The best part of any Arizona election is the ballot measures, which in AZ and CA can be put up for a vote by citizens and interest groups. There were ten this time and it was very easy to tell which way to vote, with a little bit of study.

As for voting for office-holders, that was a fucking trainwreck this time. Basically it comes down to two questions:

–Exactly how batshit is the Republican?, and,
–Exactly how ineffectual and centrist is the Dem?

Two examples.

For Governor, the R is a true believing Trumper, so no. The D was so lame that she refused to debate the R. So again, pass. There was a semi-official write-in candidate, who I actually saw interviewed on some fringe channel. The impression I got was that he was quite high on the Asperger’s syndrome, a little twitchy even, and his paperwork lists him as a Buddhist.

So, way better than the mainstream options, and good enough to get my vote.

For Senate, the R is better than some, but still very conservative and pro-lifey. The D votes dependably with Biden every time and talks real tough about “the border”, apparently trying to peel off a few independents by selling out the wetbacks. In this one there was a Libertarian on the ballot, and although he dropped out days ago and endorsed the R, I checked the box next to his name with satisfaction.

So it went down through the State Treasurer and the local Constable.

I actually voted for more Dems than I thought I would in the mid-ballot, especially and strategically for the Secretary of State (who runs the elections). This is merely a testament to how bad the R’s were. Even so, I wrote-in on my fair share. The poet Bukowski got my vote in one case even though he’s dead. Chris Hedges got another even though he’s an old blue-blood socialist New Englander.

The propositions still matter, a little. And no one cares if you just sit it out. So I voted, in my toxic hopeless way.

I’m sure you’re very proud of me for it.

Coming into town yesterday–this is the barren you see.

I’ve learned so much hanging out down in San Vicente. I needed to go, because the lone wolf mental bandwidth let me add the film channel to this blog, and even let me start saying the things I’ve needed to say, half raging politic and half brazen belletrism.

But coming back–is okay. I don’t feel hemmed in. I’ve learned how to be free in myself and to do what I need to do. (So far.)

A few days ago I was afraid of losing my foothold in the ditch, my fingernail grip on Bullard Street. I will lose it, of course, in its current incarnation, less than three months from now. I was afraid, of not being able to afford any of the options for staying.

I may not be able to afford any of them. But I don’t feel so much fear about it, now that I’ve beat back once more to my fallback place.

That’s what the cold Sand Rock moon is teaching me tonight.

It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve failed, to get a consonant regular job down there in the last two months. But I have. I think … I’ve had the bitter fragrance of the rebel all over me all my life. I also think that I did a damn good job of covering it up for decades.

I just can’t bring myself to be bothered to cover it up any more. I don’t give a fuck if the employers of La Cienega saw the real me and it made their blood run cold.

The money’s running out and still I don’t care.

The money’s running out and that’s why I was fearing.

I like living in that town, and it would be a setback if I couldn’t no more. But it might be true, that twentyfive years after not being able to afford to live there the first time, I still can’t, quite yet.

Only in passing that barren, only by landing here in this hole again, only by sleeping in my overcrowded $500 a month house on the bleak side of the Interstate, only by beholding that same moon over my head did I see at last.

It doesn’t matter where I go, or live, as long as I know who I am.

Almost the only practical thing of value I did today was getting the Starlink to recognize that it was in a new place and that it still had a job to do. It’s doing it.

Now it’s my turn, to use it to find a bloody income stream and inject that savings account with fresh green blood.

I’ll head back down in a matter of days. The clock will start ticking again. I’ll have, let’s say, ten weeks to find that injection.

If it all works out, maybe I’ll be a nomad, or maybe I’ll hole up in a different San Vicente parking place, but with a proper trailer.

If it doesn’t–I’ll be back here where the moon is cold and the landlords are cats.

What the fuck ever. I’ve found my groove.

Either way and any way, worst case included, it’s gonna work itself out.

Up and awake, 4:48 in the morning. Three-plus hours to finish the load-out in my halfbaked crepuscular way. Fuel her up. Head her out. Eight thirty three.

First seventy miles uneventful. Then at Magda the snow starts. I pull over, top off the fuel just in case, grab two bottles of water, and a small cheap burrito I don’t really intend to eat–emergency ration. I pull out of there grim and determined.

The higher up I go on the New Mexico side, the prettier and sunnier and drier it gets. I lose my grim and start to smile. The wind is up a bit but the trailer is tracking true behind me. The state line, into AZ.

Luna and then Luna Lake. At Alpine, but only within the town limits, it’s snowing fierce dry little pellets, and for a block or two they are swirling like dust across the road.

I get up to the highest point on the Alpine Divide, 8500 feet, and it’s briefly gorgeous and serene once more.

DCIM100GOPROGOPR0264.JPG

Down into Springerville it deteriorates rapidly again. But by the time I pass the time and temperature sign it’s only 34, and as long as it’s more than 32 I’m as happy as I can be.

By St. Johns everything’s cool. I look at my phone and realize that I have an extra hour because of crossing the state line. I cruise the rest of the way and decide to use that hour to spot and drop the trailer, and do the first part of the unpacking.

That done, I use my own bathroom for the first time in a few months.

Within a minute or two of settling into that, here comes the Kali Mama with a look that says: Where you been, V?

It takes her three or four minutes to allow a proper petting. But three or four minutes after that she’s on the bed in heaven, rolling around and happy.

I strip my shirt off and leave it for her, and get a fresh one for the appointment.

I get my teeth cleaned. It feels great.

Okay, so let me know if you feel strongly about this new theme, positively or negatively.

If, of course, you even see a new theme … It’s been sort of a mess of a blogging day. WordPress itself updated. Then there were a slew of plugin updates, and for the second time since I installed Jetpack and the WooCommerce store things, that broke shit left and right. When I got all that fixed, the “Site Health” plugin started complaining that I had too many themes kicking around, so I looked at the new one and it looked pretty okay. Sterile, and I miss my old brown Sundance theme, but we’ll see.

Your opinion matters a lot. Also, if I can’t tuck that damn shopping cart out of the way somehow, that may be a dealbreaker. I’m nowhere near ready to take this thing full entrepreneurial, and that goes double for the blog part here.

Today was a somewhat unexpected family day. I had planned to leave for the north by noon, but I wasn’t even started on packing or hooking up the trailer by then. So I danced with events and rescheduled myself. The good part is that it’s a little after seven in the evening and I’m feeling the desire to crash. So presumably that’ll mean I’m up very early and on the road by the time it’s getting light out.

It looks like I might have to dance a little more, and maybe even before the month is out. Dance across the country in fact. Maybe I should have been more careful talking about going On Location in that last video. But there’s nothing like a long road trip for filmic appeal, either … and now I have the tools to do it right. There’s a story to go with it too but I can’t go there yet because, well, there’s genetic craziness going on about secrets. I’m playing along, with that particular crazy, even though I’ve quite recently stamped my foot about some of the other kinds. (“I’m getting too old for this shit.”)

I’m having such a good time with the videos. At the same time I’m fretting too much about money and examining this modern Remote Work idea with one fierce and calculating eye. These are the two parts of me in the moment. The raging artist, and the careful, sometimes even fearful critter that is always figuring out how much longer the blessed life can go on financially. I’m not stressing though–not yet. I just want to find some way of never having to let the fear side take over again, even if it means chopping twenty thirty forty hours out of my remaining time on the planet every week.

I don’t have to tell you about that shit, though. We all grew up on the plantation, and we’ve all had to try to find a better way. More significantly, we’ve all chopped off parts of our time in the service of keeping fear at bay, some of us the smart way, some of us the brave way, and most of us both ways over time.

I feel myself to be both no one special, and my old flaming genius self, at the same time.

It might be the first time that’s ever been true.

Eight years or one lifetime ago, I was comfortably doing my Teaching Computers thing in the small towns and large reservations up around where Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse and Offisah Pup lived in olden times.

One day I was helping an older black guy. We got to talking, and he told me his thoughts on the upcoming election. He was leaning hard toward Trump because he admired him. “He’s a businessman,” said my elderly student, savoring the word as if success in business were the most desirable thing in this world.

I papered over my distaste with professionalism and immediately swung things back to the screen in front of him where he was supposed to being learning how to use Microsoft products or some damn thing, in order to complete his rehabilitation back into a useful office drone, which of course was not ever going to happen. But wasting his time in a college classroom was a good deal for him and me both, in the short term.

Trump won that election because enough people like my student, especially in places like Milwaukee and Lansing, either had their heads turned by visions of having a gold toilet of their own someday–or were just so fed up with being lied to and taken for granted by Democrats that they stayed home by the thousands and disengaged from electoralism altogether.

They joined the half of America that has come to realize that joining team red or team blue is not worth the price of the ticket, because joining either of those teams means people like them will lose the game either way.

I say “them”. Maybe I should say “us”.

Depending on how we’re carving up the word “Sides”. There are a million ways to do it.

For today I want to set aside the 75% of America, more or less, who are either checked out or won over by some variation on a MAGA theme, and zoom in on the “Left” … side. Where I live, and where I think most of you do too.

Even among this fraction there are factions. The internecine warfare among them interests me personally and intensely. We can argue about Ukraine or presidential dementia or apartheid in Israel all day long and I won’t get tired, and most days I won’t get seriously mad either; ahem.

Two examples of this will be enough to overflow my page for the first Tuesday in November.

DEBATE: Was the CPC Ukraine Letter a MISTAKE? (w/ Joe Cirincione)

In this one the estimable Briahna talks with some old white blueNoMatterWho type about some of these wedge issues on the left. He does a great job of standing up for his side, and the whole video clip (apparently from a longer interview that you have to pay to see) is a nearly perfect example of the split I’m talking about, without the kind of fog and FUD and personal bitterness that you will get in any given “Jimmy Dore vs. TYT” style rumble.

Then there’s the one I saw on the Twitters today. (I’m supposed to be there just to post links to my own clips and GET OUT, but spectacular firefights like the current one over hashtag #pelosigaylover are like crack for my kind of addictive personality.)

Here’s Caitlin Johnstone:

The whole story is at https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/destroying-western-values-to-defend

And here is one of the responses she got:

I think the difference in perspective comes down to one key thing.

If the System is working for you, spiritually and economically, you call this a Democracy and generally trust and defend it.

If the System isn’t working for you, you call this a colonial Empire, mistrust it, hiss when it scores a little victory (like blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline), and feel a lift when you hear that somebody somewhere countered its excesses successfully.

I’ve tried to be fair as I wrote this, but you know which Side I’m on I’m sure.

Nothing interests me more than hearing which side you are on, and at some level deep down: Why.

Happy Halloween everyone, even if–maybe especially if–you happen to be a success in a capitalist culture.

Strange answers to the psychopath test | Jon Ronson

***

Or, if you’re feeling strong enough to face @RealHalloween from a less whimsically British and more impactful POV, try this.

Michael Moore Presents: Planet of the Humans | Full Documentary

The Plot To Kill ‘Planet of the Humans’ (feat. Max Blumenthal) | Rumble w Michael Moore

Michael Moore Responds: New Report REVEALS Green Billionaire Attacks On Movie ‘Planet Of The Humans’

Listen to the dripping cult drops of the word ‘Progress’, even by a really talented and human filmmaker who has things 97% right, and the contrasting frustration and agony in his voice when he speaks words like ‘failure’.

The Mate’ video was unexpectedly successful. In the wake of that, I started to think that titling my stuff in a way that would leverage keywords and bring in random views from people searching for escapism might be a thing worth trying. I settled on “funny animals” as the key to this, but I fucked it up by putting the word ‘cult’ in there too.

The algorithm didn’t respond well to my shenanigans. Searching for ‘funny animal’ videos doesn’t bring you anywhere near me.

Live and learn. I’ll continue to think long and hard about my titles, but I’m not going to try gaming them to that extreme again, not because of any scruple, but because it’s a little gross anyway, and doesn’t work well besides.

***

On a note that is only related in my strange little head …

Diane Sare joins Sabrina Salvati

Ms. Sare is running for Senate in New York, and she doesn’t have a prayer of knocking Chuckie Schumer out of his slot, but she intrigues me anyway. At first I was interested because she’s part of a recent trend, involving the followers of the now-deceased Lyndon LaRouche becoming more visible and active politically. A pair of young LaRoucheites disrupted an AOC event recently, and were subsequently interviewed by my dudes over at DueDissidence. That set me on the path of trying to figure out what LaRouche stood for, and listening to Diane Sare became part of that journey.

There’s a lot to like about what she says, and that goes for the LaRouchists more generally too. She totally gets the part about endless war, and the capitalist military-industrial complex, and the profiteering of politicians, and how all that is central to Empire. Even just based on that alone, she felt like a natural ally.

But there’s a point where we part company completely.

She confused the hell out of Sabby in the interview, by remarking that she sees no evidence that our situation with climate change is largely human-caused. What, now?

She pointed out that solar and wind are not going to sustain eight billion people in anything approaching a modern way, which is absolutely correct, but her answer to that is that we need to build more nuclear power plants, to sustain the eight billion in style and pack still more warm human bodies onto the groaning planet.

This view is echoed by the title of one of LaRouche’s book, from 1983. It’s called “There Are No Limits to Growth”.

Pair that with: “It’s good for man to have more power over nature,” which is a direct quote from Sare’s interview with Sabby.

Personally, it’s hard for me to imagine anything more wrong, factually or morally.

***

Searching Diane Sare’s name on YouTube, the first video that pops up contains the phrase “Green Fascism”.

By which she means Klaus Schwab and the IMF and the globalists who really do cloak their fascism in a greenish-sounding rhetoric. This makes things even more complicated and confusing.

***

It’s Time to Bust the Myth That Endless Economic Growth Is Good for Us

Yes it is. Way past time in fact.

I found that article by searching on what my bioregional compatriot Edward Abbey had to say on the subject of growth, which is quoted at the top of the story: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

Sare and those who think like she does (I’m thinking of the fine gentlemen of The Duran, who I watch all the time) would argue back that’s it’s growth for the sake of People, or Humanity. From my twisted point of view, it’s all the same.

For me, whether endless growth is the goal for the sake of global power elites, or for the sake of an average middle-class American lifestyle, or for the sake of starving children in Mozambique

… is ultimately and sadly irrelevant.

Piling up a surplus in the name of endless growth will spell doom no matter who we say it’s for.

When a herd of deer is starving and you try to fix the problem technologically by putting more food out for them, it might buy you a warm fuzzy feeling. But in the end what it leads to is just more starving deer.

On a much larger and more human scale, the Cult of Civilization in all its forms doesn’t have an answer to this problem, because the Cult of Civilization itself, alas, is the actual problem. It makes no difference whether you call your favored schism in the cult Capitalism or Marxism, right-wing or left-wing, blue-no-matter-who Secular Humanism or god-fearing homespun old-time religion.

Granaries. Supermarkets. Sedentary agriculturalist citified populous civilization …

Quote this then: In the cult of civilization we’ve traveled happily and merrily along a one-way boulevard until it came to a dead end.

The truck slows.

The truck, she stops.

We stare dumbly at the dead-end sign. We know what it means whether we want to know, or not.

There is no left. There is no right. There is no way of going back, or forward. According to the traffic laws we ourselves wrote, according to the spiritualities we ourselves invented, according to all the available evidence–we’re fucked.

Leading will do you no good because there’s nowhere to lead to. Following is pointless because the Leaders have failed.

The only thing left is to get the hell out. Of the cult of the one true ten thousand year old Way.

***

What the fuck are you even saying, “Vairtere”?

Well I don’t rightly or exactly know, Reader.

All I do know …

… is that the only thing left is the now, and the only question, hanging unspoken in the air between us, is … Now, What?

First we have to know with our hearts what The Way was, and … why it made us so past tense.

Then we … might have some sense of how to get Out Of It. Out of the Way, the hell out of the way. Maybe. Maybe.

At the end of time, On The Beach, deciding to call yourself captain or commander or admiral is just a parlor game. It doesn’t matter any more in light of the situation–the problem we face is larger than titles, or who has power or legitimate authority. In fact the question of what is legitimate or illegitimate according to the old cult rules is

Completely beside the point

Now.

Here.

***

The wind in its unpredictable fashion kicks up a little devil of dust which might or might not be radioactive.

We sit and we watch it travel from one side of the windshield to the other.

I don’t want to go

just yet.

Consciousness is a miracle. The fact that I can say these words to you, and that you can listen, is completely improbable and miraculous. Sometimes it is tempting to believe that a god sent the miracle, and you should believe that if you want to, but of course there isn’t any evidence to support that belief. It’s a belief based purely on faith. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Or right, either. Carry on however you like, but don’t expect me to necessarily see it your way.

The dark side of the miracle is that everything dies—that consciousness and even sensation do not persist indefinitely. Spiders die and leaves die. Relationships and networks die. People die, empires die, whole species die. More to the point, you will die and I will die. The miracle of experiencing, the miracle of knowing and being, always has an expiration date, and no one ever knows when for sure the expiration will happen–just that it surely will.

In the neighborhood of ten thousand YBP (the actual date varies widely across spaces, times, and cultures), humans collectively made a fateful decision, to stop moving and hunting and gathering, and settle down. The decision had some benefits, and everyone sees that clearly, but no one likes to talk about what we lost in the process, and what we lost was huge.

We committed ourselves to believing that embarking on the path of progress, and “civilization”, was the right thing to do. In any case, within a matter of a few generations, whether it was right and good or not, the decision became increasingly irreversible, for almost everyone.

Also within a few generations from settling and piling up food surpluses into granaries and cattle pens, inequality became permanent. Some people had a lot. Some people had nothing. We began to take it on faith that this was a natural state of affairs, and built ourselves extended belief structures, like the infamous one called The Divine Right of Kings, whether we called them pharaohs or sheriffs or shahs or oligarchs or senators or His Excellency.

***

Generally speaking, the first kings were total despots who had no reason to believe in equality, in liberty, or in justice for all. Rule over the poor or weak, by the rich or strong, was all just a part of god’(s) plan (the names of the gods changed all the time, but not the purpose of gods). The more wealth and property you had, the more self-evident it became that you were blessed by divine favor, as opposed to the less fortunate in the same river valley, and certainly as opposed to those barbarians in the next valley over—to say nothing of the stupid and illiterate mountain dwellers, who everyone freely hated.
Over time, absolute despotism seemed to yield somewhat to other ways of seeing the civilized human situation. We call these other ways by fancy names, like monarchy, feudalism, capitalism, communism, fascism, socialism, and thousands more. “Democracy” became a huge favorite, because it claimed to support rule of the people, by the people, for the people, which sounds absolutely great.

But which people? Well, for starters, property-owning males with a pale skin. Not slaves, certainly, not women, not children, not blacks or refugees or sharecropping renters.

Modern fans of democracy will say: We freed the slaves! We even gave those women the right to vote! Progress! Progress! Any day now we will even get around to tapping the granaries and feeding the poors! You have to be patient! This way of believing, this democracy of Ours, isn’t perfect by any means, but it IS Better than all the others …

To which I say: You’re right. On paper. It sounds so much better than rule by the rich and strong. I salute and support everything you profess to believe in.

