god do I ever have a shitpile of politics going back weeks, in spite of this temporary outlet. I think tomorrow I’ll do a massive dump of it all and clear my books, not to mention my head. You’ve been warned, just in case.

* A million years ago, I took a college course in Mexican History, which, due to the academic peccadilloes of the instructor, largely concerned itself with what to even call people from here–Hispanic, Chicano, all that. So I’m aware that the current favored term is “LatinX”.

But I’m 99 percent sure that referring to him (presumably him–I didn’t check for pronouns), or to anyone around here that way would be met with amusement, an insulted silence, or both.

So yeah. Privilege checked, and found wanting, but Mexican will just have to do for general prose purposes on this Spill. Ars longa, vita brevis.

If you actually do still love America, you have to ask yourself what the fuck these red and blue retards are doing to it.

Putin Balks At West Imposing Oil Price Cap

***

Perhaps I should have said that I am one of them, the poor people again, and that it is partly, even mostly, by choice. I do own that part of it.

To clarify further, I’ve never hurt a dog, except in my imagination, and I don’t think I ever will. I came a lot closer to it when I was thirty and forty and had a job that I needed to get my sleep for.

***

I’m skipping over a lot to say this, but I’ve done the calculations, and I think I need about 300 square feet minimum to live properly, in a house at least.

Four would be better and eight better still. But price per square foot is a very important factor too.

An arched cabin is still sixty-something dollars per square foot best I can tell, and a very basic doublewide would be about the same, though that’s based on the fact that the smallest doublewides are much more than I need. A fancy tiny home is around three times as much, 200/sq.ft., and that is probably a dealbreaker, alas. Even the tiny homes that are too tiny for me come in at about twice the cost per square foot of the arched, or a medium-old trailer.

I need 100 square feet for a kitchen, and 50 or 60 for a bathroom-with-tub. Everything else is somewhat flexible. But a wood stove is twenty square feet, and so is a minimal closet, and so on. An office is another 100 at the extreme low end. I’m assuming the bed will be lofted off and thus not count as square footage, but the stairs do. (I could put a washer, closets, and cabinets beneath those stairs, a trick I learned at Tinyfest.)

Basically I’m back where I started, with the Arched being the best deal overall, unless and until I could find a full 400 of a tiny for way less than they were asking for new ones at the show. One for twenty-five thousand would pull it even, apples to apples, with building up from the foundation.

My head circles back to the sheds at Lowe’s, which may or may not be palatable to the zoning goons.

Circles within circles.

***

Catching-up companion piece posted under 24 Nov if you care to.

The neighborhood here on the hill is going downhill. But it’s not the neighborhood’s fault. The whole country is going downhill. Maybe most of the world too at the same time.

The poor people, and I am one of them, are getting poorer quicker as time passes. It’s stressful. They cope badly, with booze and yelling, too many people jammed into too few rooms and too many cars coming and going on the street at all hours of the night.

I cope badly very differently; caffeine, nicotine, obsessions and belletristic fits and starts, and I daydream about what I will do to their dogs and maybe to them for being such shitty pet owners and noise polluters.

I don’t know if Covid was ever a real thing, but when it abruptly ended, things were different. The help wanted signs go up and they stay up. Today there was one at the coolest coffee shop. So I got my java and I asked the cool chick how many hours a week there would be at that job.

First she said they were putting off hiring until February at least. I didn’t ask her why the sign was still up. Then she said, um, twelve maybe sixteen … hours … maybe …

So alright. I’m supposed to keep my availability open whenever, be ready to pick up a shift any time they finally get busy, and in exchange, I pull down maybe six, seven hundred bucks a month, with benefits out of the question. Huh. Nah.

I might make twice as much at some fast-food shithole, for twice as many hours, but I can’t even fully imagine what that would do to my head and self-worth.

Maybe I’m better off falling off the economic cliff, or of course trying to land something remote over the Starlink. Yeah.

Pretty sure I won’t be working on the railroad though.

DEBATE: Did the Squad BETRAY Rail Workers?

Spoiler alert: The question is rhetorical and the answer is obviously yes, unless you’re a tool of corporate hegemony like Ryan Grim.

Catching-up companion piece posted under 23 Nov if you care to. Almost home.

I’m getting a decent amount of sleep, but it’s in smaller chunks at random times. Right now it’s four-thirty in the morning and I feel happy and good.

Inside, I’m spending the money to keep the stove burning. Outside, it’s warmer too, because the rain clouds are keeping the day’s heat in a little better overnight.

The same clouds are playing in a very lovely way with the bright moon and stars.

I was out on the porch for a bit just now and there were two big owls calling to each other for a good long while.

***

I love the sound of owls.

I wrote that about 24 hours ago. Then my body decided to just stay up all day, and I allowed it. So I wandered through Tuesday in an energetically crippled state, and in spite of that I was fairly productive.

Finally about 6 PM, well-fed and a hot bath under my belt, I couldn’t stay awake any more and I slipped into bed with the setting of the sun, and slept deep for seven and one-half hours, bringing me full circle to one forty-three on the next morning, this new morning, and positioning me well to maybe hear the owls again, if they are in the mood to talk.

***

Catching-up companion piece posted under 22 Nov if you care to. After three more of those, the hole in my spill will be healed, just as the hole in my schedule has been as of right this minute.

I finally got the next video up late this evening. It’s Part One of the Tinyfest weekend trip and covers getting to that event, from like 5 in the morning to noon on this past Saturday.

The biggest frustration was that I used the small and convenient GoPro to shoot the clips for it, and the audio is thus naturally rough. I’m going to have to figure out a fix for that, and the fix is probably just making it easier on myself to use the big camera and its external mic a lot more often. Other than that, I’m pretty happy with the film as published.

The footage from the event itself is vast, and as I’ve started going through it I’ve realized that most of the audio is simply not there at all. I don’t know why that is exactly, but I’ve had it with the cheap kit mic, and quite ready to spend a couple hundred on a better one Right Now. The good news about this is that I’m going to have to learn how to do a voiceover of existing footage and substitute that narration for the raw stuff. This is a technique I’ve wished I’d already mastered before at various times. The time is now, it turns out …

Getting back to my rental sanctuary was a blessing, and the changes the trip worked on me made it even better. I’m going to miss this place someday.

But not right now, because that would be foolishly inefficient.

Ars longa, vita brevis. ‘That’s a thing that I keep in the back of my head’.

“I am not going to fucking Denny’s.
I am not going to fucking Kevin’s!”

This was the very literal Word On The Street, south Texas Street to be precise, that greeted me on my return to my dwelling on that very same south Texas Street just a few minutes ago this evening.

They were spoken by a young man in a loud tone. All I know about him is that he was poor, and agitated, and spoke Spanish too. He was yelling the English words at his girlfriend, who was driving alongside him as he strode furiously uphill, trying to coax him back into her battered old car with dubious promises of agreeing to not take him to either Denny’s, which is a restaurant that poor people eat at, or to Kevin’s either. (I have no god damned clue who Kevin is, but I am reasonably certain that the girlfriend’s name was Christa. This is a sort of weird private joke that you will eventually decode after watching a video I post later).

I was standing in my temporary driveway, next to my truck, which I had just backed in and turned off. So I wasn’t well-lighted. I might have been invisible even if the young man and his girlfriend were not so assiduously focused on each other, on fury and wheedling respectively. The Denny’s and Kevin’s discussion unfolded a few feet from my quiet face, and I had nothing meaningful or coherent to add to the conversation, at least not in the moment, so I remained silent, and hidden, the perfect witness to the crime.

The crime is called capitalism, or something like that–the society it inevitably breeds anyway. Among the poors. Myself included.

One other little thing that may not matter at all is that the scene took place in a thick fog that enveloped this town and the whole area around it for miles, driving in from my trip.

A hundred or so miles before, in a different town across the state line on my way in, the words on the street were different. Almost the very minute I pulled into the town’s official state rest area, a very different, or not so different young man spoke different words to me:

“Hey man. Do you know where I can buy any meth?”

I assured him that I did not, and I was not particularly polite about it either–perhaps tangibly surly, even. Even tangibly to a badly jonesing meth head.

Now. If I were very good at my job, which is “belletrist”, I would leave it there. If I were an earnest Hemingway, I would tell the story simply, in words comprehensible to someone who reads at an eighth grade level, and I would let you the reader draw your own conclusions about what it all means in the grand scheme of things.

But honestly I’m a pretty half-ass belletrist, and not even a very good reporter either. So I’m going to beat you over the head with the moral of the story.