***

But when I wake from dreaming and open my own eyes, what I see is a species for whom nothing meaningful has changed in the ten thousand years since the first cities and the original sinful inequalities emerged. I do see a world of highly evolved public relations skills. I hear a sweet lovely rhetoric, raised to an absolute art form by pretty and educated people, well-dressed, well-groomed … charismatic, and … inevitably self-interested and selling you on this point of view because it benefits them, for you to become a believer too.

Let me put it to you another way. When two nice Mormon boys come to your door in skinny ties and white shirts, it’s a pretty simple thing for most of us to say No Thanks, I’d rather not believe in the revealed truths of Joseph Smith and the angel Moroni and in the practicality of wearing magic underwear to get myself to some theoretical heaven someday. And this isn’t Mormon-bashing—take any peddled belief that seems alien to you, in Xenu or Allah or the god of gods called Apollo, or Zeus. The point is, it’s easy to say, um, No and No a thousand times, and not only No but Never.

But when every parent you’ve ever known has one way or another nurtured a belief in you, when every teacher you ever loved was on board, when every single news anchor you ever admired, or hated for that matter, is preaching the same essential doctrine, give or take a few tweaks, it’s very much harder to resist falling for their story and their worldview. It’s much easier to believe that you’re in fact thinking for yourself, while at the same time being completely encased and enmeshed in the theory of Progress, and the Doctrine of Civilization.

It’s easier still to believe that you live in a democracy, and only a little bit harder to dispute some points on the edge of things and say: of course the capitalists are lying to us, but thank the atheist god that at least Karl Marx saw clearly, and had it right.

Civilization is the most successful cult of in all of recorded history, and whether you believe that the best prophet is Marx or Jesus or Jefferson or the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, as is your right, you’re still in the cult in the same way that a fish is in water, and so am I, six days out of seven.

***

What you need to do, to fix it, is to stay in school.

Staying in school, and out of jail, will bring you to a better job.

A better job will make you richer.

Being rich will make you happier.

And if you take all that on faith, and at the end of your days you’re still not happy, well, stop being selfish—take it to the next level and realize that at least you left this world a better place, for the children—didn’t you?

The secret name of god in the cult

Let me whisper it to you

Is Progress.

We lay down our burden and lay down our lives

In the holy name

Of Progress … Amen.

Sometimes you get behind a car that doesn’t know what it wants to do, and it becomes Worth It to get out from behind them no matter the cost.

In those situations, I chant this little poem.

Which-Ev-er
way you
Ain’t

Meaning, as soon as you even start to get out of my path, dude or lady, I’m turning whatever way you are not, thereby ending this blockage and my own frustration with it.

Or, in political terms:

The collapse of the Soviet Union upset the equilibrium of the geopolitical forces. The West felt as a winner and declared a unipolar world arrangement, in which only its will, culture and interests had the right to exist.

Now this historical period of boundless Western domination in world affairs is coming to an end. The unipolar world is being relegated into the past. We are at a historical crossroads. We are in for probably the most dangerous, unpredictable and at the same time most important decade since the end of World War II. The West is unable to rule humanity single-handedly and the majority of nations no longer want to put up with this. This is the main contradiction of the new era. To cite a classic, this is a revolutionary situation to some extent – the elites cannot and the people do not want to live like that any longer. (emphasis added)

This state of affairs is fraught with global conflicts or a whole chain of conflicts, which poses a threat to humanity, including the West itself. Today’s main historical task is to resolve this contradiction in a way that is constructive and positive.

The change of eras is a painful albeit natural and inevitable process. A future world arrangement is taking shape before our eyes. In this world arrangement, we must listen to everyone, consider every opinion, every nation, society, culture and every system of world outlooks, ideas and religious concepts, without imposing a single truth on anyone. Only on this foundation, understanding our responsibility for the destinies of nations and our planet, shall we create a symphony of human civilisation.

At this point, I would like to finish my remarks with expressing gratitude for the patience that you displayed while listening to them.

So you already know that I’m going to disagree with some of that. “Human civilisation” does not lend itself to symphony in my book, for one thing. But for the most part, the overall tone of the analysis is just a far milder and more rational version of my own critique of ‘the West’.

I look at the path my own culture is headed down and I routinely think: “Whichever way you, Joe and Nancy and Kanye and Don and Alexandria and Ilhan and Elon, whichever way you ain’t”. There’s got to be a better way. Even if it doesn’t save us in the end, even if it’s just a better way in the meantime.

I listen to this speech, the end of it as quoted, and I think, yeah, maybe that does sound better. Even if it is coming off the lips of a guy named Vladimir that I’m supposed to be morally obligated by my own patriotic duty … to hate, and vilify.

Sorry for the shell game; sorry if this makes me into a Putiepuppet. I just thought it should be heard, and you’re sure not going to hear anything like it on CNN or MSDNC.

Or any real foreign corresponding like this, either:

On the ground in Donbass under Ukrainian fire

The wind blew hard and cold all day, and the moon went down just after the sun.

It was a good sun period, though not in itself a productive one.

The rambling video I posted after going to the movie last night is now my most popular ever, with the exception of that first stray kitty exploitation clip. I thought about why. When I went to go do a search on ‘gabor mate the wisdom of trauma’, I found that I was coming up as the fourth hit. I think that might have a little something to do with it.

While that was happening, YouTube finally came through with “handles”, meaning that you can sorta name your channel after yourself, like so:

https://www.youtube.com/@vairtere/videos

This is an improvement over the current system, where your URL is a long string of random bullshit. But it’s still less good than the way they did things five years ago, where the semantically correct URL would have been

https://www.youtube.com/user/vairtere

… which today just breaks, in the Newly Improved Situation.

They also launched their “Community” tab on everybody’s channel, meaning that creators can now poor rough blog posts for the purpose of interacting with their viewers, independent of the comments section of individual videos. It’s a good thing, but I’d still much, much rather have a real blog like this one, running real software that can be customized by the content producer, like this lovely WordPress, instead of suffering the choices of the corporate platform.

On the political side I’m starting to understand and make distinctions on what I stand for. The gentlemen of the Duran had a candidate on:

Diane Sare with Alex and Alexander

She’s a Larouchite just like the people who interrupted AOC the other day (see the DueDissidence people for an interview with them), and I feel like she, and the Duran guys, have a whole lot in common with people like Jackson Hinkle and Caleb Maupin. A lot more in common with me than most people too, but there’s this one place where I differ real hard.

They remain solidly pro-growth, whereas I see that as a huge part of the Problem.

It’s true that the ‘green new deal’ approach to that Problem has been viciously co-opted by globalists, and by sanctionistas in places like Germany. I guess I’m all for ‘green jobs’ in theory, but I have such a problem with ‘jobs’ period, as well as growth, and the marxist framing of human-being-as-worker, or faceless Labor, that I find a disapproving frown on my face at times when listening to people with whom I otherwise feel brother- and sisterhood.

This isn’t making a ton of rhetorical sense. I don’t feel sensible. Blame it on the wind, I think, is the approach I’ll take to that small-p problem, for one night.

My heart is with you regardless, and open, and full.

Slowly I am finding a few small cracks in the big smooth wall that stands in the way of my being extant on any map at all.

I doubt very much that one little thing like this will bring in a single more view, much less a subscriber, follower … but … it didn’t feel sleazy or onerous to go there. I even had a kind of fun. So yeah, okay.

I guess it’s like this. Around the time my mom was born, if you wanted to be an actor you went to California, and you hung out or even worked in a place like Schwab’s Drugstore, chasing the longshot hope of being discovered. If they let you go to an audition, you went and did it and did your best, against odds of hundreds or thousands to one.

If one thing didn’t pan out you did twenty, forty, sixty more.

For the majority it still didn’t work, at all, and they waited tables or parked cars until the end of their days.

But nowadays the situation is different. It’s true that you’re competing against a much bigger pool of aspirants. But it’s also true that you don’t have to be pretty, or even willing to leave the house, to have a shot at leaving a mark on the culture and even bringing in a vague trickle of cash.

You just have to figure out a way to play the game, that not only works, but doesn’t fry your soul in the process. It’s definitely harder than that makes it sound. But I don’t believe it’s completely impossible.

Not even for me.

Alright then. So I’ve quasi-promised to keep the political rage out of this verbal hatchery, and I’ve been pretty good about it, even if those recent videos cranked the fury up to eleven a time or two.

So calmly, oh so calmly, let me just mention the story of Dr. Aaron Kheriaty.

He spent 15 years as a professor in the School of Medicine at UC Irvine, and was Director of their program in Medical Ethics.

But that ended quick, a little over a year ago, when he challenged the University’s new rule about needing to get a Covid jab to stay employed. Challenged it, by the way, in court, in a lawsuit that is of course dragging on to the present day with no end in sight.

There’s plenty of good information in the story about how know-nothing anti-vaxxers like this medical doctor are now being vindicated as being on the right side after all, as the conspiracy of silence between politicians and capitalists starts slowly to crack.

For me though, the best parts come later, when Dr. Kheriaty tries to explain WHY we were lied to yet again, and why so many of his colleagues went along with the authoritarian response to the pandemic in spite of fact that there wasn’t, and still isn’t, any real scientific evidence that the damned shot did any good at all. No evidence that it protected anyone. No evidence that it prevented transmission. Counter-evidence to the claims that it was at least harmless.

You won’t be surprised to learn that money was involved. Federal funding for research … uh-huh. Instead of “following the science”, the vast majority of the good smart people, even medical professionals, followed the side of their bread that was buttered by big pharma and careerist hacks like good old Grandpa Fauci.

All that is necessary for the forces of evil to triumph, is for enough good germans to do nothing, or maybe even speak out in favor of evil, if their mortgages and college funds depend on it.

And for too few to place the public good above profit, and get fired for it.

Ultimately this is why, 95 times out of 100, Moloch wins.

The Machine isn’t broken, it’s fixed. In favor of the rich and powerful, which ever way you turn.

This is what makes liberty and justice for all so elusive, and equality into a pipe dream, on the regular, around here.

With a fair number of exceptions to the rule, my videos have been dependably getting a whole five views. The channel as of today has eight subscribers. It’s a good bet that I have personally hugged most of them.

After I posted my latest one, a weird brilliant little thing that I was far too proud of, and after I’d had a bit of a nap, and watched it a few more times, and turned my attention to cooking, I was pouting in perfect silence inside, about the single-digit view counts, like a butthurt little wallflower, my delicate petals all ruffled. It would have been a disgusting display, if it had been a display at all.

Eventually I tired of listening to my own brilliance over and over and started craving a different quality voice. And I found more than one, at a place called Due Dissidence, while spending my five minutes a day at Twitter in the interests of self-promotion.

After I’d seen enough of their stuff to be personally hooked hard, I got interested in what their story was.

It turns out that two friends from the Hudson Valley in New York just decided to go for it (podcasting) one day, no website, apparently not even a camera. They put out their first show on March 21, 2019–three and a half years ago.

To this day, their earliest videos still only have like five and nine and four and three views, for quality stuff with at least two people making it happen, sometimes with a guest. And these gents are far more amiable and accessible than I’ll ever be.

Their view counts slowly started to climb, but it wasn’t until a year and a half after launch that they had a breakthrough vid that got over 700 views, and a few months after that, another that brought in 4000. It wasn’t until three years after their first show that they cracked 6000 this past April, and then in June: one with over 18K.

Today their subscriber count sits at 2.6K, and their videos are watched by between a few hundred and a few thousand people. They honestly don’t seem to give much of a shit about the numbers, either.

For that reason among others it was a humbling little bit of research for me. The humbling, paradoxically, made me feel better too, over the fact that I’m not an overnight sensation, but … I’m doing pretty okay, really, with only a month under my belt.

Here’s one thing that the crafty side of me noticed.

Every time their view count had a big spike, at least one person’s name was found in the title of that video. Sometimes the name was nationally famous, like Bill Maher or Tulsi Gabbard or Tucker Carlson. Other times the names were more conditionally well known, like “Jimmy Dore”, or even just “Cenk”.

The name is no guarantee of a big view count. They put one up with “Elon Musk” in the title two weeks ago, and it’s still sitting at 255 views today … but it’s a general clue, anyway … can you smell the acrid odor of my greed wheel spinning!?

It’s a little after eight on Monday evening. I’m putting up tomorrow’s scribble early, and I’m trying to love myself without trying, in blissful paradox and jangled truth, eh. The right thing to do from any standpoint now is to bed down and dream at length. So that’s what I’m going to do.

Let’s touch base again on the other side of that, my darlings.

So.
What would we be leading?
Or.
Who would we be following?

Or, or … if the answers to those questions are, and they are: leading Nothing at all, and following No One ever …

Then what exactly is it that we will be … getting the hell out of the way Of?

The answer is simple and complicated at the same time.

It’s the System, the Machine, that which the poet Alan Ginsberg personified as the capitalist god of child sacrifice, named Moloch–a name which Marx before him used simply as a synonym for money itself; a name cribbed from Leviticus, eighteen, verse twenty-one.

In raging political speech I have often called it The Empire, the ugly satanic thing that the noble Revolution of 1776 so quickly turned into.

***

Maybe call it the Avatar of Greed, of Overconsumption. Within the official borders of the Empire, “5% of the world’s population (are) consuming 30% of the world’s resources, and creating 30% of the world’s waste.” (cite).

There are a lot of ways to say the same thing:

World’s wealthiest 16 percent uses 80 percent of natural resources, 1999.

I don’t care too much which exact numbers we pick, or whether you want to focus on all The Wealthiest or just the five percent of us within the US. The point is that in the end, “we” care much more about exploiting-out way more than our fair share, and “we” will find a nice shiny way to justify killing anyone who objects, even if that involves literally sacrificing Iraqi children (for example) by the thousands to the Moloch “we” worship, and then killing Julian Assange for good measure, for making us see what we’ve done, like a prophet of old.

You can talk to me all day about spreading democracy, or helping some subset of the exploited to Fight For Their Liberty, or bestowing our precious freedoms upon the less fortunate from the barrel of a gun or a cash-filled briefcase. I’ll see your lips moving, with skill and talent and erudition, but to me, with regrets–it will always just look like you’re using them to expertly pull up foul seed from the ballsac of Moloch.

They’ve lied to us consistently from the time we were too young to know any better, but repeating the lies ourselves again now, telling them to our children, just perpetuates the tragedy and the trauma.

They’ve told us that staying on the straight and narrow, and being smart and working hard, means that we deserve to burn up 300 times more resources than a poor dumb fuck who God chose to fling into Ethiopia instead of Napa or Sonoma or Marin.

Our dedication to the Machine means that of course we are very much entitled to jump on a plane, or a cruise ship, a couple of times a year and spend a vacation among some other overconsuming elites, or maybe, for a change, among the ones our very way of life necessarily exploits, should we be partial to slumming it once in a while.

There’s more. That same nation of five percent also holds within its (increasingly for-profit) jail cells twenty-five percent of all the world’s prisoners. As the truths we hold self-evident become harder and harder to ignore, our own children go nuts and our old people commit suicide at unprecedented rates. Every other person you meet is on something to try to cope with the contradictions, be it a prescribed head medication, or a surreptitiously obtained illicit substance, or just a bottle of firewater pulled by the quart everyday from the shelf of a convenience store.

Half of your fellow Americans have given up on ‘democracy’ and don’t vote. Of the ones that still do, half of those hate everything you claim to stand for, even though in the eyes of the world you stand for exactly the same fucking thing.

Will you cluck disapprovingly at them all? Will you pity them? Will you take it upon yourself to educate them? Will you instruct them each to straighten up, and fly right, and improve their broken characters? Will you quietly and proudly feel yourself to be their betters?

Will you tell them all to pull themselves together? Will you lecture them about bootstraps?

Will you … lead them?

Will you follow?

Good luck, with all that.

***

But I can’t get on board with you, not for any of it.

I can’t lead them, down some false dreamy garden path. I’m not willing, probably not even able, anymore, to be a follower, of the sick religion of lies and hypocrisy that underlies the whole Enterprise.

I murmur to myself, like a drunkard, like a fool: “Get the hell out of the way … “, first in the harsh, alien, stentorian voice of a blimp Commander, and then repeating it, in something that sounds more and more like my own hushed, cracked whisper in the dark.

I wake, to sleep, and take my waking slow.

With a shiver I remember the words of some other greenish freak from forty years ago.

“You can’t throw it Away, vairtere. Because there is no such place, as ‘away’, you see.”

Well, that’s true. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

Another voice comes, singing:

They will tell you: You can’t sleep alone in a strange place. You will believe them.

Then they’ll tell you: You can’t sleep, with somebody else.

The contradictions and the lies will give you The Fear, a deep, gnawing spiritual fear, and no matter how pretty and perfect your dining room may be, it will never serve very effectively as an antidote.

You resolve the tension by vowing to sleep–In your own space. To make it all okay, To wake up. With yourself.

But where? is that space? and which master owns the land it sits on, and how will you serve him, in order to have the illusion of calling it your own?

Please, listen to me.

When I say. This question, that question, it isn’t cynicism. I mean it.

I understand all about what I must do. What I must do is: Get. The hell. Out of the way.

Even if I don’t, and I don’t, know how, or even where Out Of The Way even is, much less how to get there.

Here, anyway, is a miracle that happened.

Understanding what I must do, but not knowing how to do it, has given me a Purpose, a Work that is not a job.

The Work is figuring out where Away is. The Work is figuring out How. How to get. How to get the hell. How to get the hell

Out. Of the Way.

The Work warms me, on a cold and cloudy night in the mountains I have learned to love.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.

Yesterday’s post here was good to write. But in my own estimation, it turned into the best thing I’ve ever filmed–for the whopping audience of four souls that actually watched it, and for myself. It clarified some serious things for me. After creating it, I changed a few things around here.

I weeded out the two-thirds of my first 30 or so posted videos that weren’t that good, or were just for learning the game. I didn’t delete them. I just unlisted them, and if you want to see them you now have to get to them through the backdoor of a Playlist. They’re not on the front page of the channel anymore.

I also decided that although the Spill here will continue to come out Daily, the vids don’t have to. I posted video every day for the first month because I wanted to get myself in the habit, and also because I thought doing it might draw more people back regularly. The latter thing didn’t happen. I’m sitting at eight subscribers on YT, and that’s eight more than I started out with–I’d call that a small victory while acknowledging that bigger ones are not going to come easily.

I think when I make the run back to SandRock early in November, I’ll shoot a bunch of cat footage while I’m there, and make some vids out of it. But what I really want to do is Part 2 and Part 3 and Part 33 of PR&SF, whether I call them that or not.

I want to tell the brutal pretty truth as I’ve come to know it. I want to do art. Yesterday I did. Today I didn’t … I don’t have unlimited time left … I don’t want to waste it.

So I’ll write here every day and do the best I know how. And when I do manage to bottle lightning, I’ll put that in a video. If it’s just another post, like this one, then no video is required, or maybe even wanted.

Part Two is already written in my head, but not on the page, much less the screen.

I got some bills paid. I cooked and set up my kitchen for more cooking. I made a short list of really important things I really need to get on out there in the world, starting twelve hours from now on a Monday morning. I listened to the wind and I hoped it was listening to me.