Things out here in the real world are really started to look more and more fucked up. Far away, in other words, from the well-appointed corporate conference rooms (I am also of late newly unemployable), from the tree-lined campuses, from the Tiny Home Expo in Scottsdale, Arizona, from the gated communities and the precious suburbs with skyrocketing property values, from the ski areas and the jazzercise studios and the better sorts of day spa, from the kayak shops and the Lambo dealers, far away from Ibiza and Martha’s Vineyard, things are … not good. Not good at all.

I don’t know how it is where you are. Maybe the comfortable, diverse but still mostly white world is suffering too; maybe the co-workers or the kids or the lady who manages your local Starbucks are showing signs of going a little nuts as well.

But here in Flyover with the poors, nuts is becoming a more than daily occurrence, maybe more like an omnipresent new normal.

While you and I fret over whether Elon is evil or heroic, while we do our level best to ignore what Blue MAGA is doing to Julian Assange or some rando railworkers, the capitalism we’ve always counted on to be there for us economically and spiritually is dying an ugly, brutal, and pointless death. The civilized democratic values that we hold so dear are meaning less and less to anyone who can’t afford to eat at Pappadeux’s or maybe even Del Taco except on Taco Tuesday, or put enough gas in the car to get to their shitty alienating thirteen-buck-an-hour job.

I think there may be some cause for concern, and I’m not even sure that voting for the Democrat is going to help for too much longer.

Believe me, I’m not trying to be alarmist. I know there’s enough stress in your life already without the spectre of imminent social collapse being flung in your face like a unhelpful handful of Jelly Bellies.

I just thought you should know. The results of my careful peripatetic research are indicating a Situation may be brewing.

Maybe we should do something well in advance of the chickens coming home to roost or whatever

it is

they say.

It’s well before dawn. I’m working on four hours of sleep. Against my better judgment, I’m hitting the road to Scottsdale. But before I close this fascist-killing machine down, I am compelled to point out to you that Matt Taibbi just broke the story of the year, and that the media’s silence on it is just as predictable as it is evil.

When you go to the Y-Tubes and put in his name, or #Twitterfiles, or anything else that you think might bring you back some relevant video on this major story, you get exactly one credible hit.

Matt Taibbi Drops BOMBSHELL Report on Twitter’s Censorship of Hunter Biden Laptop Story

I don’t care what you think about Hunter and the Bidens, or Elon Musk, or Donald Trump, or Matt himself.

Once you’re down in the weeds, this isn’t a political story in the usual sense.

It’s a tale about the banality of evil.

Not the Orange Man Bad kind of evil. Not the evil that they try to make stick to Putin or Zelensky respectively based on team colors.

The evil you live with every day.

The evil perpetrated by college-educated people in successful organizations in the name of keeping their personal and corporate worlds successful. Thriving. Abundant, or whatever crappy Oprah word is au courant lately.

The inside of Twitter was a shitshow, but that’s only the surface level of this story.

The reason it matters is that in the end your company, your school, your bosses are absolutely no different, and to the extent that you succeed within and among them, you will end up being no different too.

The System sucks souls. The System wants you to care about hockey and wear an e-watch and to vote pointlessly in useless elections that change nothing ever.

Fuck this shitty world, this shitty world of the trains running on time that you built, that I built, that we built and go on celebrating with nauseous piety, patriotism, and flatscreens for all.

I’ll talk to you later.

The place I’m calling home for the next eight weeks is getting quite clean in mental bandwidth terms. There are still a few bags to fill. There are still a few piles to address. But it all makes sense at least. The only thing wrong with it is that it won’t last, and that I’ll be retreating back to what was once sanctuary soon.

The place I call my house, in other words, a currently uninhabitable place.

I let myself drift toward sleepiness hoping for a nap from seven in the evening to three in the morning, leaving me plenty of time to pack and get to the Tinyfest. I turned off the pellet stove, and the Internet. But as soon as my head hit the pillow I was assaulted by the image of a dead refrigerator and I bounced right back up again and went outside and burned one. Then I came back here to the more durable sanctuary of the blank page to pour out my botheration, so grateful that it is always here for that purpose or ones more noble.

I’m going to kill that refrigerator because it’s a matter of survival, a fight to the death between it and me.

My weapon of choice is still a nebulous image too, but I’m leaning toward that table saw.

There must be some way to hacksaw out a space there. It seems impossible.

It’s not.

That’s what I tell myself.

My hope is that this theory so full of promise will be enough to grant me the peace of sleep now.

It’s eight. There are still seven hours for it.

Catching up companion piece posted under 21 Nov if you care to.