Today, you and I are going to begin considering two responses to societal reality from within the Empire.

In the abstract we can call them the Political and the Spiritual. In the concrete terms of emotion, considering our modern situation politically leads to a response of Anger, while considering it spiritually evokes a first reaction of Fear–fear which becomes Loathing the closer it gets to political rage.

Both responses, or any response on the spectrum between them, are valid. Anyone who has chosen to consider the situation with an open mind, or been compelled to live through it, can easily understand why it leads to fury on the one hand, fear on the other, or more typically a wobbling oscillation between the two.

The response of anger is justified, and the response of fear is understandable, because the situation we find ourselves in as average people within a modern society is horrifying to both our human and animal sensibilities.

The societal reality you and I live through day to day can seem normal, but that is only because it has been normalized, often deliberately and strategically, by those who have a vested interest in making the horror seem ordinary and the evil seem banal.

Let’s start with the brilliant analysis of Malcolm X. On the plantation, he says, everyone fell into one of three categories. You had masters, and house negroes, and field negroes.

The brilliance of the analysis comes from Malcolm’s observation that nothing has changed.

When I was still a child, more than a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, I was told that I had three choices. I could lead. I could follow. Or I could “get the hell out of the way”, which has always been the option that had the most immediate appeal, for me, in spite of the fact that I’m still not sure what it means.

To lead means striving to become a master. To follow means rather obviously to obey, and to orient your life toward becoming a house negro.

That leaves ‘getting out of the way’ matched up with ‘field negro’, and although I’m not sure the match is philosophically perfect (in part because no one knows what getting out of the way means), I think we can take that much on faith for now. Malcolm was a separatist, for example. He admired his brothers who found the courage to secede from the plantation by running away, and he believed that physically separating from the Empire was the best answer to what was at the time called “the race question”, or sometimes “the black problem”.

In any case, having your choice limited to these three options is not “freedom” in any real sense. It’s easy and technically true to say that whites in America have always had more ‘freedom’ than non-whites (whatever those dumb terms evolve to mean), and that a literal field negro had less ‘freedom’ than a black person born into shiny modern American modernity. But most of the time and for most people, hot takes like these end up being distinctions without any difference.

The poet Charles Bukowski, echoing Malcolm on the subject of nothing changing, says:

“Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.”

Another reason that the offered choice is false is that many, many forms of “getting the hell out of the way” have been criminalized over time, depending on local circumstance. A field negro who ran away became a criminal by doing so, by stealing back his own freedom and labor from the master who claimed to own them.

Today, there is no frontier outlet for getting out of the way. Wherever you may go the hell away to, the very land you stand on is already owned by some damn master or another. Putting up a shanty and planting carrots anywhere is just going to get you arrested, unless you first have to money to ‘own’ the land yourself. And even if you do make it somehow to the owning class, you will run up against the zoning board, who will want you to get, at the very least, a permit to install a mandatory septic tank, and who will be glad to forcibly inform you that your kind of shanty isn’t permitted in the Residential B-1 zone that they themselves placed your ‘owned’ property into.

And by the way, your taxes are overdue, or … your property is being seized by eminent domain, or … we’ve invented this thing called ‘civil asset forfeiture’, so fork it over, or … we don’t like the way you’re raising your children, up there on Ruby Ridge, so we’re coming up there to shoot them, or you, or whoever gets in the way.

So our only realistic choices are to try claw up the ladder and become beastly Masters ourselves, or to obey and devote ourselves to one, enslaving ourselves voluntarily. (Bukowski again: “And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does. As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can’t believe it“.)

Being offered the vague third choice of getting the hell out of the way really just means ‘you are free to get the fuck out of my sight, peasant, and stay out no matter where I choose to look’.

And even so–I speak for myself–the impossible choice is nevertheless the only morally acceptable choice.

I don’t have much to say to the masters of capital, because there’s nothing to say–there’s only wordless contempt rising up like bile in my throat, manifesting itself in a mostly useless political rage, and a mostly worthless spiritual fear.

Likewise, I have few words for the obedient followers, the house negroes. For the best of them (thinking of Dilsey in The Sound and The Fury, thinking of a middle manager who held my hand when our masters were trying to stab me) I have pity that arises from a shared and spiritual fear. For the worst I have a loose scorn. But words stick in my throat either way, not wanting to waste themselves on what can’t be changed.

But for the rest of you
oh I have words,
all my words,
and more.

To be continued.

I quoted a poet at length yesterday, and now I would like to zoom in on two lines from what I quoted.

you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes

Now zoom in even further.

What does Bukowski really mean, by the phrase “death-in-life”?

I thought about it long and hard. At one point I could explain it entirely (to myself) in relation to holding a job. Selling off your hours and being a wage slave means being alive and dead at the same time. I think that’s partly right.

Then I thought about waiting in lines, or queuing up as they say. You’re not at a job, when you’re in the drive-through waiting to pay for some fast food burgers and fries. But even so you are marinating in what Bukowski calls death-in-life. You’re not at work when you slowly shuffle forward to present your ticket, your proof of payment, in order to get into a Utah Jazz basketball game, or a concert in Las Vegas, but … you are stewing anyway, in that same death-in-life.

It may be true as well, but the definition is at best still incomplete.

Let’s try to get at it by trying to figure out what life-in-life might be.

I sense and feel, personally, that what makes the drive-through and the ticket line so deadly is the crowd around you trying to grab up the same thing you are, whether that might be the dull evil satisfaction of having stuffed yourself with processed meat and over-salted potatoes, the less evil (and less crowded) waiting for a real and decent burrito, the overheated thrill of watching some athletic millionaire perform a slam dunk to win one for “our” team, or the soothing narcotic poison of hearing Alanis Morrisette give her songbird opinion on what irony is. The crowd itself is toxic, and not even just to introverts.

When we pursue life in life, where do we go? We go to Iceland, perhaps. Or at least to the forest, the black forest or the juniper and ponderosa one painted in shades of green and brown. We “get away”. From what? From crowds–not exclusively, but maybe mainly. If we’re lucky.

We go to a cabin in the Carolina woods. We go to a desolate mesa in Colorado. We go to a tiny interstate town in Arizona where almost no one else wants, or can even stand, to be. We go to whatever our idea of the last best place is, whether that might be a gated community on Tampa Bay with ocean views, or a remote little town in New Mexico with two and a half espresso places exactly, and no more than a mile from the food co-op, because someday that mile might be all you can walk in a day.

We’re seeking life-in-life, and seeking to avoid death-in-life at the same time. We seek the life in life in horses or owls or stray kittens or the birds we seduce near to us with our birdfeeders.

And yet … that can’t be the whole story either, god dammit, because Bukowski lived most all his life in LA, and never for one second of it in a gated community. In fact, he hung out in dive bars, because he preferred it usually to drinking alone, and because those were the kinds of bars he could afford.

So I think I know internally what Bukowski meant by death-in-life, and I’ll bet you do too, but … I’m going to give clarifying it one more shot, from an obscenely acute angle. Strap in, cadets.

***

So there’s this guy they call H.E. (I think that’s ‘His Excellency’) Josep Borrell. Mr. Josep’s job title is:
High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission

Hoo lordy. So when he talks, people listen. And he talks a lot. Maybe too much.

The other day he gave another speech, and included in it this one minute and twenty seconds:

A special message from H.E. Josep Borrell

That shit hit the Twitterfan with a dull thud that evoked immediate screams that H.E. was a racist.

I think those screams were mostly mistaken, but that’s only one observer’s opinion. You can decide for yourself.

What he said, summarized and paraphrased closely, was this.

Europe (presumably also including the Anglosphere) is a garden. “Everything works“, and it is the best combination of Political Freedom, Economic Prosperity, and Social Cohesion that humankind has ever built.

But as for the rest of the world, well, it’s a jungle out there. (He literally uses that image repeatedly–walled garden vs. jungle teeming with blooming hordes of not-garden.)

The garden, H.E. opines, is a fragile thing, and constantly under threat of encroachment by that which lives out beyond the walls in the jungle. It is “our” job as political elites, as gardeners, to take care to remain focused on that threat.

Walls alone cannot protect the garden, because the crowding jungle is too strong for walls. Specifically, the jungle has a “strong growth capacity”. (It sounds very much like he might mean birth rates of the kind found in modern China, Africa, and any Catholic country in South America, but–benefit of the doubt–maybe not.)

In any case, walls no matter how high are insufficient. No. In order to do their duty, the gardeners have to pro-actively invade the jungle before the jungle invades the garden. The gardeners “have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world”. We have to take the fight to them, and not wait behind isolationist walls hoping to preserve the sanctity of the garden. If “we” don’t … the jungle will invade the beautiful free rich social cohesive garden … the ultimate catastrophe.

***

I would hope that any thinking person could see why His Excellency’s imagery is problematic. I feel compelled to point out though that the most serious problem with it isn’t “that’s racist”, which has been the overwhelming sentiment of those pushing back online.

My argument would be that a man, and a man’s remarks, can possibly be free of any real or perceived racism, and yet still be immoral and deeply horrifying at the same time, on many, many levels, perhaps even to the point where he personally embodies: Death-In-Life.

I hardly know where to begin, but let’s start with the simple fact that your rich free socially cohesive gardeners spent the first half of the last century trying with all their might to murder each other behind those lofty walls.

In the seventy-five years since, the gardeners did exactly as you suggest, and fanned out into the jungle again and again, hoping to control its wicked rot at the source, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Cuba, in Libya and Yemen and Syria and Somalia and now Haiti too. They did that job with German efficiency, and American enterprise, with subtle French style and a British stiff upper lip in the face of adversity. They assassinated kings of the jungle, and bought off its lemmings, and sacrificed any rotter in between who stood in the way of the values of the garden and all the protected hothouse flowers within it.

There’s more. It may be very hard to see, Sir, from within the walls of Brussels, but the jungle isn’t limited to the lands below the equator, or east of the original Eden, or … anywhere. Deep behind the walls of the garden, the jungle lives. Do I need to remind you about Flint, Michigan, and Ferguson, Missouri, and Jackson, Mississippi? Even within the garden’s grandest cities, there are little pockets of jungle ghetto. The orchid jungle blooms in the less advantaged parts of Paris and London and Berlin just as “extremism” thrives in all those red-tinged states in the middle of “flyover country”, in Oklahoma and Idaho and Alabama.

Put simply, the garden you speak of in such enlightened tones is an elitist fiction, and it could not and would not exist even rhetorically without relying consistently and barbarously on colonizing and exploiting and oppressing the very enemy jungle itself.

***

Maybe His Excellency is a racist, and maybe not. Maybe he is the personal embodiment of the Antichrist and the Death-in-Life force itself, or maybe he’s just the learned, well-dressed, kindly and wise old grandfather he would prefer we see him as, kind of a more debonair and intellectual Joe Biden.

Maybe the Devil wears Prada.

The truly troubling part to me remains, regardless.

The worst part is that most free and well-off and socially cohesive people in ‘the West’ agree uncritically with every word leaking out of that poor befuddled anachronistic man’s mouth.

It’s a jungle out there, is it not?

We the blessed, we the elect, we–God’s chosen people whether there is a god or not–have an abiding responsibility to the walls and to the garden. We need to be grateful, that we were born in the Land of the Free, and not some shithole country out there in the jungle. We have the duty, not just to build up the walls, but to go out when necessary into the Devil’s own domain, with our persons, with our soldier sons, or at least with our tax dollars, and fight the rot. We are obligated, by the blood of our forefathers, to spread democracy like so much Agent Orange over the teeming foliage of the fearful jungle, and to be the victor, and to bring home the spoils.

That’s what most good and righteous and comfortable and well-read people of the garden believe. They’ve told me so, in a graciously superior tone, over and over. Even some of the ones that I love best, and love me best back.

It hurts me to the core sometimes, on any given bad day.

I share many, but not all, of the garden advantages they grew up with.

In the end I’ve made my choice, and that is to say out loud that His Excellency has no clothes.

I choose the jungle. I choose to be a fieldhand, even if I might have made an able Master, or at the very least a serviceable house negro. I choose to say: What do you mean “we”, Kimosabe?

the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.

Or to steal some more of Poet Bukowski’s knowing words:

“I have one of two choices—stay in the post office and go crazy … or stay out here and play writer and starve. I have decided to starve.”

I don’t know how literally Bukowski meant the word ‘starve’, but having been an economic malnourishment case myself a time or two, I think the answer is: pretty literally.

Let’s hope it doesn’t quite come to that, again.

But on this random particular Thursday night in the fall, I mean it pretty literally too.

There’s this proverb, attributed to Ben Franklin, about how going to bed at a reasonable hour and getting up early is a sure formula for ending up healthy and rich, and even wise.

I got up around eight. It probably wasn’t early enough. I fired up the pushbutton stove and curled back up in the warm covers for an hour and I dreamed while the house was warming. I dreamed about Bukowski.

If you don’t know Charles Bukowski I’ll get you started on knowing, because I would like you to.

The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowski

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

In the video today I’m going to read that for you and give you an interpretive version of a letter the poet once wrote to a friend.

He drank too much and I abstain too much. He started late; I started later. Plenty of smart people know his name and almost no one knows the name Vairtere, and maybe it will always be so: it may not be much light and that warning is real.

But we both know that ““Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.” He puts things more succinctly and I ramble on.

I need wood pellets aflame just as he needed a drink. The addictions look very different but at their core they are more similar than not.

I need very much to listen to his words from the other side of the grave. I need to keep doing the brave thing instead of the smart thing, to keep following the example he laid down in my clean well-lighted way. That is the message of the dream and I need to hear it through this hastily named Awakening.

I have much work to do.

I interviewed and you can hear more about that than you want to at the vid for today on YT.

On the looping way home I had the NPR on and they had a shockingly brief interview with William Shatner, who seems to be on a book tour at the age of 91. May we all be so lucky.

I’ve never been a huge fan, but this time he did himself proud.

He said that when they took him up into space for the first and only real time, the experience broke down into grief for him, an unshakeable sadness of tears that lasted well after he returned to the ground.

The interviewer gamely tried to tease out of him why he was so sad, clearly struggling the whole way to not be a Debbie Downer, to retain her chirping optimism.

Shatner said he cried because we as a human species have already lost the game of life, and he only really realized it when looking down from above. He cried, he said for his great grand-daughter, knowing she will likely be alive and aware as humans send themselves over the edge into extinction, and he cried because it was us, our couple of generations, that made that unhappy ending inevitable. I paraphrase of course. But this is what I heard. Respect, William.

They let him say it, even if they did cut the interview short, and move directly onto more immediate, and solvable, problems of this wacky world we live in. Because after all, this is radio crafted for the tender ears of professional managerials, and not prophets of doom.

One day you will disembark this ship of fools, and I will too. Sometime a generation or two later, the ship will sink with all hands lost, and now you have heard it directly, from the Captain himself. He isn’t wrong, and he is man enough to tell you the unpleasant truth, and to weep for it.

***

I have told you that I won’t be voting anymore for any D’s or R’s of the duopoly. But maybe just maybe, I would have to reconsider, at least if I lived in Vermont. Because on the ballot there this time will be a self proclaimed fake Republican.

Fake Republican Wins Vermont Republican House Primary

He made use of a damned interesting strategy, and in the interview he says some damned interesting things besides. Like for instance, that his position on climate change is that it is only a symptom of a much bigger problem. He never quite comes out and calls that problem Capitalism-As-We-Know-It, but that’s what he means. He says that the universally acclaimed goal of endless growth is what dooms us, and that even if we went there on the wings of solar power and harnessed wind, it all ends up leading to the same unsustainable place.

He’s a young man, a veteran, and also incredibly wise in knowing that already.

I will meditate upon the wisdom of joining the fakeRepublican Party. Even if Shatner is right, and of course he very definitely is.

***

Hey, did you know that we’re setting ourselves up to invade Haiti next?

U.S. Invading Haiti YET AGAIN

The headline is premature, but close enough. “We” are sending the Haitian cops military trucks to help squash a popular rebellion against the Empire puppet who is currently running the Haiti show. The protestors have been in the streets for seven weeks running. The puppet is getting edgy, as well he should. So we’re starting out with some stomp-them-down and prop-him-up military-grade assistance. My prediction is that it will not be enough, and ‘advisers’ will come next. The propaganda is already underway–it seems that the protestors are a bunch of ‘gangs’. Soon they will graduate into terrorists and so Uncle Samuel will step in for the very best humanitarian reasons of course, to save the day for yet another ‘democracy’ a little closer to home this time.

Cui bono? Well I won’t spoil it, but their initials are The Military Industrial Complex, those nice fellas President Eisenhower warned us about on his troubled way out the door.

***

Dear Mr. Vairtere. Have you not learned by now that no one loves the messenger who brings the bad news? This belletrism, this small business as you somewhat facetiously called it today … can it ever succeed even marginally if you insist on being that kind of messenger? You’ll never see the cave art in France or Spain at this rate my dear.

Dear Reader. Of course you are right, and seeing more clearly than I ever will. But I have a secret weapon yet to deploy. It’s code name is Endearing Cat Videos, but of course I cannot yet tell you more.

Don’t touch that dial, though. You won’t want to miss it.

In today’s tiny moviefilm, I talk about minutiae of a day. Such as: In this context, the power being out means no Starlink. The power being out means no heat. Then I came back in to the almost-cold house to get that murmur ready to upload, but first I made coffee.

I measured out the water, put it on to boil, scooped in the three scoops of Equal Exchange Guatemalan, and went back to work. In a few minutes the kettle sang. And I said to myself with sudden realization: how come the electric kettle boiled that water so quick when there’s no electricity?

That was how I found out it had come back on.

The moral of this story is that, in this context, the power being out means no coffee either. I would do well to remember that. Will I do well? It will always be unlikely, an improbability.

I also learned that the minimum crew for a ship of fools is exactly one human animal. That much at least I am certain to retain.

The process of my art has always drifted hard toward being a solo sail. That’s why writing was my first love, and why the great love was talking over the radio in the middle of night from a small studio to a potential audience of millions, and an actual audience of dozens.

I acted in plays and I liked it, but I always knew that the big collaborative effort of theater was not my game. Counting on that many people to get my art out is just not how my soul is built. So my projects have always been very small in scale and light on ambition; at least ambition in the sense that leads to success.

Without a radio tower to call my own, my art is necessarily small too. Mostly that’s fine with me. But sometimes I think: god damn, what would life be like if I could make movies with epic sweep like Stanley Kramer did?

I told you about On The Beach. The second Kramer piece I want you to know about is called Ship of Fools.

Ship of Fools | Vivien Leigh | Lee Marvin | Full Restored Classic Movie in HD | Retro TV

Even more than OTB, this is a movie that makes me want to weep, at the genius of the vision motivating it.

Unlike OTB, there is no clear moral, except perhaps a silent urging to truly live and embrace this miracle called life before it is too late. Because someday it will be, and that day is probably a lot closer than you think.

At the center of it is a doomed love story and in orbit around that center are other stories of doom, love and otherwise. It looks into the limits of tolerance, the pros and cons of storytelling being used for the greater social good … so many fine-grained and important things that an average film or work of art never comes close to even acknowledging, much less addressing.

This is no When Harry Met Sally drivel made to sell popcorn. This is cinematic art and I want to understand how to be like the guy who made it, even if I never quite am.

I want to learn how to be the kind of man who would never let Simone Signoret go like the doctor does. Might that be too much to ask?

The beautiful Ava Gardner, as Moira Davidson, watches the Sawfish sail off into the sunset, or maybe the sunrise, forever.

She watches because she’s in love with the Captain, Gregory Peck, as Commander Dwight Lionel Towers. Or maybe he’s an Admiral by this point, but the world has passed beyond such distinctions. He’s a man, she’s a woman, and that’s all that is left.

This moment happens on the coast of Australia. This moment happens in the context of a movie called On the Beach, 1959, directed by Stanley Kramer.

They don’t make them like this anymore, and I tell you this cliche’ in a spirit of an ancient self-awareness.

It’s the end of the world as we know it. I feel alright.

It’s worth watching. Some part of me believes it will be worth watching again for a specific reason, that reason being the feeling it imparts to us all the way through. The reminder feeling.

The world as we know it is gone away, or going fast. Whether or not you or I believe that radiation will take it from us, or another Flood, or overheating, or any other catastrophe we make for ourselves … doesn’t matter. Even if all those bullets were to be dodged somehow and the pulse of the species were to beat improbably on, each one of us will still face the fact of mortality as individuals.

It is the seventeenth of October more than sixty years after the film was made. It is still here for us and we are still here for it. But that will not always be true. Exactly how many more October seventeenths do we have, you and I? Answers will vary, because some of us are young and healthy and others old or sick, and anyway the bombs or the sun may level all that. There’s no way to know.

It doesn’t matter whether I’m right or you are, or Jimmy Dore or Marjorie Taylor-Greene or Tulsi Gabbard. The movie suggests that it doesn’t quite matter whether we’re with someone to love, or on our own to face the night. That the only thing that might matter is doing the work, of moviemaking, or preaching, of driving a fast car or a slow hauling pickup or a submarine, and doing it with grace. It can be enough or more than enough to just discover what our work even is.

I have that much though I have little else. I speak to you now from my own job-free place of work, from my heart, trying to tease out from the fragments and the mess each tiny fleck of gold that might not even be there. It doesn’t make me better. It doesn’t even make me good. It’s a matter of each moment, and of each developing skill. That’s what it means to be a belletrist. That’s what it means to be alive.

Flecks of gold. This is the only performance by Fred Astaire that’s ever mattered to me in any meaningful way.

His character takes his destiny into his own capable hands at the end. There’s nothing moral or immoral or sentimental or noble about it.

If for no other reason than bearing witness to that, I recommend that you set aside two hours of your life sometime and see for yourself.

They said it would be raining by ten in the morning yesterday.

It didn’t, so they revised the model and said the showers would start, weirdly, at five this morning. Again they did not.

Now they say that it will happen like a normal monsoonal day with a buildup in the coming afternoon, which is plausible, although the latter half of October lies well outside the usual time for monsoon thunderstorms.

Prediction is a tricky business.

Any which way, I should start some laundry and hang it on the rack in the yard. If nothing else, that should get the heavens to loosen their jealous grip on the precious moisture.

This is the definition of magical thinking.

After that, it will be high time to grind a batch of coffee, and then address the piled paper on my side table which has again somehow fallen into complete divine chaos. No magic there, except the most prosaic (and maybe real) kind.

High time also to make a strange random video, or maybe even a small wicked film.

The twenty-fifth one in twenty-five days.

When the number of videos is one hundred and thirty, life will look very different and so will they.

Russell Brand doubles down on the ‘Rona story.

We’re Not Allowed To Talk About This

He says the last video (of his) I posted never made it onto YouTube, only Rumble instead, because of the danger of Google censorship shutting down his channel. I watched this shorter one on Rumble too, but I’m posting the YouTube version because it sort of makes more sense that way. You’ll see.

Another controversial subject. A quick clip of two persons of Jewish extraction trying to answer the question in the title.

Should Israel Exist?

Norman Finklestein is a rogue academic whose views on the query have actually moderated somewhat in his old age. The interviewer, Katie Halper, was recently fired from her day job for the crime of using the word ‘apartheid’ too close to the word ‘Israel’.

Regarding all the controversial subjects … Brian Bereletic, who goes by New Atlas on YT, talks about the Ukrainian kill list, and Elon Musk himself going onto it briefly, presumably for talking about peace, and suggesting that someone help him pay the ongoing cost of Starlinking the entire Kyiv-based military.

I love what he did with the Newsweek article in this video. It is a useful case study in exactly how we are intended to become ill-informed.

It’s not about disinformation or malinformation. It’s about information being used as a tool to further various agendas, and if you get all your news from places like NPR and Newsweek and cable TV, you are intentionally being propagandized on multiple levels. and it is very much meant to turn you into some parody of a good caring normal American.

They lie and they lie and they lie. On purpose, for a purpose.

Please stop sucking it down like Kool-Aid. I love you and I don’t want you to be willing zombie. Thanks.

Yesterday in a postscript comment I linked an interview with a man named Jeff Sachs. I think it might be worth your while to examine his credentials. His resume’ is very impressive, and he is no whacked-out conspiracist. Even the dependable Empire goons at Wikipedia don’t dare bad-mouth him too hard.

The Grayzone has a second part of their interview with him up, and it’s even better than the first.

Jeffrey Sachs: US biotech cartel behind Covid origins and cover-up

The Nulands. The Faucis. These are the professional lying class, the people that make it simple for Sachs to say with conviction that almost nothing you hear out there is the truth.

The Matrix is real.

This second part concerns itself with the pandemic, and as the weeks roll on, more and more evidence of misdirection and simple self-serving lying begins to pile up. Russell Brand weighs in:

It’s All Falling Apart

Brand is doing a great service by bringing ample documentation to the description sections of his videos. Check it out, should you dare.

Eartha Kitt was the best Catwoman. You probably knew that much already.

You may not know that she started out life as an abused orphan and a literal Fieldhand. You almost certainly don’t know that she was the victim of a post-McCarthyite decade-long blacklist perpetrated by the Democratic Party, not because she was a Commie, but because she made Lady Bird cry and pissed off LBJ himself in the same afternoon in the middle of the turbulent sixties, simply by telling the truth in polite company.

I heard about these stories from a harmless little boomer YouTube channel called “Cool Classics”.

The Shocking Life of Eartha Kitt Catwoman Batman 66 TV Series

I was watching it for brainless mind candy. Sometimes things work out differently from how you expect.

The picture above is screenshot-swiped from this video:

Eartha Kitt vs. LBJ – Newly Found Audio

And here is Ms. Kitt in her own words, years after the secret blacklist on her was reversed by Jimmy Carter:

Eartha Kitt: The White House Incident

Not only was she unable to find work anymore in Hollywood or much of anywhere else in the US for ten years, after speaking truth to power, but she got a dossier started on herself by the spooks. At the bidding, of course, of the DNC. And things didn’t change at all during the Nixon and Ford years either, because the Hollywood moguls continued to be loyal Dems, and those who ran and run the Dems didn’t want Eartha to thrive or even survive. She had to go find work in Europe to keep food on the table for herself and her daughter.

She never called for revolution like Malcolm. She never marched on Washington like MLK. She just went to a ladies luncheon with a bunch of influential white women, and politely called bullshit on the imperialist game–Vietnam, at the time–and what it was doing to the youth of America that they were supposedly there to discuss, and fix.

Instant blacklist. Instant dossier. Ten-plus years in the black hole of hegemonic disapproval.

Blue no matter who my ass.

***

If I was a better writer I’d just stop there.

In recent hours, Tulsi Gabbard quit the Democratic Party. Because, she says, they’ve turned into a bunch of lying, war-mongering hypocrites. Because, I say, offering Eartha’s story as proof, that’s what they’ve always been. Sure. By all means. Let’s have a luncheon to talk over what we’re going to for these poor, lost, unenlightened disadvantaged youth.

Besides, I mean, send them off to deserts and rice paddies to do the slave labor of colonialism with a gun, or consistently ignore the fact that they have very little economic alternative than to make themselves into good robot killer fieldhands for the Man.

Now I don’t have much use for a lot of what Tulsi had to say. She’s a religious fundie who just happens to be Hindu rather than Christian, and that alone is enough to make me very skeptical of her positions and views.

But she’s spot-on in saying that there is no place for her, or any truly thinking person, in the cozy confines of that elitist bag of blue manure we call the Dems.

Ms. Gabbard, I’ll make you a deal.

You’ve done the right thing, for a first step, and I salute you for it.

As for your next move, just please don’t join the Repubs, because they’re almost as bad, and obviously worse in some key ways.

If you can promise me to stay independent, and run Independent, I’ll give you my vote in 2024. Even if you continue to spout nonsense about transgenderism. Even if you continue to drone on about families and values in that way I find so very cringy. Even if you choose Liz Cheney as your running mate … Even though you flaked out in 2020 and endorsed Biden with your fingers crossed–I mean, so did our good man Bern … but I wax tangential.

I can’t vote for Trump or DeSantis. I can’t vote for whatever stooge the Dems will inevitably prop up on a stick to lure the unwary.

So keep your nose clean of party affiliation, and stay firm and strong about being against war, and I will vote for you, without hardly even holding my nose.

Let me know if this works for you, and Eartha be praised.

I got up and I knew right away that the first thing was a film walk with the new camera.

I caffeinated and pushed ahead with that.

My field test went great but the video was a wreck, partly due to my noobness and partly due to unsatisfying equipment–just the tripod, not the camera.

Toward the end of the walk I told the camera something about needing to get my truck back, to get to the printer’s, to properly apply for the next job … and no sooner had I turned the Panasonic off than they called from the dealer–it’s ready.

So I went back home and cut the haphazard video together haphazardly, got it uploaded, figured out how to get myself an Amazon affiliate link to post with it, and set out again for a walk to the dealer.

By the way: the fancy new camera doesn’t make small rough files like the GoPro does. It’s monster .mp4 only. So it takes a while to edit and upload–the seventeen minutes video was a gig and a half in five clips. The good news is that the Starlink is up to the job. I’m putting my kit together right, and now I just need to grow more talented at using it. Bear with me. I’ll get there. I’m promising that to myself as much as you.

I wore too much shirt and not enough hat to make the long hike to the dealer on a sunny seventy-degree day. But even though I sweated, it was a good sweat, and a good strain.

They charged me $666, rounding up, for spark plugs and coil packs and an oil change and an inspection. The inspection was half-ass, so I drove my temporarily healthy baby up the hill a little farther to check out the highly-rated independent mechanic called Todd. I’m looking forward to having him do the real inspection, finally, on my beast. Also, he’s advertising ‘expert Subaru service’, so that might come in handy someday (I have one of those back across the stateline too).

Some iced coffee and now I’m back at the ranch.

This evening is going to be all about re-organizing myself in both cyberspace and meatspace, with the intention of completing my third job app entirely by tomorrow. I’ll tell you a bit about it maybe when that’s done.

Here on the print side, I have my ten thousand hours. But as a maker of videos, it’s more like a hundred. I don’t feel ept.

But I don’t feel ashamed either. I’m red-cheeked but I am committed to it and to getting better. And I will.

I woke up feeling it was far too quiet, and even though that is almost always a good thing in my world, it made me feel off. I performed my ablutions and made the pot of mud and pulsed inside for a while, and then I climbed up on the roof and talked into the GoPro for about 15 minutes and came down and posted that soliloquy. Then I lay down. I’m sure I did nap for a minute. But mostly I just wanted to lay and I did.

I got up and went outside and there were three boxes on the porch, including the one I was hoping for most, the one that held the Panasonic Lumix G7 camera, and some accessories for it.

I took this with it.

I’m feeling satisfied with the sharpness and the way it feels in my hand. I’m eagerly grasping at formulating opinions about what I like and don’t like about it. Testing has barely started. I haven’t even hooked up the external mic yet.

Of course as soon as I wrote that I the question rose up inside me: Why the hell not? I broke off and ran a couple of tests. It sounds so much better. I will say: I don’t like that the mic is so big and I don’t like the fact that it needs a separate battery, but … it sounds good and it was, essentially, free. I can always get a different one. But for now as I type to you, I am happy.

I don’t feel off, any more.

A vid to share and I don’t know if it’s political or not.

It could legit be titled any of the following:

“Paying the extra for organic is very definitely worth it”

“OK Boomer: why you don’t want to hear what comes out of your rich neo-liberal grandpa’s mouth”, or,

“Why you actually agree with that Joe Rogan guy much more often than you thought you would”

***

Enough of that though, for one evening.

It was a very nice social weekend; the visiting waif of a kitten did more for my YouTube than I’ve done myself in three weeks of hard cinematic labor, and now suddenly the rental home is once more starkly quiet. I recover, in my dishes-and-laundry way.

The truck is at the dealer and there’s every indication that it is finally going to get a proper inspection of its old bones and, um, … coil packs.

The smart femme practicality of the Spooxta (you can look her up on YouTube now too and her first video instantly got more views than my whole channel to this point) is slowly turning me away from the cargo trailer solution and toward the travel trailer version instead. She’s finding nice old ones for me for five and six and seven thou apiece, and it’s hard to dismiss her logic (god dammit).

Some mash-up between Living In A House In Town and Living as an Eternal Vanlifer Vagabond is trying to make itself plausible in the churn of the modus vivendi part of my brain, which is like about 62% of it.

A third job-for-which-I-actually-want-to-apply popped up just tonight, so I have more grindy resume’ work to do tomorrow.

My bedside book is Thomas Wolfe’s ‘Look Homeward Angel’ because when I stood in front of the Friends of the Library sale shelf and silently begged the book god to please have one good thing for me, that is what she decided on. This puts me in a distinct phase of being immersed in hundred-year-old literature now, coming as it does right after all that Hemingway in September, and breaking with the August of John Nichols.

I am developing a pet theory. In order for writing to be Great, it goes, the writer has to be willing to say the quiet parts out loud and talk about whatever won’t do in a polite conversation.

Being open to Going There is no guarantee of Greatness–John Nichols’ writing, and probably my own, are willing to speak freely about anything, and yet no one has accused either of us of Greatness–but without that willingness, there’s never a chance of catching lightning in a bottle, at all.

Alright then. I’ve done my workmanlike duty and pursued my daily ration of craftsmanship diligently. Early to bed with the Alex the well-fed. Tomorrow dawns another miracle, with any luck.

First we dropped the pickup truck at the dealer for a check engine light.

Just after, we ate at the second-best burrito place because option #1 is closed for renovations until “mid-October”.

Then without even stopping for more coffee, we hit the road for the Cliff Dwellings, a National Monument.

We did the classic hike there, plus a shorter one, and then proceeded around the rest of the loop, back through Lake Roberts.

Between the lake and Mimbres, I found the turn for the oldest road, the long, long muddy dirt stretch of near-wilderness that that led me down here 25 years ago. It was like seeing an old friend.

The Mimbres Cultural Center, of course. The winery was closed. And then back to town through City of Rocks State Park.

Like today’s video, this written version is a quick sketch and barely here, because normally this would have just been a day I skipped.

But I want to keep the habit, keep the streak, and these are my way of doing that.

I’ll do better, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

The advice in the video struck me as realistic, practical, and fairly heartfelt. Maybe not a paragon of integrity or moral fiber, but at least not a pack of opportunistic lies.

EXACTLY How to Get 1000 Subscribers on YouTube in 2022

There are hundreds and probably thousands of such videos, and I do appreciate that this one, unlike most of them, was not solely about naked greed and how to indulge it at the expense of one’s soul.

But, still.

For the most part all of the experts are telling you the same thing, and it boils down to ‘Give the people what they want’, and do it with good lighting and combed hair, and promote the hell out of it in these six or twelve ways.

Left to my own devices, contrarian that I am, I will always naturally gravitate to wanting to tell you exactly and precisely what you don’t want to hear, and every time I start to promote it, I feel a little sleazy and gross.

The people I instinctively admire are the ones saying the quiet parts out loud. I want to respectfully shake the hand of Malcolm X. I want to awkwardly hug Glenn Greenwald and Chris Hedges. I used to say Jon Stewart, but nowadays he’s got one foot in the house and one in the field and it renders his takes choppy and uneven. The same is even true of people like Cornell West, but I can love him anyway because the words flowing out his mouth are natural poetry and reflect a soul that gets it, without letting it get him down.

I’m not on their level. I probably never will be. I’m gimped and wobbly. I let myself fear phantom consequences for too many years to stand as an example of bravery. I’m broke in more than one way.

It would do me no good to sell out, and try to work my way up to a mere thousand subscribers using the well-meant advice to be charismatic and upbeat, to shill the folks into believing in the sunny side of this crazy American life. Even the dullest intellect would be able to perceive my attempt at fakery and false cheer.

It’s not just that we’re fucked up and fucked over, around here. It’s that we’ve been that way for so many decades now that the Big Lie has become trans-generational, trans-racial, trans-gender and maybe even unknowable as a Lie for most people. Even the educated, even the gifted, even the nominally more thoughtful. Hello again, modern NPR.

Orwell tried inelegantly to wave us off. The Wachowski brothers, or whatever their pronouns are these days, tried to make us understand, about the Matrix. James Cameron gave us the Avatar parable–watch that one movie with your heart open, and then try to come back and tell me all about how proud you are, to fly the Empire’s flag on all the right holidays–how glad you are that you don’t live savage in some backwater shithole like the Na’vi on Pandora.

Lord knows I tried, to be a quietly academic sellout in what I hoped were inconsequential ways. I tried to stick to the dry facts, about Linux or Photoshop. Sometimes it worked better than others. In the end it was impossible for me to not talk about Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, or to mask my true feelings about my fellow house negroes, or ultimately my own self.

They didn’t gun me down for it. I wasn’t a real threat worthy of a bullet. They just chopped the hose that was my gravy train, and I faded back into the Desierto Pintado and disappeared from The Great Conversation, for a few long years.

And now I’m poking my nose up out of that gopher hole, in a prettier little town, with my ugly but healed scars and my eyes still trying to get used to the blinding light of day and civilized life. I’m seeking out a little more gravy, because I’ve got these plans like a junkie has the shakes.

But no matter the glory of the plans and no matter the burn of the craving, I’m not going to lie for gravy, no more. Not to him, or her, or you, or myself. It is close to literal truth to say I’d rather die first.

I’m not going to tell anyone just what they want to hear, for the sake of love or success or unobtainium or gravy.

The guy in the video did have one perfectly valid thing to say. He suggested asking one’s viewers, should they find themselves resonating with one’s content, to share it. On the social media platforms, et cetera. That made sense. So I’m asking. If you are one of the rare handful who sees these things, and feels them, then share them too, to the wider world.

I don’t care if you subscribe or click the like or decide to be one of the blessed souls that slip me Patreon every month. You don’t even have to log in, to YT/Google, to point people who like you to my better efforts with a link. Thanks in advance.

I have houseguests through the weekend and I’m planning to introduce you to one of them at the vidChannel tomorrow if I can. I may slip up and miss a post, or a shoot in this socializing time. But I’m here now for real, and not going anywhere. Viewed darkly, there’s nowhere else left to go.