In Real Time.

I haven’t seen an ant in many a cold week. I assume they’re tucked away safely in their hills. Meanwhile and somehow

Still fiddlin’.

I’ll leave the metaphor implicit for you to discern yourself, not because that’s the belletristicly proper thing to do, but because I have no idea what the truth is, and we all know it will end badly for her because eventually it ends badly for everything that lives.

Catching up companion piece posted under 20 Nov if you care to.

I dream of love again. The warmth of the stove pales before it. Everything changes. The time is so short but that fact solves the problem of the dry few words and they pour.

Today the wind died back and the afternoon should rightly have been a triumph of productivity. But instead I battled a depressive mood.

Unlike the estimable Lee, I have not yet Begun To Run.

I’m Done Running

This one’s about a strategy for getting beyond the censors.

The other one I want to give you is emblematic of why the censors are after him in the first place.

Major News Outlets Finally Demand Assange Be Freed

Watching the whole thing is too much to ask, but starting 58 minutes to an hour in should give you a very good idea of why this guy is important and cool.

Nor ski, paddleboard, jetski, Razr; it’s just not the kind of thing a peasant or rice farmer finds useful or productive or even affordable.

I do want to be involved in the process of keeping myself warm, and not have a gas bill.

I want to figure out how to cook my curry over the same stove that keeps me warm, instead of paying a cook and a waiter.

I want to live close to the dirt and let it feel me alive because it’s an antidote to the fear.

I’m not sure that hospitals matter to me.

I am sure that trees do.

This morning she packed up the sick kitten and headed back to the place I call my house. I remained behind at the place I call my home for another two months anyway. They love me and I love them. Who deserves who or not remains an open question.

There was a long hot bath and there was wind. The slick modern woodstove began getting its workout and my head got one of its own.

I am making a little birdhouse in my soul, but I have not decided about whether or not to leave the night light on in it. I leave that decision for another day, habitually.

I am the younger dark-matter version of this guy, but I have no Mexican relatives to run to, and I will never tell you to vote or quit whining. I will tell you instead that Gramps is a libtard even if he is a better man than me.

I’m the artist always searching. There is another place now, also in New Mexico, but without zoning:

“Otero County has no zoning or licensing requirements. However, restrictive covenants, deed restrictions, county ordinances, or the regulations of other government entities may apply. Certain areas of the county may fall under review by other governing bodies in the case of ETJ (extra-territorial jurisdiction) but currently there is not zoning in Otero County.” … https://co.otero.nm.us/183/Zoning

Timberon, the Concho of the East. For my adult life I have dreamed of the person I would be in Silver, but now it’s turning out temporary and that is my fault solely.

My life alone is shrinking to a white-hot point of light with a tent in it.

It’s important to me to be cold and to take steps to be warm, whether that be a rental stove or an alcohol heater that suffices to put the glow on a hundred square feet.

The tossed-together vid about a drive surpasses all expectations while the Halloween one that says Four Weeks Ago now remains chill and sober with a quarter of the views. I understand almost none of it. There is only the work, done well or tossed off, and I am the pawn of the mercyful fates instead of a self-made man.

The hardest part of falling a little behind on posts here is discerning the best way to remedy the situation. I never know whether to go back and fill in the days in order first, or to just start from the present day. There isn’t a perfect answer.

But since I’m in more of a recoouping mode rather than a highly energetic one, I’m starting here. There are some drafts started for like the 20th and the 21st, and I have reason to want to fill those spaces behind with things that interest my audience less–the overtly political things. So that’s the way it will be.

There’s going to be another day or two to put my space and my head back together, and then a shorter trip next weekend for Tinyfest Southwest, which, like much of what’s happened lately, is more video-bait than writing-friendly.

Tonight I did some fun research, the lesson of which is that a canvas tent is better for my use case than a nylon one. The ‘awning rooms’ I was so hot on a week ago are less attractive now, but maybe there are canvas ones I haven’t seen yet.

And in any case, there’s much to be said for relying less on tents altogether, and more on trailers.

Just like there’s much to be said for an arched cabin over a pre-built tiny house …

These are the things on my mind. Modalities for living cheap, rough, and happy.

” … a track or trail, especially that of a wild animal pursued as game. See more.”

Major News Outlets Finally Demand Assange Be Freed!

A story I don’t cover enough (Julian Assange) from a guy I don’t watch enough (Lee Camp).