Viewed brightly, I am where I belong now, already.

Ten or so years ago, when I was settled into professoring and looking around impatiently for ways to grow my writing, I researched a lot about Print-On-Demand (POD) tech, which at the time meant signing up with a company like Lulu or Smashwords to essentially self-publish books. I still think it’s not a bad idea, and I might go for it.

The Present. A few weeks back I got serious about the YouTube option and started making a video every day. Sometimes a good video, more often an underproduced mixed bag–just like the Spill here. Get it out, put it up, move on.

The day before yesterday, I bought my first real camera to be used in the service of that growing seriousness. At the same time, I was learning that even once you crack that magic 1000 subscriber mark, ad revenue from people, even lots of people, watching one’s vids is no guarantee of art translating into anything like a living wage. Maybe you could hope for a few hundred bucks a month, more like, if everything went well and you were a modestly viral success.

Instead, it seems, most committed full-time Tubers were, are, funding themselves in other ways, most especially through affiliate links, most especially through Amazon. The way it generally works is that a Tuber reviews a camera, let’s say, and then posts an Amazon affiliate link for that camera in the description of the review video, and gets a small cut of sales generated in that way. Not just for the specific item, but on any other purchase that the customer might make in the session that started with clicking that link. Review enough crap, post enough links, attract enough people to click on those links, and you might make thousands a month, as opposed to hundreds from having ads run on your monetized channel.

Learning about all this way of making money set my teeth on edge for a number of reasons.

I would rather you didn’t buy more shit, and that if you did, you bought it somewhere that wasn’t contributing to making the Bezos even richer. Even if it was making me a tiny bit richer too. I’m an anti-capitalist. The whole business model is pro-corporatist, consumerist, capitalist. And anybody with any sense knows that late-stage capitalism is indistinguishable from fascism. The Man owns the Washington Post now, and he did not buy it and does not run it for anything resembling charitable or nobly journalistic reasons. It’s just another cog in his propaganda machine and his domination strategy.

Now sure … if you have to buy shit anyway, like a camera, like I just did, because there are no camera shops left where you live, because Amazon, Walmart, Whoever, put them out of business in the first place … I don’t mind you clicking my link and benefiting me along the way. But still. The whole thing, if we’re being honest with ourselves, and I intend to be, is fucking gross.

I went to bed a little bit grumbly and I woke up that way too.

After I had yesterday’s post on the simmer here, and posted my vid for the day, I started messing around purposefully. I went to the home page of vairtere dot com and decided it was time for a change. I went out and found myself a fresh new Creative Commons HTML5 template and started adapting the code to my needs.

I put down the breadcrumb trail at the top and replaced the logo-like image and re-introduced this project and the new one without fussing myself much. Then I got down to this part of the page:

It’s that third part. It’s short. I’ve got the Patreon and that’s fine, but … something’s missing, conceptually and practically.

You know what I need? I, personally, need a t-shirt that has the words Vairtere Dot Com printed on it. I need one, no three, just for me. Maybe three short-sleeve and three long-sleeve. Wearable business cards. I’d wear ’em. And I could sell ’em too. That could help. I once bought a t-shirt from Scott Carrier’s website for fifty bucks, which was too much for a t-shirt but not too much for a donation. It says Home of the Brave on it. That’s the name of his podcast. People really seem to like it. I get a lot of comments when I wear it.

He really should have put his web URL on it though. So mine will just say Vairtere Dot Com … or maybe … “Anarcho-Belletrist”, with the V-dot-c in smaller letters below. Why not two versions? Or four? Maybe put it on a coffee mug too. A mousepad–there are people who do that now, I think?

There are.

So I went out to my search engine of choice and started typing in things like ‘best online t-shirt printer 2022’.

That’s when I learned a new thing, about that term ‘print-on-demand’. It hardly ever means books any more. People are PODing on everything from bedsheets to spoon rests. Catchy little phrases. Good and bad art. Full-color photos, sometimes.

Whole business are run by people who take no pictures, are not writing, are not filming; they are just … Printifying.

Again I was assailed by the chirpy children and the chirpier adults, explaining to my old witless ass exactly how to get this done. You need to find your niche! You need to study the analytics! You need to run strategic value-laden ads on Facebook!

Oh fuck a rabid mangy duck, here we go again.

No. No, no, no. I’d almost rather get a real job like a proper Murican; fieldhand, house mammy, anything. Just to mute the grasping greedy sound of the chirping and the whole systems of belief that it rests on.

I just want a Home of the Brave t-shirt that says Vairtere on it instead, you … twitterers. I don’t want a god damned niche. I already have one of those and I like it fine, even if it may very well be hellfire impossible to monetize.

I’mma get my printified t-shirt; yes I am. You’re getting one too. My Patreons are going to get theirs for free and it will be tax-deductible as a marketing expense. Just you watch.

In the relentless rain of this October day, I am sifting through my starlink signals, and I am already down in the weeds with this beast.

The WooCommerce plugin for this WordPress blog will dance to my tune. I will be Master of it, Emperor of my own spreadshirt, even if I am a Fieldhand.

I will kick its ass. I will rule the world with my cheap chinese proxy threads. I’ll be punk deity of my own Imperialistic domain.

Secretly, the whole thing is even a little more fun than I care to admit out loud.

Which is scary and cool, as it should be.

I’m not sure this first part will be the whole post, but I wanted to get it started anyway.

I went with the G7 for three main reasons. One, I could not find anything credibly starter-professional for less. Two, the ecosystem of good lenses for it tend to be very modestly priced compared to bigger names like Sony, so it’s both budget, and flexible in creative growth terms. Three, the people who have owned and reviewed it generally speak of it with a certain fondness, even though most of them have moved on to cameras costing two, three, four times as much.

I went with this particular bundle because for six hundred inclusive I got the three things I really needed–camera, lens, and an audio solution that might work out–plus some other things like a bag and a tripod that may or may not work out. Also, this version of the bundle came with a “Silver” camera. Which means that part of the body is silver, but of course the name of that color has a metaphorical significance as well.

Thinking about the bag makes me remember the potential downsides to this purchase, including the fact that the G7 is not weatherized at all, so I’ll have to treat it very gently when there’s wet in the air.

Also, everybody agrees that the auto-focus on this camera, and most all Panasonics, is garbage. I plan to get around this learning to manually focus effectively, and just pretending it’s a feature instead of a bug.

One guy had an opinion that the audio with this camera would always be shit even with an external mic. If he is right, it will be a dealbreaker and I will return it. But … no one else mentioned anything like that, and his review was uncommonly negative in other respects too. We’ll see. Here’s hoping he was a shill, or just wrong. I want this decision phase to be over for a nice long while, and to not have to go back to agonizing between a G85 or an M50 or a ZV-E10. I’ve had my fill and then some, on that score.

Either way, I’ll do a review on it eventually, and maybe dip my toe into the waters of affiliate links. Because the more I learn about YT and money, the more evident it becomes that those links are where the living wage comes from, and not YT ad revenue. The excellent content creator Justin Reves has generously taken the time to explain that fact in detail (he’s also a huge G7 fan).

It’s hard news to hear for me. I feel like I’m already slipping down the slope a bit by using Google’s platform, and now I’m supposed to bitch myself to Amazon’s too? Hiss hiss spit spit. Look at Vairtere and his first world problems! But of course don’t cry for me Americagentina, either. I’ll find a way to live through this, because that’s what fieldhands do–survive, and maybe sometimes even overcome.

***

Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.

Meltin’ in a pot of thieves
Wild card up my sleeve
Thick heart of stone
My sins my own
They belong to me. Me.

But you see, it’s not me

It’s not my family
In your head, in your head, they are fighting
With their tanks, and their bombs
And their bombs, and their guns
In your head, in your head they are crying

***

Whether or not some house job comes through, I’m taking This much more seriously.

Right now I’m in the process of replacing the militantly ugly home page of vairtere.com with something that doesn’t hurt to gaze upon.

Compromises will be made.

***

As I started putting up the new homepage, there was a tremendous crash of thunder right overhead. That was a couple of hours ago and it hasn’t stopped pouring down since. The street is slowly becoming a creek.

The central metaphorical image of the Fieldhand, alongside the compare and contrast to the House Servant, is the most important part.

There are other important parts, embellishments, tangents.

I love what he says about “we” and “our”, when it comes to talking about the government. Once upon a time, it may well have been We The People, at least if the people were white, male, and landowning. But it was never Ours for the fieldhands, and they’ve never thought of the project in terms of We.

We, kimosabe, are much more inclined to be receptive, when it comes to talk of Separating, from ya’ll.

The part about the nice clothes, nice food, nice house–that resonated. Pretty recently, I’ve been schooled about all that: ‘say all you want about the bad parts of America, but we’ve got all this nice stuff and don’t have to live in a shithole country’.

The nicer stuff only comes if you are both willing, and qualify, to work in the house instead of the fields. Generally speaking, I’ve been willing, even though I might keep my counsel about the conditionality of that willingness. Most of my life, I’ve been qualified–on paper anyway–but after a time, it turns out, there are other less tangible qualifications that complicate the sustainability of that. Eventually, it becomes impossible to hide what they might diplomatically call an Attitude Problem. Less tactfully it might be called hate for the Master and the Master’s System.

Novocaine. That which makes suffering silent and passive … a Peaceful suffering. Malcolm was a critic of religion as the primary pain drug. Especially Christianity, especially turning the other cheek. He was openly critical of even Reverend MLK for that.

Nowadays the opiate is corporate media, and it comes with diversity, high production values, a nice haircut, and a chirpy attempt at including you and me with language tricks and attempted humor. Like this:

This is a still I pulled from a video called
Stark contrast of how CBC explains inflation vs Economist Richard D Wolff and Mark Blyth

The chirpy man wants you to keep watching, and to believe his sketchy explanations, and laugh along at his dumb jokes. The chirpy man is a dangerous propagandist who would never see himself that way ever. But compare what he’s doing, to what Wolff and Blyth do after. There’s almost no difference between the chirpy man of the CBC and the Morning Joes and Rachel Maddows of the world, except that they get paid better, down here in the seventh circle.

Muzak for soothing anxious house negroes, is all that is. Here’s looking at you, NPR.

Let me slap public radio and television with one hand and then turn around and offer you their best with the other. It’s an older piece, of course.

Malcolm X – Make It Plain (Full PBS Documentary)

2+ hours of biography that examines certain important issues critically and evenly, including the straight dope on who gunned Malcolm down in the Avalon Ballroom, and even a bit of speculation regarding who was behind motivating the triggermen.

Ultimately he was killed because he had figured a lot of things out and was sharing his epiphanies too loudly.

Toward the end of his life he was evolving faster than ever, still clinging to his own religious crutch of Islam, but reaching out to Christians like Martin Luther King, and even to certain less toxic species of white devils.

And King for his part was becoming ever more anti-war and socialistic, more of the revolutionary that Malcolm always was.

We don’t have poor boulevards named after Mister X. His birthday will never be a holiday.

Even in death, no one can succeed in turning him into a useful idiot, not even a little bit. He was too hot to handle alive, and filling him full of bullets didn’t change it either.

He was a better man than I am. I only observe and comment, where he fought the good fight both intellectually and in the streets.

He left us some useful metaphors, like this one about the different kinds of Negro on this modern cybernetic plantation.

I’m listening. I’m hearing. I’m grateful.

Right then; so.

The afternoon before this one, I listened to part of a speech from sixty years ago, given a couple of years before the System murdered the speaker. His name was Malcolm X.

The audio is linked in yesterday’s post. Today, I’ve been letting it work its magic in me.

I started out by finding a transcript and reading the most germane eight minutes, out loud, myself, into my cheap camera, and I posted that as my vid for the day before I was fully awake.

I did it that way for a couple of reasons. I don’t know what the copyright status of the audio is, for example, and I don’t want to give the people that run YouTube any excuse at all to give me one of their stupid strikes. Also, Malcolm twice uses a word that our tenderized modern ears find far more offensive than a Fuck or a Shit. So I whispered it both times.

But mainly I felt like reading it myself, even though it was definitely not as good that way, would help me internalize it.

Also. In the process of internalizing it, I lay myself open to charges of appropriation, or privilege, and I’m willing to admit that I might be marginally guilty of such anti-woke crimes. Guilty even now–and I haven’t said an actual meaningful word yet.

Let’s fix that (and do the crime right). The speech as I found it was titled, “The House Negro and the Field Negro”, and the main thrust of it is to inform you that the Civil War changed pretty much nothing.

For me, it succeeds, and then some.

As far as I know, there is no history of Slavery as defined in the popular mind in my direct familial line. As far as I know, Malcolm wasn’t even talking to me. But … he spoke to me anyway. It felt personal.

The shape of the argument is that in the olden days of Empire, far short of two hundred years ago, there existed three main classes of Person–the Masters, the House Negroes, and the Field Negros–and that things are essentially the same, right here and now.

Malcolm was talking from a space bound by his own experience and time. I was listening bound by mine. The Sixties, the 2020s. The black and the white. The young and the old. The activist, and the belletrist.

Either way.

The Masters own the others. In the Before, that was literal and legal ownership of human beings. Now it’s dressed up. Sure you’re a citizen, a taxpayer, a voter, theoretically entitled to a speedy fair trial by a jury of your peers. Try not toiling in the fields for a while. Try not paying your taxes. Try being accused of anything from a speeding ticket to petty larceny, and tell me how many juries you run across. Yeah. They own you. It’s not Slavery, it’s just wage slavery, and income inequality, and different justice systems depending on the size of your bankroll and the color of your skin.

You are free, of course, to try to find a way to be a house servant instead of a field hand. Stay in school and stay in your lane. Go to college, get good grades, and try not to become addicted to anything. In this land of opportunity, if you’re a little smart and a little lucky and not too lazy, you stand a pretty good chance of becoming a House Negro, closer to your Master and benefiting from that closeness. Even if you don’t go to college, there are ways. Any cop or any soldier, at or above the rank of Lieutenant, is for sure working in the house, directly for the Man, making sure his belly is full and his children are clean, sober, safe.

Finally we come to the class of human that both Malcolm and I identify with. The field hands.

I spent plenty of time working up in the house in a metaphorical stiff white collar. But like I told the people I was closest too, all through it, I never embraced the identity of House Negro–I was a truck driver with a Master’s degree, and then I was a working class stiff who professed about technology. Not middle class. Not white collar. In the house, sometimes, but never of the house.

Time and again, at twenty, at thirty, at forty, and finally–definitively–in my 50s, the real house negroes came to understand that I would never really be one of them, that I was a subversive and a separatist in my heart, and they booted my ass back to the fields, for the good of the house and their Masters.

Out where the masses stay poor, oppressed, brutalized, angry and street-smart.

They’ll quote scripture and folk wisdom at you all day and all of the night. Those who don’t work, don’t eat. A penny saved is a penny earned. An eye, baby, for an eye.

My only real moral crime is that for a while, I believed that I belonged in the House, and when my position there started to fall apart, I was afraid. I didn’t want to go back to sleeping cold and eating hog guts. I wanted to see myself as smarter than that. Better than that. A cut above the common field hand.

But I don’t belong in the big house. I don’t love the Master. Finally they smelled that. Finally, I did too.

A month ago I came to this new town, and it was right, and it was good.

The very first thing I did was apply for a job at the big house on the hill. I talked a beautifully good game in the interview. They called my references. It seemed all but done.

That was a month ago now. The job is still posted. Maybe they’ll call. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter to me, not like it once would have.

Today I went to the little field downhill from the big house, and I told them yes, I would be willing. To toil in your papery public fields, for the slave wage of thirteen per hour. Plus those benefits, those human rights that cost extra.

It’s a lovely little field.

If they say no I’ll be a little bit sadder than I would be if the people on College Hill never call back.

If they say no, there are other fields, not so pretty. If they say no, maybe I’ll have to create successfully or starve. It might be the harsh motivation I need, the tough love that saves me and makes me into that rare bird they call a working artist.

Whichever of these things come to pass, I was born a field hand and I’ll die one too, at play in the fields of the Lord.

Thank you, my dead black friend. My brother, if that word is not too full of presumption, or privilege.

There are three main things I use to distract myself from the things my best self really wants to practice and accomplish.

One is, let’s speak it obliquely and civilized, Eros.

The second is gaming, and this one is weird. I have lots of video games filed away, barely even installed, but I only ever play one of them. It was released twenty-five years ago. It’s called ‘Alien Crossfire’, which might make a good title for my memoirs. I usually have a game in progress, a save file to go back to–it’s a postmodern chessboard sitting in the corner of the sitting room. I open the file and study the board intermittently.

The third is politics. Specifically, watching smart opinionated people comment on Our Situation, agreeing and disagreeing with them, hashing around in my mind the rights and wrongs and lefts, and formulating The News into something that resembles a philosophy, in that Voltaire way. Eventually, taking all that and using it to feel superior in some stupid way to the great masses of sheeple. (Whatever, dude. Go do your wobbly art instead. Get a job! Or something.)

Central to my politics this year has been studying the way late-stage capitalism has begun to slowly and surely morph into fascism. Not the goose-stepping imagery, not the aryan supremacy with swastikas, not the hurled epithet of ‘fascist!’ that every side uses to try to smear the other as the Bad People. Real fascism, as Mussolini envisaged it: the merger of the corporations and the State.

I have been particularly critical of the Empire I grew up in for gliding carefree down this dark path. Within the Empire, I have been particularly critical of the faux-leftists, the libtards, the Democrats, because they should be the ones standing against this blind blithe drift into real Darkness–Often their words try to claim that they do, but their words are lies, and they don’t even try hard anymore to get you to believe the lies. Partly because they don’t have to try, because the brainwash of the general populace is so complete … but I digress.

Sure I’m happy to criticize right-wingers and Repubs, but there’s hardly any sport in making fun of dangerously disturbed rubes like the Orange Man or the Florida Man.

I’d much rather make fun of Dems who think Liz Cheney might be a valuable ally, or who fawn over the childish paintings of the addled war criminal who was her father’s puppet for eight years.

I’d rather make fun of people who think it’s a good idea to ship billions of dollars halfway across the world to fund proxy wars of colonialism and imperialism, whether it be in Korea or Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq or Ukraine or Yemen or Somalia, while their neighbors and countrymen suffer for it every day as a direct result. Black fun, gallows humor.

This has resulted in some unpleasant moments for me in some quarters.

Like many a pro-human leftist (for lack of a better term) that have come before me, I’ve looked on with interest at the projects of the enemies of my enemies. Are they friends?

The fact that newly empowered countries like Russia and China are actively working on solutions to the hegemony of the petro-dollar and the unipolar Empire does make me smile at times. This tentatively approving little smile is what has led to the episodes of unpleasantness. I’ll listen to people snarling at Trump’s latest antics, Putin’s latest antics, and I’ll take the part of the Advocate of the Devil; take it with joy.

Today whatever joy I’ve taken in it is turning colors like a fresh bruise.