Additionally, I believe this is the first clip where I saw anything substantive about the railworkers story.

Also, at about an hour in, Mr. Camp starts waxing pretty metaphysical, about layers and levels of truth. I think he’s really quite a philosophically ambitious man, behind the comedic persona, and I can both relate to, and appreciate that.

CA Now Sharing Vaxx Recipients’ Medical Data w/ Consulting Firm

A Democratic Party Consulting Firm to be precise.

They’re ignoring HIPAA and they’ll get away with it too.

I’ll be filing this away for the day two or six or ten years from now when people are trying to sell me on what a great progressive friend of the people that Gavin Newsom is.

Or maybe I’ll be lucky enough to have built a reputation for never talking to political salespersons by then.

Cops ARREST Mom For Having Son Walk Half A Mile Home

I remember so long ago, like fifty years, when first I came to the Arid Zona. The crazy father told me I wasn’t old enough to walk around by myself. I did it anyway, pushing the limits when he wasn’t looking every chance I got, until I was going far back up into the hills, and all the way downtown eventually.

The dipshit neighbor and the even dipshittier cops and prosecutors in this story are another reason why poverty of the average people is snowballing.

Hope it’s better where you are.

Evidence Biden Ordered Trudeau To Crush Trucker Protests

The story is that they’re having hearings in Canada right now, about their woke little hitler’s dive into martial law against the convoy protestors some time ago. It’s not going well, optically anyway, for Boy Justin. That makes me happy. Schadenfreude.

He ruined a lot of lives that day. The Ottawa protesters were not only deprived of their ability to make a living, but smeared in the media as anti-vaxxers and white supremacists. They were neither.

I think about the rail workers of America now. I think of my own shaftings at the little college world of Arizona.

Our job now isn’t a job for the Man. It’s to take the bullshit they heap upon us and to compost it into something better.

This right here and right now is my personal answer about how to do that. I don’t always feel it will ever come to much, or do any good. But I’m not going to stop, either. Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.

Joe Biden ABANDONS Rail Workers

This is a long beautiful panel piece hosted by Briahna Joy Gray that tells you everything you need to know, not only about the rail strike and the shafting of the rail workers, but about everything else wrong with being a “worker” as capitalism tries to die.

If you don’t have time for that, you can get the basics in a minute and a half at the Revolutionary Blackout Network.

You CAN’T Support Labor IF you Support Democrats (or Republicans)

In some ways I feel like venting at length against the PMC and at Blue MAGA now, but it isn’t the right night for that, if indeed it really ever is.

I ask that you listen to those who have the time to be thoughtful and merciful about this. There is no penalty for ignoring my ask, as almost the whole world will surely do. May the blessings of true freedom be upon you and me both either way.

Primo Radical came back briefly from his hiatus of months’ duration to post this.

273. Whitney Webb | One Nation Under Blackmail

I had no idea who Whitney was before I saw it. I’m glad I saw it.

There are a lot of heroes out there still.

When I can snatch the pebble from their grasshopper hands, I will have learned.

I think you want to know about Syd Barrett. I want you to too.

In outline, he was a member of Pink Floyd, the primary songwriter and creative genius in fact, just as they were breaking through to stardom and success, and at that point he stopped caring about either. The other members eased him out of the band because his attitude and behavior were making those lofty goals less possible.

He was losing It.

Maybe he was just going nuts.

Maybe he took too much acid, or couldn’t, or wouldn’t, handle fame.

Maybe he was autistic, schizophrenic, catatonic. Or sensitive, artistic, if you prefer.

His sister says he was never diagnosed with anything at all.

Everybody has an opinion.

I have one too, but I’m saving it for a future post.

Some of the opinions are famous ones. Shine On You Crazy Diamond is one of them. It’s purely about the Syd question from the point of view of his bandmates.

Listening to it with that in mind is enough for one day.

What’s wrong with me?
What’s wrong with me?
What’s wrong with me?
None of your goddamn business.
See how we also

***

Waking up, it occurred to me that looking at land in Apache County is just the latest attempt to answer the question of where “The Hell Out Of The Way” is.

Subsequently, I thought: I could do most of that cheap land parking bit in my driveway in SandRock, too. With no worries about gas mileage or septic tanks, and less worry about cash running out before September. It would be a tinhorn, nickel-plated, and admittedly ugly way to live; it would be a deferral of dreams that might amount to a denial if things went really badly. It would also be field-testing with no real pressure.