I didn’t mind when Putin ‘recognized’ the independent micro-states of Donetsk and Lugansk, the underdogs in the Ukrainian civil war. I thought, still think, that it was a rational response to a brutal situation. When he took Lysychansk back, I cheered in perfect silence. By all means, recognize the Donbas oblasts. By all means, help them to defend themselves against the western interests that greedily sought to colonize them.

Today in particular, the joy is long gone and the smile is fading into black sobriety.

The enemy of my enemy is demonstrably not inevitably my friend.

Putin annexed the two revolutionary oblasts, and a couple of more besides.

In so doing, he made the puny hypocritical arguments of his critics seem quite a lot more plausible.

Annexing … is a counter-revolutionary move. I can’t find a way to justify or be okay with it, even though I’d prefer to.

What it says to me is that placing any faith in him to effect real change, or to create a real and slightly better (less worse) alternative to the rapacious Atlanticist colonizers, is now just rendered a foolish position to hold onto.

It all just comes back to, in the durable words of Midnight Oil, corporate criminals playing with tanks.

I give up. On Republicans, on Democrats, on the empire run out of northern Virginia and Brussels, and yes, on the one run out of Moscow and Beijing too. It’s all just greed and power taking different forms and shapes.

It’s the ordinary people of the world, the ones that are still more or less human, that have suffered for it ever since we came down out of the hunter-gatherer hills and settled in the valleys. Grain piling up means surplus, silos, rats, tetanus, plague, kings and war.

Surplus tends to amplify the worst in us, and the worst in us now owns everything and rules this mortal coil with a iron fist, sometimes in a velvet glove, and sometimes not.

Sometimes we at the bottom become obvious distasteful underclass slaves to the wage, and sometimes we become collaborators in the fundamentally rotten system as part of the managerial class. We become secretaries of the state, or god help us: professors.

“Oh, but the poor are always with us,” we solemnly intone, but the real emotional reason for saying it is to try to distance ourselves from those poors. Nicer haircut, nicer car, nicer house, pedicure, organic wine in pretty bottles, better coffee or cigars or cameras.

Success. Surplus.

The ragged truth is that you and I have more in common with the bum asking us for quarters than we do with any Condoleeza or Elon or Volodymyr of the ruling elite. It’s a terrifying thought and one understandable impulse is to push it away with vehement denial. The impulse is the Stockholm Syndrome–to identify with our oppressors.

Fuck those fieldhands! I, at least, am a house Negro!

Malcolm told it true before I was out of diapers, and they killed him for it of course, but the killing didn’t make it any less true.

East, or West. Black, or white. Then, or now.

I’ve been waking up earlier, facing the oncoming winter dark. It’s morning on the first Monday in October and 54 degrees. By tomorrow, they say, the rain will kick up again, and the nighttime temperatures will drop into the 40s, and probably that will become a new normal until the solstice season really takes hold.

***

One time I saw Matthew McConaughey of Uvalde, Texas, interviewed by Larry King. Old Larry was needling him a little bit about doing Cadillac commercials. Matthew didn’t like it. He said that he really believed in the product. Sure he did. I think reaching that point means your integrity is toast. Not that it makes him a bad person, or a worse actor …

But my respect plummeted even so. And no, Tommy Lee Jones, I don’t really think I want a reverse mortgage, thanks. I’ll pray for your soul.

By the way, Larry, I listened to you on the radio for years as a child, and I heard you shilling for the likes of Gold Bond Powder, over and over and over. Cast ye no stones, sinner!

***

We all be sinnin’.

One way or the other, a capitalist system pushes us hard toward selling ourselves off. Maybe it’s just our time being sold, for 13 or 36 dollars per hour. Or maybe it’s something more subtle, nuanced.

I have always and will always resist that with my creaking bones.

That resistance is the real underlying American way. You want to tax my tea, bitches? I’ll show your ass. I’ll fix your wagon.

But nowadays. Nowadays you need to get into the right school, to get the right job. Maybe you’ll work for the tea man, or the tax man, and be able to afford to live by the ocean, or even have kids, or at least dogs. You’ll need to vote in every election and choose between the red giraffe and the blue squirrel every time. Omigod that giraffe pisses me off so much.

You’ll visit harbors in Greece and Belize, but never will one leaf of Lapsang Souchong fall overboard ever. Not by your hands. Which are clean and even sanitized, because of this pandemic thing you know.

You are vaccinated. You are boosted. The Squirrel approves of you, and marks your performance review Outstanding.

You outstand.

Waffle no more, Alejandro.

In the beginning of my research, I gravitated toward Canon and the M50 in large part due to the informed opinion of Mark Wiemels, a self-described thirty-year Canon fanboy. But only just today, I caught up with his channel enough to watch a pair of videos he posted three weeks ago.

Hey Canon, This Sucks.

Devastating News for Canon R7 and R10 Owners – What You Need to Know

I won’t bore you with arcane detail. Suffice it to say, in purely my words, that Canon is quickly turning into a bunch of greedy, proprietary, monopolistic dicks. It’s a dealbreaker. For Mark I’m sure it’s a heartbreaker too–he’s only put out two videos in the weeks since posting these Devastating two.

None of this means that the M50 isn’t a great choice. I think it is, even though the things that made it great are losing ground and traction almost five years since it first launched.

Nor does it mean that Sony are some merry band of non-profit anarchists, because they definitely are not.

But I’ll be spending the initial $100 more on the ZV-E10 anyway. (Hold on. Maybe. See comment.) It’s worth it in some warped moral way, but I believe that in the long run in will turn out to be the fiscally smart thing too. Maybe only by a little. Maybe by a lot, should I find myself getting serious about owning and using imaging tools at a professional level someday.

I pray to reach the same level of clarity and certainty about the employment front as well, in the near term.

The main question now is when to go for it. I’m doing alright with my budget amateur tools, for now. The smart thing would be to hold on for Black Friday.

I thought about calling this “Retro Cool vs. A New Hope”, too.

I spent the evening past trying to talk myself into a better all-around camera for a hundred dollars more.

Retro cool is the Canon M50 at $700. New hope is the Sony ZV-E10 at $800. The Canon is better at color, and their brand name absolutely has the edge in cachet. The Sony shoots twice as many frames per second at 1080p, and might be good enough at audio to not need an external mic.

The Sony has no electronic viewfinder and the Canon has no headphone jack, but they both have a good articulating screen.

The Canon is easier to use out of the box, but the Sony is more extensible in the long term.

Here are a couple of comparison videos I liked:

Joseph Kim

Mark Bennett (an almost perfect video for the question)

I am not entirely joking when I say that the choice really comes down to how long I think I’ll live, and be creatively productive. The longer that is, the more I’d lean toward the Sony.

But … none of this speculation and tervigersation really matters much at all.

***

I’m doing it to distract myself from more important things that are way harder to figure out.

***

Likewise: Jobs. So for the last month, I’ve been a high-ranking candidate for a very complex technical job at the University. There was a problem with contacting one of my references which accounts for some of the delay. But that’s been fixed for like ten days, and for unknown reasons they still haven’t come through with an actual offer. It’s starting to piss me off.

So now I’m looking at a drone office job with the City that pays a third less, but also involves simply putting in the hours and going home–no effort beyond that required, at all. I am overqualified. I would be underpaid. But my mental bandwidth would still be 100% my own.

The part that interests me isn’t what will happen. The part that interests me is what I really want, and maybe even who I really am.

What’s better?

***

Does the camper come first, or does the house come first? What is the way to live that makes the most sense and has the best chance for happiness? Is an arched cabin really perfection, and if so, why am I not moving toward it with more fierce dispatch?

I’m not good with people. I’m possibly even worse with decisions. I am definitely terrible about finances, except to the extent that I know how to get by with a modicum of grace even when there is no money.

Everything I said just now is Attributes, and baseline Reality has no attributes, right?

I think I believe that.

Life and consciousness are improbable miracles and of that I have no doubt at all.

October, and let it breathe.

Now, I live in the most beautiful place in the world. For me.

With that said, I’m slamming gears and going political on you. Stop reading now if you want to stay sane.

Today in an obligatory text thread, someone posted, more or less verbatim: ‘Yay! Ukraine put in an application with NATO! Stupid Putin!’ …

Shooting from the hip, I responded somewhat foolishly. Then I listened to actual smart people discussing the topic, and here is what I should have said.

Ukraine can apply to NATO (meaning going from quiet diplomatic begging to open desperate begging) all it likes.

It ain’t happening, in any rational world.

NATO is a military alliance, in which an attack on one is an attack on all.

So, naturally, even if every single current NATO member voted to let Ukraine in (an extremely unlikely thing all by itself), that would mean they were all willing to go from a cold war to a proxy war to a real live shooting war with Russia.

When you cheer for such a thing, you are cheering for World War III, with nukes this time.

That’s not hyperbole.

But before you go from nanner-nannering Vlad to ducking and covering, take heart.

We already know that the power behind NATO, our own dear Murican Empire, doesn’t want to go that far.

Early in the conflict, Ukraine was pleading in public for a no-fly zone.

President Joe said no. Why?

For the exact same reason as above. If you declare a no-fly zone, you have to enforce it. Which means shooting down Russian jets. Which leads you right back to the apocalypse.

Why does the Joe B. faction not want that?

It’s simple. A real war means killing the golden money-laundering goose.

These people don’t give a shit about Ukraine.

They want a place to dump money in a circular loop that leads back to corporate elites, including but not limited to arms manufacturers, all in the name of Liberty and Freedom!

Iraq and Afghanistan are over. The Machine needs a new vector for its financially masturbatory way of playing parasite to the world and indulging itself in a kinder, gentler colonial imperialism.

Ukraine is that vector, and all the one-sided tearjerker bullshit peddled in the mainstream press is just a sideshow to all that.

They don’t care about Ukrainian Babushkas. They don’t care about you. They don’t care about me. They care about winning their bloody little game and piling up cash in obscene amounts year upon year.

If you can look that basic fact in the face and still go on waving your little yellowBlue flag, I don’t even know what to say to you.

Except that running around calling people stupid, in this context, is going to result in some awkward moments, at the least.

I think we want to be loved. I think love means different things to us, even though we go around acting and believing like we all share the one same meaning of the word. I think some of us have a very hard time knowing what it means, either in the societal sense, or to ourselves particularly.

It is definitely time to crack a bottle of wine. Our selection tonight is a Syrah from Esperanza along the Mimbres River.

I didn’t used to care much what it meant, beyond getting laid. I had this idea that we all should take care of ourselves, and then sometimes those self-cared-for selves would come together and be greater than the sum of their parts, and that would be nice for a change. That theory was enough, and good.

Now I think differently. I probably still don’t care as much as other people, about Love. But I do care more than I used to, and I have some few evolving ideas about the meaning.

I felt the love in Wellington all those winter years ago, when the girl went out and started my car and got the heater cranking. I felt it not because the cold night air was awful at all. I felt it because someone was caring about the same things I cared about. Caring with me, in the same ways I cared.

Sometimes people say that love is being able to count on someone. I think that’s half right. I think that when people care with you, in the same ways, for the same reasons, they’ll be dependable, for independent reasons of their own.

This is why almost nothing in the world feels as good as knowing someone is reading this. Subscribing to that. I know they’re not doing it dutifully. I know they have their reasons to care, besides just being dutiful toward me.

At the end of The Garden of Eden, this is what Hemingway is trying to get at.

He felt Marita’s shoulder by him and heard her say, “I know David. It hit me too.”

“Don’t let it.”

“I’m glad it did. There’s nothing to do but we’ll do it.”

“Good.”

“We’ll really do it. Toi et moi.”

Marita isn’t the one he’s married to, but she is the truelove, and this is how he knows.

So thanks for loving me, if you are one of the very rare ones who has figured out how.

That’s all I really did today. It was a lot of work. It was my first time putting multiple clips together. Six of them to be precise. On the bright side, it’s up. On the dark, the app is both a necessity, and … substandard.

That first comment mirrors my own experience.

As things wound down at sunset I fell asleep in the living room recliner.

I watched my own video and after four hours it appears I’m the only one who has. There’s a temptation to let that fact be depressing for me. Here on the WordPress platform, there’s no easy way to see how many people have read a post, and I think that’s a good thing sometimes.

I didn’t feel like the video I made was very good, but I do have a good handle on why not, and I’m not going to stop. Ten thousand hours, no? By that metric I am already an expert at spilling. Someday the same will be true of using a camera instead of a keyboard.

This was the Christofouru take that I mentioned in the morning vid.

More crumble.
Gates Award Recipient Blasts Bill Gates At Award Ceremony

And completely unrelated. Probably.
WHY I DON’T USE EXPENSIVE KNIVES (The Only 3 Kitchen Knives You Need, All Under $30!)

It sounds dumb, but looking at this arched doorway in sepia really is nostalgic. It reminds me of the apartments I rented in Northwest Portland for two hundred a month.

The Nikon Coolpix A10 doesn’t seem to have USB for getting the files off it. But it had an old 4GB storage card in it, and I made it work.

–The Description for the day’s vidspill entitled ‘Lo-Fi’

I found out some things about the camera kit, mainly that most all of the prices I was looking at were for used or refurb product, which in this context is a no. So … I’ll be spending a little more and spending it differently. It’s still under a thousand. But unearthing the little old cams also made me think about holding off and limping toward Black Friday. Maybe.

At the other end of the spectrum and the day, I’m thinking hard about perfect trailers and perfect tiny homes. Here I want Hi-Fi, or that’s what I’m feeling about it tonight. The idea of just buying up a second house has an appeal, but the cheapest one I can find is still up over eighty thousand, and that’s not appealing at all.

They still haven’t called back with a for-sure for-sure offer from the job mart up the hill. Any day now, I guess, but when it’s official that will once again change everything all over again.

I was out and about making the vid of the day, the FilmSpill, and it just so happened that as I started to head home, All Things Considered came on the NPR at the top of the hour. Normally I would listen to the five minutes of headlines (listen churlishly and without grace I might add), and only listen until I parked in front of the hacienda, flipping it off with no regret.

We have history, NPR and I. This is where I first heard of people like Scott Carrier and Joe Frank. They were who I wanted to be, in the old days. I worked for affiliate stations. I even interviewed once at the mothership in DC. But of late I’ve mostly hated them for what they’ve become.

Today, though, they thrilled me like they used to thrill me routinely. On this episode of ATC, they said, we’re devoting the whole hour to some interesting questions about democracy, and specifically the question: “Why is it that things most Americans want, like some form of gun control, and some form of Medicare expansion, never seem to have any chance of being legislated into existence?” …

Okay … you corporatist toady bitches … you have my attention. For the hour. Proceed. With caution.

(I drove around, the back ways and the long ways, instead. That turned out to be fruitful too. But not germane here.)

The good news is that they’re asking that kind of question at all, in contrast to their usually doofus fake feelgood stories about, oh hell, banana bread, heartwarming spiritual anecdotes; how busy our lives are, how all of we thoughtful normies support Ukraine and vaccines and Murica and wacky old Uncle Joe.

The good news is that they did it old school and long form.

The good news is that I learned a few things. So that’s a lot of good they did, for a change, and I admit it, without rancor.

With rancor, I have a critique too, which is that they tried real hard to make this about bad and backward Republicans versus noble Democrats (like “us”). Also, about redneck flyover country versus sophisticated liberal urban elites (like “us”).

I reject that premise or that tacit conclusion or whatever it is.

Listen, my PMC media darlings. Just because I’m the very opposite of a conservative, that doesn’t make me into a liberal, much less a Democrat. The definitions of those kinds of words has been warped over time to mean pretty much nothing.

You might say that Chuckie Schumer or Nancy Pelosi is a lib. You might claim that Justin Amash or JD Vance is the far right wing, and therefore the problem. You might even say, well, that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that Squad oh boy, well they’re the progressives, and our great hope for the future.

But in point of fact, all those supposed champions or enemies amount to the same old shit that is sending the empire into decline, enriching only the rich, and quite possibly putting an end to civilization as we would like to imagine it. They’re a pack of venal careerists, and even if they didn’t start out that way when they were running (here’s looking at you, AOC, and Bernie too), they quickly became entangled in the foul Game and sold off every scrap of integrity to the highest bidder.

The same can be said, at least day in and day out, about anyone who succeeds at NPR, particularly inside the Beltway.

That is why listening to “national public radio” (as opposed to state-run media?) generally just pisses me off now.

But it was also why I was so shocked and pleased today, that they were at least starting, appearing, to make a real effort.

More of that, please.

For me, for yourselves–for the children, my dears. You do love you some children, ennit?

***

Alright. Cameras. I’ve mostly pretty much sorta made up my mind.

The Canon M50 Mark II is $595 for the camera body only, and it is the exact middle of the path from consumer grade on up to really professional equipment. In other words, it’s the cheapest thing I can start with and still have some feeling of seriousness and credibility.

Make no mistake–I could get by with the GoPro Hero 9, or even the ancient Flip I used to record today’s video, and you could argue reasonably that I should–because the content is much more important than the production value. I take that argument very seriously indeed. But I am going to spend the money anyway, to … lay down a marker of sorts, inside myself.

By the way, the nearest competition in my mind to the M50 was another Canon product, very similarly priced, called the SL3. In not buying it, my one serious regret is that it has on-screen audio levels, where the M50 does not. But: the M50 shoots in 24 FPS. The M50 is more portable. The M50 gives composition feedback in real time through the viewfinder. So on balance, it wins. (I would also say that if you ever find yourself in a similar place, you should check out the Sony ZV-E10 as well. It is, in many ways, a ‘better’ camera, especially if you think you will live long enough to be worried about ‘future-proofing’. I don’t have that worry.)

The external microphone will cost me 50-150 more. The semi-pro tripod, thirty. A couple more accessories, maybe, in that same range. The only question left is what lenses to buy at the same time to start with. Right here right now, I’m leaning toward the 18-55, a solid but inexpensive midrange lens that is a slight upgrade from the one Canon wants to sell you by default in a kit for a hundred dollars more, with the camera.

I’ll make that choice quite soon and send off my thousand to the Bezos right away, even though sending off to the Bezos is part of the problem too. There is no local camera shop any more. I looked and checked for real. I would have gladly paid a little more if there was. And even the wicked walmurt doesn’t sell anything quite this nice. So we gonna fish or just cut bait, Mr. Vairtere?

We gon fish, my darlin’.

Compromises will be made. It’s the way of the fallen world.

I want to alert you to the presence of two other YouTubers who helped me a lot in making these choices in videography. Both because they deserve credit for the help, and because they represent two different ways of being a “YouTuber”, or preferably a anarcho-belletristic ‘content creator’, and I’m thinking a lot about those ways and what my own will be.

The first is Mark Wiemels. He is the smart, no-nonsense Expert that I will never be. I believe he says at one point that he’s also a business consultant type for ‘creatives’. His videos ooze confidence and reassurance and production value at every turn.

Here’s a dump list of his videos that I still have up in the alternative youTubery browser right now. (If I list them here I can finally close those tabs.)

The Best Prime Lens for the Canon M50, Canon M50 Mark II, and Canon M6 Mark II

My TOP 10 Accessories for the Canon M50

My 16 Best EF-M Lenses for the Canon M50 and Canon M6 Mark II

THIS is the BEST audio you can get on a Canon M50

How to make your Rode VideoMicro sound PRO

Mr. Camera Conspiracies is a quirky and episodically Weird Canadian who is much closer to my own style. Only I intend to be even more profoundly and maybe even uncomfortably strange. I’m only listing two videos for him even though I watched quite a bit more, because I took what I needed from him and closed the tabs right away. Usually.

Sennheiser MKE 200 vs Deity D4 Duo vs Rode Videomicro: In Depth Comparison

I’m Not Like You

Honorable Mentions

Tech Gear Talk

That ‘How Much We Make from a Million-View Video” video I talked about the other day.

Vairtere For Sunday

Friday morning was bright. In the afternoon, the clouds let loose with rain. Blessings.

The main question had been: Alright. So you have this small pile of money left over (the four-grand-and-a-truck scenario per John Nichols), and so far you have no plausible hope of more. What is the best way of investing the small pile, to try and keep this life rolling, even if there is no immediate hope of income?

I scribbled some ideas down on a post-it with the title: The One Thing. Below the title it said things like Trailer, and Parking Space, and YT/Camera! and … Starlink.

Starlink is Elon’s satellite-based Internet service. It’s said to be, by people who are experts (like the esteemed Mobile Internet Research Center), the gold standard of bandwidth and connection. It’s expensive, and fast, and theoretically always available no matter how far back in the sticks you happen to be, provided you have power for the little dish.

I woke up with the almost certain knowledge that there was an immediate hope (at the least) of income. A trade-off of my time for the money. Classic wage slavery. And I was … pleased and shocked, at the depth of my own relief, in having that chance to be enslaved again for a time.

So I posted about it and I made a film from the post because that’s the way I do now, and then I ordered my very own Starlink at an initial investment of $700, and a little over $100 a month going forward. A carefully aimed shot of faith in the digital dark.

It was hard to have faith, but whether you know it or not, you helped me be brave.

For the first time in my life, I really am a working artist in every plausible sense.

The next goal here, best I can suss it, is to find a way to be one, but without also needing to sell myself and my time into wage slavery. For now, out of a near-necessity, I’ll do both. Until the art produced in working eventually begins to pay off in the usual gross capitalistic entrepreneurial sense; until I can achieve at least a cult following and milk it for a few pennies.

The first bullet point under that goal is to reach a thousand subscribers over there, which is what the evil platform requires of creators to reach Monetization.

I don’t intend to ever urge my viewers to “like” my videos, or to “comment” on them. But there are two other parts to that mantra, and, as time goes on, I expect I will beg for those. I’m going to right now.

The first is: “Subscribe”. Every subscription puts me 1/1000th closer to actually making it pay something.

The second is: “Share”. So that more people can be exposed to what I’m doing, and maybe subscribe themselves at some point.

Personally I hate this self-marketing crap. I don’t have a Facebook, and I don’t intend to get one. May … be … I will think about … twittering … as a necessary evil …

Maybe.

In the meantime I could use the help, in getting to The Thousand Magic Names, and further on up the road to the ultimate liberatory goal. If and only if you even have an account to subscribe with, and are so inclined. I won’t nag. I won’t Expect. You don’t owe me nothin’, and
some of you are already helping in much more concrete ways. (Thank you, Patr[e]ons.)

I will even so bring myself to just ask, this once … even a few more times maybe. Spitting out the bad taste of begging, the taste of not being forever and always completely free and independent of needing anything ever from anyone, each time.

Thanks for what you’ve done already and what you will do going ahead.

Abrazos.

All things being equal, of course, I’d prefer not to have to be Employed at all, because of the wage slave aspect.

But things aren’t equal and for a poor prose poet boy they never will be, not even if he lives much longer than anyone ever expected.

Just like my fellow traveler John Nichols; all dumb speculation about secret silver spoons to the side.

That is a lesson I’ve had to learn the hard way over and over.

It comes down to four thousand dollars and a pickup truck any way you scheme to slice it.

I didn’t want to tell you that, and while we’re down in the weeds here’s another one.

When I woke up this morning, I was happy. Even though the sleep was exactly the same, seven hours from 4 to 11, the morning was brighter, my body felt better, the gray cloud above my head was thin and wispy and barely there at all.

I woke and I was not under the gun. I had no worry, about where some imaginary meal seven or fourteen months from now would be coming from.

What I really don’t want to say is: given the empire world we live in, being a wage slave might just be really good for me.

This is obvious from a physical, financial, materialist POV. The hard part is admitting that it might be spiritually good, and maybe even artistically good. For me. Right here and right now.

That too is dumb speculation.

The meal I may have the privilege of eating a year from now (god willing and the creek don’t rise) is a complete fabrication born of an unenlightened mind. The whole sense of security and well-being is nothing but a dance of neurons, and the exact same is true about the worry of not having that security.

Māyā (माया) is the proper word for all of it.

According to one pencilhead, the word comes from the Sanskrit root mā which means “to measure”. According to some others, it means tricksy mental magic that keeps us from being One with the All. “In Buddhist philosophy, Māyā is invoked as one of twenty subsidiary unwholesome mental factors, responsible for deceit or concealment about the nature of things”. Because the Buddhists, they just love a good list of factors.

We do it to ourselves with worry, and we do it to ourselves with joy too.

We say: this place, has these attributes. We say: The truth about this situation is thus, and so.

It’s all intricately woven lies and invention, sometimes really beautiful and sometimes tragically destructive.

Reality–Reality doesn’t have any attributes.

That’s the truth. But still. I will not say no to a good feeling.

I will explore it instead, because as the sage tells us:

It feels good to feel better.

(Video Link)

“A solar equinox is a moment in time when the Sun crosses the Earth’s equator, which is to say, appears directly above the equator, rather than north or south of the equator”.
–the wiki thing, okay guys, whatever

Aye wobbly. But fierce too. Is the sun, is the son. That’s where I sit.

I gave myself this job seven years ago. Spill, I said, and verily I have spilled.

Then two days ago, three? I promoted myself. There is no change in duties, only more of them, self-imposed over the top of what exists.

I’m doin’ it, yeah?

Today I heard a good indicator about a second job, an allegedly real one that pays regular money and that stuff. It’s not official yet, but I’m pretty sure now that the delay has been just about paperwork turned in late, and not even turned in late by me. Here I stand, waiting for everyreference, impatiently and without impatience at the same time, shivering without shivering.

There’s a song running through my mind that has yet to be written. I think it’s by REM, 1988 or so.

Wobble and Shiver and Fierce.

I’m wanting to hold onto both new jobs and suck all the juice out of them and not let go this time until the lemon tang fills my heart overflowing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b100YZcLU4

Yesterday doesn’t count. It was video zero, a chance to see if and how I could actually do it.

Today it’s for real, warts and all.

Here is a bonus for viewers who are also readers. This is what I’m carrying down and the bag I’m using to haul it, For Now.

The phone/temporary audio device is not included because I used that to take the picture. Also, the water bottle is aspirational–I don’t have enough room for it in that current messenger bag. That needs to change, and I think I should bring food too, for reasons described in the video among others. So–a bigger bag, yes–but not so big that I can’t carry it slung across chest and back. And no fucking dweeby fanny packs either.

But all that said, I am ready in body and gear and mind to have this underway right at the equinox.

***

By the way, the camera split the video into two parts, and I didn’t have the mother wit to fix that before uploading. It seems that it used to be a trivial matter to splice two videos together seamlessly with the “YouTube Editor”, but that they improved that feature out of existence.

I’ll learn their stupid game. Eventually.

Part One
Part Two

trumpbad putinbad voteblue hashtaggin muhpronouns democracy freedom vaccine

Please. Just stop it. When I listen to that shit you sound just as mad to me as Gollum Girl.

Examples

Il n’y a plus de lait. Tant pis, je boirai mon café noir!
There is no more milk. Oh well! I’ll drink my coffee black.

Of course I have to admit the possibility that I sound exactly that crazy now to you.

Tant pis.

***

It is Tuesday and I write again in real time. Three weeks since the Tuesday I landed here for real and interviewed.

They told me it would be two weeks–Now it has officially been three.

Everything screams to call them and see, but I wanted to get back on track with my spilling first, and be able to tell you cleanly that I don’t think it matters whether they hire me or not. The waiting damage has been done, inside my own head.

If they called and said Yes five minutes from now I’d take it and I’d be glad, because it would be so much easier.

But the greater part of me is in this moment craving the hard, scary way.

***

I just shot two minutes of video and now I intend to walk downtown and see if Adobe Springs Cafe will give me an omelette.

I’m hitting Publish on this post but it’s not fully written yet.

***

Okay. Now it’s fully written. The channel is up and

the first video is live. This is a test. This is only a test.

I’m publishing this before the pol post of the 17th or the very strange story of the 18th, because I miss you.

They’re drafted. Sorta.

The strangeness blossomed throughout this day too–a very weird one. But very productive too. I won’t bore you with my organizational details.

I will say that the ‘violets’ here are really morning glory, best I can tell from research.

Also that I am optimistic about the mark of Cain being beat back even farther to the Utahn north, even though I’m apparently being cautioned about the validity of that optimism–okay.

The weather forecasts here are no better than up north, or anywhere probably. At one point they had the day’s monsoon hitting at midnight, and then that went away …

But at ten in the evening, just now, there was a sudden rush of rain bigger than any other since I’ve been down in the montane south.

The hurtling of the negative ions sent me back to the keyboard and to you. Bless the goddess of the clouds.

Mostly, noise only happens here on the weekends.

On Saturday around dusk there was a noise of crowds drifting over, capped off by a booming loud announcer’s voice doing that Let’s Get Ready to Rumble yell coming in from a medium distance. It was a football game at the college, maybe even Homecoming given the time of year. But after the initial ruckus, there was hardly any more noise from them forthcoming. Maybe the home team started losing right away, or something, but it went quiet fast.

Around nine o’clock there were two very loud bangs back to back down the hill, like major firecrackers, M-80s even only louder.

A little over an hour later something made me go back outside onto the porch that overlooks the side lot.

There I heard a much softer and closer noise further up the hill. A rustling of grass … following by a breathy whuffling.

I thought about going back inside for a flashlight, but I didn’t want to leave my study of the sound.

It sounded smaller than a bear, larger than a squirrel. Coyote maybe? So weird to picture one alone so close to town. I just held still and kept listening.

Then I saw a flash of white moving through the starlit darkness not far away. My eyes resolved it into a skunk and I smiled. It didn’t make much sense that the noise and the skunk were related–their positions didn’t add up, and the noise sounded bigger. But my mind seized on the explanation anyway.

Then, with the skunk still basically in sight, the noise grew, and then someone said, “Quiet, quiet, oh quiet … ”

I said, reflexively, “Okay, I’ll be quiet”.

The other voice made a fearful chattering sound and said–Oh My God you scared me!

She came shuffling into view finally at the edge of the last little drop-off behind me cargo trailer, looking for a way off the rough hill and onto the driveway.

I said, “You want to be careful. There’s a skunk right there”.

With a final vocal tremor of terror she jumped down awkwardly and shuffled toward the porch. I was grateful for the little three-foot wall between us. I felt quite wary but modestly protected.

The first real thing she said was, “I need to find the producer”, like I was supposed to know what that meant. So I had a pretty good idea right off that I was dealing with crazy.

I studied her with my eyes and it was painful. She was totally bald. Her face looked greenish in the darkness. She was wearing ratty clothes. The overall impression was that she was Gollum.

I told her I didn’t know the producer and I asked her, Producer of What? Are you in a movie? It was a comforting thought, because it would explain her weird makeup and generally otherworldly self-presentation.

No, she said, it’s a kind of reality TV thing. It went kind of wrong. Did you hear those two gunshots?

I said I did, and she said that her boyfriend had shot somebody, once in the face and once in the chest.

Is somebody dead, then? I wondered carefully out loud. I looked closer. She didn’t appear to be armed in any way, but I took a casual step back anyway and leaned against the far wall of the porch up against the house.

I don’t know, she said. I just need to get back to the producer’s house. Do you know him? Have you been there?

It went on like that for a couple more minutes. Then I watched her wander up the steep street on her witless quest for home or some twisted version of sanctuary.

I went inside, locked up tight, and made a huge meal for myself too close to bedtime.

In the morning, trying to figure out where the hell she came from, I studied the map and drove around a bit. The weirdest part was that there is no street up that hill. It’s a fairly big open area that rolls back down the other side toward the unused railroad tracks, and the ditch that holds what’s left of the creek.

For all I know she came up out of the water like a tadpole.

I’m telling you all this a few days late because I’ve turned it over in my mind and I don’t know what else to do with it.

I have no doubt now that the two bangs were indeed shotgun blasts.

Beyond that I have no clue about any of it.

Except that it may be time to become a producer myself.

Colonialism and imperialism are alive and well and a lot of us are Frederick Douglass, though few of us are so brave or so efficient at overcoming our enslavements.

There’s a journalist improbably name Robert Flummerfelt and he has a real story to tell about how the Empire is still hunting black people in the depths of Africa.

German-funded inquiry into DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo)atrocities slammed as ‘cover-up’

Rania Khalek interviews him at length here. I initially heard the story while catching up on old podcast episodes from TrueAnon.

I’m not up to reframing the story for you myself today. I lay it down here, a few days late in fact, because it wants to be heard, and it may make a difference to you somehow. I can’t sign off with a flippant ‘Enjoy!’ because it’s not a story for enjoying. It’s just another ugly truth in a long line of them stretching back centuries.

The world of humans is an incredibly ugly place, and success–winning–doesn’t change that at all. As far as I can see it only makes it worse.

Our America, 190 years ago. The following is a quote, and obviously not my words.

***

I lived with Mr. Covey (the slavebreaker) one year. During the first six months of that year (1833), scarce a week passed without his whipping me.

***

If at any one time of my life more than another, I was made to drink the bitterest dregs of slavery, that time was during the first six months of my stay with Mr. Covey. We were worked in all weathers. It was never too hot or too cold; it could never rain, blow, hail, or snow, too hard for us to work in the field. Work, work, work, was scarcely more the order of the day than of the night. The longest days were too short for him, and the shortest nights too long for him. I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!

Sunday was my only leisure time. I spent this in a sort of beast-like stupor, between sleep and wake, under some large tree. At times I would rise up, a flash of energetic freedom would dart through my soul, accompanied with a faint beam of hope, that flickered for a moment, and then vanished. I sank down again, mourning over my wretched condition. I was sometimes prompted to take my life, and that of Covey, but was prevented by a combination of hope and fear. My sufferings on this plantation seem now like a dream rather than a stern reality.

—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

As quoted in a proximate source, namely:
Show 68 – BLITZ Human Resources from Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History
03/06/2022 | 234.9 MiB | 05:39:12
The Atlantic Slave Trade mixes centuries of human bondage with violence, economics, commerce, geo-political competition, liberty, morality, injustice, revolution, tragedy and bloody reckonings. That sounds like a lot, yet this show merely scratches the surface of this enormous subject.

***

I got the quote from the podcast episode and in the five-six hours of it there were far worse things. But this one struck me especially, in light of the Marvin and the Man theme.

There’s a lot to say and I won’t say most of it, but …

The main thing is the question of whether our lives have improved. Whether Progress exists.

I get why most people think they have, here in the West and the Empire.

Tomorrow I’ll give you a bit of the counterargument.

I would tell you about Thursday.

It began with a shudder of wondering why they haven’t called back yet. Then I sorted the last box haphazardly and got in the truck and tried to find a different way across town using the new ridiculously expensive GPS system.

The first road pleased me with its indifferent green poverty, but the map system failed me. A road that looked like it went through on the screen turned out to be rough dirt and then it ended abruptly in a pair of yards. I picked one of them and it too ended almost immediately. So I started very carefully backing up around a couple of vicious curves. About halfway down an unseen woman began braying alternatively “Hello?” and “Can I help you?”–to the first I answered Hey and to the second I just said No, repeatedly. I have no idea if she heard any of it. Her cries only focused me in getting the hell out as efficiently as possible. It probably took three minutes to accomplish it, from the time she started up.

I tried the second road and it got me over to the hospital part of town, and I knew where to go from there to get two breakfast burritos, and I ate one of them on the spot.

Then I went shopping and a bought:

–the small kind of chrome rack, to serve in the short term as a nightstand,
–a lamp that has no wall plug and no regular batteries, but can instead be charged via USB, or by a small solar panel built into the top of it, or by a hand crank concealed in the bottom of it,
–some of the kind of refrigerator magnets with hooks for hanging for example a bamboo spatula that won’t scratch enamel,
— and a home version blood pressure cuff.

Then I tried the third road and it went a long paved way, rising another thousand feet in elevation beautifully before also ending abruptly, but at least not in someone’s yard. This I addressed not by backing, but by one of those one million point K-turns. It is a very long old luscious truck, about twenty feet. The dropoffs on both sides of the long road were not catastrophic, but only concerning. Care was taken, believe it.

Then I got a coffee and went home and assembled the chrome rack and charged the light by USB and hung the fridge hooks and took my blood pressure without going calm and still for fifteen minutes first like they tell you to in the pamphlet. The preliminary result were in the yellow range, initially suggesting a case of mild hypertension, which I think is correct. I also hung the fresh wet clothes on the new drying rack as it got dark.

Afterwards I felt tired but laying down and reading did not lead to sleep. I read the entirety of a short later John Nichols novel about September, and a very short story by E. Hemingway called Soldier’s Home.

Toward the end of that, still feeling nowhere near restful, I cracked a bottle of wine for the first time in my two and a half weeks here. It is the Cab I liked best from Esperanza’s.

Having had two short glasses and done my proper work by telling you all that, maybe sleep will finally come.

Listen: I live in heaven now. Shit still blindsides me. Like the doorknob. Like the invisible braying woman.

I’m not always perfectly in my right mind and in fact I think the utter freedom of this new life inclines me toward finally feeling some pretty awful things after years of suppressing them more and then less and then more. Feeling them finally leaves me also feeling mildly hypertense.

By the end of his apparently purely autobiographical novel, all Nichols has to his name is a heart condition, a truck like mine, four thousand in the bank, and some kind of weird prep-school boy inner assurance that he’s never going to get a regular job again.

At the end of Hemingway’s story, the soldier cuts all emotional ties, moves to Kansas City, and gets a very regular job as a newspaperman.

In some ways I’m better off than either. In some ways not. In still others the jury is still out.

Some say comparisons are odious, and others will tell you that what they are is inevitable.

I don’t know who is right about pretty much anything.

Nevertheless, consciousness in all these forms is miraculous and dear.

The monsoon is taking a break and that fills me with nostalgia, but soon there will be a winter and new kinds of shivery beauty at six and seven thousand feet to notice within it.

Maybe the first movie will go into the can then.

I have such an ungodly pile of shit to dump on you today. Housecleaning. Sorry. It’s the night before trash day and I need to reboot anyway.

First of all, there is no such thing as right and left anymore.

Here is His Execrability Stuart Varney on Fox News, a pure right-wing elitist, trying and failing to stick up for a pure left-wing elitist, Bill Gates, at the expense of a populist Georgia farmer. The farmer wins.

Oh F*ck, He’s At It Again

So god bless and keep Russell Brand, notable populist, and man who is not afraid to admit when he is wrong.
(Please consider that second video to apply to my quoting of his slightly wrong thing some time back, too.)