Is the same little slab of concrete where I stopped being a professor a good enough Out Of The Way for a while? I’ll keep thinking.

“‘Cause now fires and rock houses and grape-flavored rat poison are the new trinity for this so-called community.”

But hey baby. It’s the 4th of July in the land of the free.

***

Once upon a time, I wrote a cycle of ten poems, each accompanied by a carefully composed photo, based on points along a section of AZ 77 and Navajo Route 6. It was a road I drove up and back once a week and every week for ten years during the academic year. I drove to go teach.

There is now a road in my life that is more important. Maybe it always was, but now it is in that regular kind of way too. It is US 180 and the essential section for me runs from SandRock on I-40/US 66 down to La Ciénega de San Vicente, with a coda tail that rejoins the interstate system on I-10 at Deming.

Leaving SandRock and heading southeast, you will first encounter the back way into the Petrified Forest National Park. Just after the park entrance, you move into a new county, named after the Apaches. The important thing about Apache County is that it doesn’t have any zoning. (Or at least it hasn’t historically. Quality information on the subject of places without zoning is very hard to come by.)

The first ten miles of Apache County are not worth discussing with seriousness. It’s flat and barren. But starting about 30 miles out from SandRock, the land begins to roll and the junipers start to present with at least a decent thickness and height. It’s not gorgeous, but it is very close to good enough.

(The stop sign is at 180, about exactly forty miles out.)

And, it’s very inexpensive. Three, four, five thousand an acre at the low end.

I don’t want to live there. But I might like parking there for a while. Maybe even a long while, at that price.

Until I establish an income stream, the lot in the small artsy college town will remain unbuilt. That plan will be on hold.

The Apache County plan, or maybe at longer odds Socorro or Catron counties, is a stopgap I could afford, and that has been the obsession for twentyfour hours. I’m ready to let go of it for a bit now, filing it for a rainy day.

It’s not even four-thirty. On, like, the tenth day …

I feel really good about it being done.

I did not get a second mobile room out of the deal so far–the ‘annex’ didn’t work right with my plan. But I do now have:

1) Absolutely everything I need to do light welding on my own, and,

2) A plan B which might result in two more rooms beyond the RTT bedroom, rather than just one.

It’s done and yet … it’s never done.

I went in dutifully to the weld shop at ten, and all I got was a long sad face.

Come back at 1:30, said the Chief.

I’m writing this at 12:46, initially.

We’ll see shortly if the fourth time is the charm.

****

Meanwhile, by last night, I had figured out that the annex room that is supposed to hang off the rooftop tent is not going to work for my situation. I won’t bore you with Why.

So I went looking for alternative solutions, and I think this is going to be the one, eventually:

ARB Deluxe Awning Room with Floor

I could buy and mount just the awning first, and then add the room if I still craved an annex.

I found this guy who even put a woodburner in one.

His YouTube. He has land now too, and although he’s very cagey about saying where it is, I’m pretty sure it’s in the far east outskirts of Prettytown. He’s dragged up a trailer and is living rough in that Apache County kind of way, which is delicious.

***

Fourth time was. The rack is stacked.

They finished too late in the day to bolt and lock everything down properly. But I have two of the four holes drilled, and I think I can finally finish things off tomorrow. Fingers crossed, because I miss my peaceful sanctuary and I want to get back to it.

I went to the little weld shop at 10 in the morning when the frost was melted off. The ‘service advisor’ here was a little old lady (sorry Ma’am) who had very little clue. I got the two pieces to finish off the tent rack cut, but they couldn’t weld them on right then. “We’re backed up for weeks; down to two techs”, and the usual modern bullshit. They said they’d call.

They didn’t call. So at 2 pm I walked back over and the big chief was finally in. The big chief’s story was No Way Today–come back at ten in the morning.

To be continued.

In the meantime:

I can’t find much verification for this story online. I watched the video. Maybe what they showed amounted to sieg-heiling. I’m inclined to trust Max and his version of what happened, but I can’t really say for sure.

What I have no trouble believing is the bigger story, about the FTX cryptocurrency company going bankrupt, the fraudulent nature of it’s owner, a Mr. Bankman-Fried, and the ties of this failed institution to both the ‘government’ in Ukraine and the Party known as the Democrats in the service of yet another War-As-Money-Laundering scheme.

This world of ours, the world run by oligarchs, is bullshit mendacity at every level.

Sure I’m glad that Kelly, and Hobbs, and Cortez-Masto all won their little races, for all the good it will do.

Which is exactly none.

Last time, when they promised us 2K if those Georgia senators won, and when they did Biden welshed it down to 1400.

This time, he did student debt relief in the worst possible way, and is now acting surprised that it didn’t work out. But it did work out, for him. The red tide was stemmed and he still didn’t have to keep his promise.

It’s the same with the refusal to codify abortion rights for 50 years, but now I’m repeating myself.

I feel good about getting as far as only voting Dem in a couple of crucial places, like helping keep the cowboy lunatic’s hands off the office of the AZ Secretary of State.

I feel even better about not contributing to the rot, by spiking my votes for governor and Senate and House.

Two years from now I’ll do better, and spike my Presidential vote too.

Apologies for the partial rerun, but now that we know where things stand out there, I can finish my thoughts on the midterms, and move on to the important things, like the state of welding in SandRock.

Recoup day mostly, due to high wind.

It was supposed to die down after noon but it never did. Then as the sun set, the chance of rain went suddenly from two percent to 79% … which quickly turned into a better than average chance of snow …

Which then started falling, though admittedly in no great quantity, but still–weird.

Meteorology around here is not a science. More like tarot card reading, or political polling and prediction.

Speaking of which, the conspiracy du jour among the cognoscenti is that the Joe administration knew all along that student debt forgiveness, as they constituted it, would fail in the courts, right after the midterms.

I don’t know about that. I’m willing to believe it, pending further data. What I am sure of is that the Dems never enshrined Roe v. Wade into law for 50 years very much on purpose, for the political gain they get from the Handmaid Republican Bogeyman, and that even with a real majority in the Senate they will continue to throw up their hands, probably blaming three or four people in the House for that bullshit, which they are neck deep in.

Sorry not sorry for withholding my vote from you, Mark Kelly. I’m glad you won anyway, but I’m even happier that you did it without me this time. Get used to it.

I did get caught up on the aforementioned cognoscent, and present here a sampling of the better things for your perusal. Or not as the case may be.

Three Dores.

America Is A Mafia State Run By Democrats & Republicans

Court BLOCKS Biden’s Student Debt Relief As Unconstitutional

The Absolute Dumbest Takes On Midterm Elections

and a Russell …

RB in conversation with Eckhart Tolle (on the political/spiritual borderline)

And oh wait one more, from Sabby, on the student debt crap:

Biden’s Student Debt Forgiveness BLOCKED

Includes a BJG clip in which Briahna notes that wonderful Dems like Tim Ryan (who lost) and the Cortez-Masto woman in Nevada (who barely won) came out against Biden’s broken and quite possibly entirely cynical version of student debt relief.

It was still below freezing at nine, but sunny enough to think about going outside. I warmed the pickup, melted the frost off of the windshield and everything, and got to work. Video was shot of it too. You’ll see.

I’m probably going to need a small shot of paid help of the metalworking variety first thing Monday morning, unless things go super smooth tomorrow. But in the end I will have a truck with a bed, not in the classic van sense, but then my vans have never been 4WD either. The whole casita of the trailered variety will still have to wait. But the thing I ached for in the early months of the year is a wish fulfilled regardless. Take her out anywhere. Get cozy. Have internet no matter where. Yes and a reality now, rental or no rental, full trailer or none.

It’s almost eleven at night and I am exhausted from all the process with power tools. It’s time to crash and sleep the sleep of the just.

A snow day without snow, long cold slow and grey, prepping for the short warm one to come at the weekend.

I did get one thing done, and that was a fresh domain+email+hosting package designed to go on the hunt for a joblike income stream all over again. I dreamed about going back to driving large trucks but I think the remote call center, customer service, whatever, is still much more likely.

Anyway it’s got my legal nomenclature all over it so you are unlikely to care, and if you do I will of course let you know when the transition happens, something like a year or two from now.

I feel like I’ve been away from art too long and I’ll be fixing that soon.

First it was only a violent windstorm, yesterday, and then the chill rains came down and wouldn’t stop.

Today dawned cold but clear and though it never did warm much it was a beautiful sunny day.

It turned out that a third trip into Prettytown was warranted, for the reason of getting one vehicle close to perfect. (Some parts came in quickly.) So that trip took up the daylight, and it was worth it, if only barely.

The Red Pearl purrs.

Tomorrow they say will be warmer, and Saturday better still, before the snow comes back late in the weekend. I have a job to do and its name is RTT, the tent that goes anywhere.

Jimmy Dore Savages Michael Moore

This one fascinated me because, at various times in my life, MM and JD have both been exemplars of all that is good and right for me.

These days, there are Democrats, and there are leftists, and there is no overlap between the two. In all the essential measures, from the economy to endless war, the elected Dems, all the way to and including AOC, are on the wrong side whenever there’s a vote–despite what they may say and preach and claim to stand for.

Michael Moore has said the smartest things of all when it comes to climate change and the fact that “alternatives” will solve nothing if the richest peoples in the world insist on excess and capitalist overconsumption and lives rooted in greed and inequality.

Jimmy Dore is ignoring all of that, and saying that so long as Moore still thinks that voting blue is the answer, he’s a dumbass.

Mostly and usually I tend to agree with Jimmy, and consider Moore’s prescriptions to be dubious to useless.

But I don’t support JD’s demonizing of MM, because I view it as worse than useless.

Personally I can still be friends with you if you’re a Dem, even though I’m not.

It is getting more complicated though.

53 House Republicans voted against billions for Ukraine, while no Democrats did.

Then we have cases like this guy, a Repub who based his whole campaign on being anti-war.

I still haven’t voted for any R’s.

I don’t know for how much longer that will be true.

The woman who was Trump’s lame press secretary for five minutes is now Governor of Arkansas.

It’s early on election night and that’s the most photogenic thing I can say so far.

What we got done today, during yet another Prettytown run, was making the backup car, a Subaru, happy with an oil change plus air filter and turn signal bulb for a hundred bucks at the dealer, and ordering it a couple of additional parts, like a sun visor, for $two-fiddy more.

I’ll keep this car, I think, until one of us dies. It’s the perfect low-slung all-wheel drive beast for snowy pavement, which is exactly why I bought it eleven years and a hundred eighty thousand miles ago–the only brand new car I ever bought (and probably ever will buy) and paid for five solid years until it was cleanly mine. Selling it would only bring in three or four thousand bucks. It’s worth more than that to me just sitting in the driveway waiting for a sick truck rainy day. Amen. Love you little red pearl.

The running around is all done. Tomorrow is supposed to be a day of darker skies, lower temps, and light snow. So I scheduled what sociality there is to schedule in SandRock. Thursday the snow should be tapering off and if I’m good I’ll get started on the RTT.

For tonight I’m watching election livestreams without much actual interest (it’s like having an NFL game on in the background, between two teams you could care less about), and drinking the fine fine Moscato (her favorite) from the same club vineyard we visited … was it only yesterday, technically?

Yes.

Lord.

We got up early, fasting, and both dropped off a little dose of blood at the cool non-standard doctor.

The other major adventure was looping around through greater Cornville to the Oak Creek Vineyards. We’re members because she said so, and the perqs of membership are growing–there’s talk of an exclusive clubhouse, ain’t we fancy.

We had a flight of the latest, brought home a case of goodness, and rocked back through Prettytown without even stopping because we’ll be back there tomorrow for an extended round of errands. I got some quality footage of the Vaaiir dropoff coming down the Rim, and that famous red rock country. The video it belongs in is slowly coming together in my head.

With luck, after tomorrow, voting and car maintenance and all, real life can begin again. By which I mean: getting the RTT installed at last, on the beautiful truck that is, knock wood, running like a dream.

These days are both prosaic and full. I listen to them carefully and I feel good, not with the intensity of those writing nights of rain, but with the blessings of clear skies and temps near 70 once more. Glory.

Mostly I worked on film today, in SandRock.

I got a cat video up because I had access to footage of the six beauties currently residing permanently or temporarily within the official confines of my 1400 square feet.

More importantly, I went down to the pocket park where I made my fateful decision last year, and shot a few attempts at trying to explain what I’m doing here at all. That single crummy park bench is … central to my story, a turning point for how I think and live.

I suppose you’ll see fragments of why, soon.

It’s been a messy trip full of social and other obliging, like the Thursday dental, the Monday light medical when I next wake, and another appointment for the old car Tuesday. After that I can get to work on the rooftop tent, and start to think about heading back to the cienaga for a time. After a slight chance of precip here Wednesday, translating into an even slighter chance there Thursday, the long-range forecast is for nothing more menacing than clouds for some time.

I believe that’ll suit my needs just fine, and may it be so.