***

China just passed the US in life expectancy.

this is a bad sign

Just as in the rest of healthcare, the Empire completely botched their response to The ‘Rona compared to the rest of the allegedly civilized world. That was one major factor. The other is that since so many of its citizens have no real choice other than to self-medicate (biologically, psychologically), we are now at the point of one overdose every five minutes, a historic high and a new low morally. The elitists just keep failing upwards, and the rest of us pay for it every em-effing day with our blood and treasure.

The other day I got a very long text message from one of my two Dem Senators, the lesser evil as it were, begging for money. I wrote back:

“Fight for us for real and I’ll think about it …
Medicare for all. A living wage. Billions for Nogales instead of Kyiv. Like that.
Or, just go ask Pfizer for another dose I guess.
Let me know.”

I won’t think about it really, because he’s never going to let me know. That’s not how we play this game. I’m just supposed to suck up his spam and fork over the cash, and my braying back will only ever be read by some marketing department algorithm.

Fuck that astronaut. I threw away one vote on him and next time I’ll write in David Bourne from The Garden of Eden and it’ll do just as much and as little good.

By the way, the one point I scored with my new Latino Cheney-loving museum friend was for using the word ‘Dempublican’. He really seemed to love it and even though it was a free and cheap shot, his being tickled made me happy.

A couple of grinning natural-born populists.

***

Then there’s this Veritasium guy on the YouTubes, another new acquaintance who is politically dense but worth hanging out with anyway. This one has nothing to do with politics and is therefore a completely happy experience.

The Universe is Hostile to Computers

You would make me very happy, in turn, by using this excuse the next time you fail to return an email or something. “I think a lepton hit my bits!” I know I will.

This other one teaches you the science of one of the ways the capitalists fuck your life over on the regular.

This is why we can’t have nice things

I want to say: What are the moral and political implications of this, Mr. Veritas?

But just as with Mark Kelly, I’d only be pissing in the wind.

Don’t get me wrong. I like the windpisser work. I just wish it paid better.

***

Speaking of stray leptons, mesons, WTF ever, I hope you know by now that democracy is completely dead within the Empire.

U.S. Election Integrity Is A Joke And Here’s Why

Jimmy Dore interviews Tim Canova, the guy who tried to primary that truly horrible Wasserman-Schultz creature down in Florida. Mr. Canova’s experiences with being on the wrong side of election fraud amplify nicely on the notion that right and left are meaningless labels now.

‘I don’t believe there are any Russians
And there ain’t no Yanks.
Just corporate criminals
playing with tanks”

And ‘votes’. And money. Mutatis mutandis.

***

I think that will do for now. Thank you for your patience.

In his earliest novels, the part of Hemingway was played by a character he called Nick Adams.

In The Garden of Eden, he is David Bourne. And also metaphorically Adam, the first man. Bourne’s new wife is the serpent or devil–a Lilith figure to be sure. Later, they meet Eve.

Hemingway started this book in 1946 and continued to work on it until his death, at which time the versions of it consisted of “three irreconcilable drafts of varying lengths, the longest of which was chosen to be the basis for the published text”. What we have to read, published 1986, is one version, and less than half the length of the source texts combined

And, it is brilliant anyway. Even if the Hemingway they gave you to read in school bored you, as it did me.

Apparently they made a movie of it in 2008, but the print work is still impacting me enough that I don’t want to watch a movie right now.

***

Watching a bird at the feeder or among the violets is a beautiful thing, but watching them in groups is more often a depressing reminder of John Cage’s maxim.

Free as a bird? They’re not free. They’re fighting over bits of food.

Or to be more precise:

I put that together for myself and you, and then I went outside again and saw three very different beautiful birds getting along just fine. There was a big brown one, and a little black and white one that wasn’t a magpie, and a blue one called a piñon jay. A reminder that this isn’t New York, nor a city, nor a park at all. Just like he is blue, and a jay, but not a bluejay.

But still. Four bookstores in a mile of walking. Three distinct lovely birds at the feeder. Two major grocery stores in addition to the organic co-op. And one man at the end of days, Adam, bourne again.

By them, I mean the man writ large, starting with my father and moving forward in time to every boss I ever had.

Just typing the words makes me feel old and like I want another cigarette. However, neither feeling old nor burning another stick erases the words from my head: ‘I let them get to me’.

I had that thought first thing in the morning and it shook me real bad for half a day.

I soothed the shakes by walking to four bookstores, buying five books and a turkey sandwich, and having two conversations, the best of which was with the new curator at the museum, who tried his best to convince me that Liz Cheney should be the next President, which was so wrong it was also deeply entertaining. I listened to him. Sagely.

Normally you’d need a town ten times this size to have access to that healing strategy.

I like it here.

In May, sixty-some years ago, Gary Cooper died in LA. In July, his friend and hiking partner Ernest Hemingway committed suicide with a shotgun in Ketchum, Idaho. Later in the fall, I made my planetary debut in Chicago

A lot has happened since then and it wasn’t all pretty.

But now I have some books to read before sleep, and one of them was written by Hemingway, because I enjoyed his posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden so very much, and finished it the night before I woke up and thought ‘I let them get to me’, and I was right, and the book was right too.

i don’t want to start any blasphemous rumors but
i think that god has a sick sense of humor
and when i die i expect to find him laughing
–Depeche Mode

I was 22 and times were tough. I walked over the Willamette River on the Hawthorne Bridge. Rain soaked in through the holes in my shoes and socks. I made it to the program office where they had computers long before the Web for job searches and writing resumes, but I already knew where I wanted to work, and quite a lot about where I didn’t.

The program gave out a small number of bus tickets and this partly solved the soaked socks problem. I was a dutiful attendee at the sessions and eventually I got ready to graduate.

Graduation was a mock job interview that they videotaped for later critique.

Even then I had a good handle on what to say and how. I aced the interview. But then something strange happened.

The guy across the desk, whose name was Marv, turned off the camera and looked at me. That was fine, he said, but something was bothering him.

He took a breath and continued, working up the courage to tell me the truth. Eventually it came out this way.

“The real problem here is that somebody told you you were shit, and you believed them.”

No one has ever been more right, and I knew it immediately on some cellular level. This was the opposite of fake news.

The story of my life and especially my working life since was written as an attempted response to that truth.

It isn’t easy to change an ingrained belief like that, but I have tried honestly.

The someone who told it to me was of course my father. My father, The Man.

Rejecting his injected belief has looked the same as rejecting The Man. Even during the years when I was working so hard to believe that I myself too had what it took to be as a man.

I got the job I wanted soon after. It was at a library. Life started to change for the better.

In my most recent interview, at a library, I told the ladies of the committee that libraries were (professionally) the last best place, and I do believe that. Academia is the Mater, the Mother, and the library is the most motherly part of it, the part most intermittently insulated from the way of The Man.

There isn’t any better or less false place to have a day job.

***

I wrote that late on Saturday. It is now first thing Tuesday which for me is 10 AM.

Meaning, writing it sent me into a 2.5 day funk of unsuccessfully trying to forget that I let them get to me.

The Big Misconception About Electricity

How Electricity Actually Works

I still don’t know what electricity is or how it works, but I’m not quite as totally ignorant as I was. Maybe.

In a similar fashion:

Civilizational World Order w/Dr. Steve Turley (Live)

I listened to about the first hour and I think I’m done listening, but this was useful.

I’ve wondered a lot about the philosophical underpinnings of the two guys in the Duran, who I’ve been watching faithfully since the Special Military Operation in Ukraine began. I agree with about 80% of what they say and seem to believe, but other times I just think, “Well that’s … not what I see”.

Like when they shit on Greta Thunberg or the notion of climate change as a reality generally.

This interview helps explain the disconnect.

In it, we hear a lot about tradition and religion and the central importance of family.

I understand that a lot of people think and live this way. I will even concede that a lot of very smart people center their lives on such notions.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, one of them.

I’m completely alone right now at a few minutes to midnight. There isn’t even a cat here. The neighbors are only loud on weekend nights and they’re past that stage, probably in a blissfully drunken stupor by now. They have been for some hours.

The quiet is nearly total even though I’m in town, and that makes it perfect.

I am shorn of all traditions except the ones I made up. Sometimes it’s a lonely path, but it feels true.

I have family but we’re only episodically close.

Religion is bollocks. The gentleman being interviewed says nice things about Buddhists, but he is the furthest thing from one, and the buddhism I know isn’t a religion, either.

The best buddhism I know says: After enlightenment, the laundry, and

Today was laundry day. I did it twice, in two different ways, and I learned from both.

At the end of the literal day, there is wind coming in strong but not forceful, and it pulls the rinsewater from the towels on the line under a moon that glows blue.

I may not ever go back to the big home appliance for drying clothes, but an electrically powered washing machine is not a thing I want to live without and I feel the same about pipes that carry clean hot water.

There is always more to say.

Debate: Are Democrats REALLY Any Better Than Republicans?

You might like this one more than most I post. It’s Dore’s show, but his guest is a funny, articulate fellow comedian who says, yes, Democrats may not be wildly better, but yes, definitely a little bit.

Also, JD stays out of it, and lets his sidekick, a guy named Kurt Metzger, argue the reverse, and Kurt loses control of himself and gets mad while the guest keeps his sense of humor and makes fun of him for it.

So there’s that.

WH Press Secretary Said 2016 Election Was Stolen

Another little JD clip, more typically targeted. Partly interesting because Kurt is still fuming. Partly interesting because I realized that Biden’s press secretary is a likable person who is just bad at her job, which is lying.

Democrats better or the same? Haitian press secretary lady a force for good, or not? And, completely unrelated, probably:

James Webb Telescope FINALLY Proves The Big Bang Theory Is Wrong

Was there a big bang, or not?

The smartest people in the room can’t even agree on that now that the JWST is starting to send back hard data.

The cloud of unknowing thickens around us. I don’t mind as much as I might have once.

Hang On, Was Joe Rogan Right Then?

Natural immunity is now being used as an explanation for why Joe Biden won’t get boosted again.

“Horse paste” was just quietly added to the list of treatments for the scary disease.

And … other stories that prove you and I were lied to repeatedly, for profit, again.

I wish I hadn’t voted for Biden. I wish I hadn’t taken the vaccine.

Maybe we’ll get smarter in time. That’s part of why I do what I do here.

***

Related:

Max Blumenthal & Katie Halper react (point by point) to Biden’s “Dark Brandon” speech

Jon Stewart Honors an AZOV Battalion Nazi At Disney World

The Black Sun symbol of the honoree’s tat, per Wikipedia

In the first link, as a bonus, you get to see how Brie Joy is doing in her new and almost mainstream job.

There’s been a firestorm of controversy but Stewart has not azov yet responded.

Baba ganoush is the same as hummus except based on roasted eggplant instead of boiled garbanzos. We had some at Revel and got interested. I think I’ll make some soon.

The best internet connection is Starlink, because it works off modern satellite and you thus have a blazing fast connection no matter how far out in the sticks you are. It is expensive though. 700 up front and $135 a month currently. So for the short term, I think the next best thing will turn out to be Visible Cellular, which is just Verizon’s budget data plan at $40/mo. off a hotspot. Which is less than I pay for wired cable back up north … it’s a lot slower, but I think I can live with that. Probably and mostly.

The Lower Mimbres looking as good or better than Napa yesterday, the Sunday.

Today, much more low key. We found a good six dollar breakfast burrito and then went to a Gem and Mineral Show that was just the right manageable size.

Meanwhile, water.

The jowly red-faced very white governor of Mississippi, flanked by his white male team of crewcuts, explains why the 80% black capitol city of Jackson is now completely without running water, and why it will be so indefinitely.

And closer to home: Saudi Arabia Draining Water From Drought-Stricken Arizona

Stay hydrated while you still can.

Gila Hot Springs isn’t what it used to be, but up the road the Cliff Dwellings National Monument is still free and still worth the short slow drive.

Back down through Lake Roberts and San Lorenzo, where there were more quail in one spot than ever, crossing the road.

Then the vineyard, ripe and lush, where I like the Cab best for a change.

City of Rocks. She called it New Mexico Stonehenge and that was perfect.

The restaurant known as Revel is closing in two weeks but we made it for one more time and that once more will help us miss it with a pining respect.

I drank a little too much delicious Willamette Valley Pinot but only a little too much.

Elsewhere in the noosphere: Turning a Free Pallet into a $1,200 Desk

Late on Friday I got company in the form of one woman and one cat, who is Cybelle, since renamed Lexi.

Before that: intense enjoyable moments contemplating the mundane.

In this rental, there’s a kitchen. The kitchen is mostly full of the landlady’s stuff, and that needs to change some to make room for my own minimalist kit. There’s no point in plugging in my electric kettle next to hers, for example.

I got an idea from a small box I brought that only has the foodstuffs for making my curries in it (except the rice, which is a generic staple).

I think that instead of building in to my new house a full set of countertops, and pantries, and cupboards, I’m going to make the whole business portable and flexible.

So for example, instead of cupboards for things like the curry kit, I’ll get a few more chrome racks that allow the user to vary the shelf height.

And on those shelves, I can slot boxes-as-drawers. Maybe even just plain cardboard boxes, but probably something a little more sturdy and pretty.

And then in the trailer-camper, there will be a space for exactly the same rack-and-drawer system. If I’m feeling super minimalist, I can even dual-purpose the chrome racks, and slot them in from the house kitchen to the camp kitchen and back again after trips.

Or, more plausibly, I could just duplicate identical racks, and just pack for a trip by moving the full drawers from the full stable kitchen to the mobile one.

The same system could be applied to most kitchen and bathroom and bedroom and closet kinds of things.

I think it’ll save on a lot of duplication and unnecessary redundancy of both perishables and durable goods.

I’m going to start thinking and living and buying that way.

It’s not a big revelatory deal, maybe, but I think it has a lot of potential and it pleases my aesthetic.

Modularity. Sometimes the cast iron pan heats over a steady normal blue gas flame, but sometimes the same pan cooks the same things over a glowing bed of coals.

Like that.

The measurements of So near and yet So far turn out to be
about 4 blocks long and 5 months wide,
and that right there my friends is pure belletrism
soul poetics.

Today I bought that effing doorknob, but mostly I bought groceries, basic things like eggs, and crazy new things to try like clarified butter and tortillas made out of thinly sliced jicama. There’s gonna be a big batch of homemade hummus mixed up here and you can count on that much.

Out beyond the blender the situation necessarily declarifies. I know nothing. I have dreams, hopes, prayers. I write instructions in my head for theoretical electricians.

Listen now buddy, the primary system is this solar panel right here. Your job is to hook me up to the grid like any good normal homeowner, but that whole big grid is only the backup system, see? Before my new home sips a single watt from the system, there’ll be this charge controller wired up in front of their meter, and it will suck down the rays first, and only take electricity from them when there isn’t enough left being generated here onsite. Can you do that for me? Good. Let’s do that for me. I have some money laying around here somewhere.

I write irreverent eulogies for people I love who are sick or will be someday.

I write the songs that make the whole world sing … well, the whole noir world that isn’t manilow.

Most of it never gets put down in print. I go over what I said and what I should have said, to clerks and prospective colleagues, and only tiny shreds of it make it to this page.

I say: This world is both; this world is ID checks and 10K electric bills, but it is also the prickly pear growing next to the purple flower and the bees and butterflies so happy about it.

It’s like Gervais says. For thirteen billion years there was a universe without a me. Then somehow I got sixty, seventy, eighty maybe to go about the woodland checking out the snow-hung cherries. And what did I do with that little miracle sliver? I wasted it mostly, like an average god damn fool.

But at times like these, in days like this, I remember and I don’t waste and that’s as good as I or any of us will ever be.

Checkout time always comes too soon, and for thirteen billion more years after it, there will once again be a universe untroubled by any notion of a Vairtere.

It’s so unfair! But still, the odds that I would ever have the sliver at all … astronomically against me. It’s so lucky.

It’s unfair, but it’s the most incredible luck, at the same time.

You’re a sly one, God. Or whoever or whatever.

Salute.

Wednesday. The first day here where I had no major task, like a drive or an interview (or a breaking and entering besides), that needed to get done without fail by a time certain.

It began innocently enough. One of the first things I did was to take that picture, and then post it, thinking it would serve unto itself as a daily spill and that I was done with my self-assigned job early.

I sorted piles of the stuff I brought; I found an out of the way temporary spot for the empty boxes. I had another sweet bath and got cleaner than I have been for years.

Then I got dressed and went for a bike ride down and up the prodigious Hill I’m living on, and then back down to the town. Coffee. A bite. An informal study session on where to park the bike, at the coffee shop, and an unexpected discovery that in spite of the many lush charms of the Tranquil Buzz, I may very well end up going back to being a Javalina Cafe kind of guy.

(In some ways the TB is a victim of its own huge, respectable, and well-deserved success. No matter when you walk in there, the atmosphere and the entire vibe is dominated by the endless lingering of comfortable senior citizens in tight little groups. My buzz is not harshed by this–and I’m not young myself–but it’s … not what I hunger for, in a coffee shop experience. The randomness and relative impoverishment of the Javalina clientele, too busy surviving to linger overmuch, is just palpably preferable. To me.)

Between coffee and the co-op I got rained on a little and didn’t mind it. I pulled another turkey bacon avocado. I studied prices and selection of some things that are staples for me, like hummus. I found myself hoping that when the new co-op building opens next year, the larger size of the place will mean good things, in terms of that selection.

I came home, conducted further studies on bike parking and access, took the trash to the curb, ate my sandwich, and crashed hard but not bad.

It’s been a long row of six or seven hour sleeps, and of long intense days. On top of that I had the uncommonly vigorous physicality of a more serious bike ride. So when I got home, and ate, my body just all at once said: Enough. It wasn’t the gentle maybe of an afternoon nap like I’m used to. There was a slam the brakes urgency this time, telling me in so many unspoken words: The System Is Going Down Now.

It was glorious and delicious. I had some of the usual guilt over sleeping well in the middle of the day, but also the consolation of knowing it wasn’t really even a choice. It was compliance with and submission to a mandate from a legitimately constituted authority. It’s no real fault of the conscious responsible productive mind, when the body says This You Must Do.

I am so very spiritually intoxicated by the fact that I have a temporary foothold here on living the life I always dreamed of living. In each moment, I am for now, quite literally … living the dream.

***

I woke to crepuscular dusk a little while ago. I poured a fresh cup and I resumed the sorting of my tools for life, with an emphasis on dishes this time.

While I worked I put my usual politics videos up on the big monitor and listened.

What I heard made me come back here and write.

We begin again, here.

Geraldine Dolan owns the Poppyfields Cafe coffee house in Westmeath, Ireland.

This is the electric bill for her little business there, for two months. Five thousand dollars/euros a month, to keep the lights on, even before the onset of a cold Irish winter.

She’s probably got air conditioning. Maybe she has a roaster running all day. But speculation aside, this is basically a death blow for her lovely, tranquil way of making a living.

“How in the name of God is this possible”?

I saw this in the first video update of the day by Alex Christofouru, and he pointed out something easily missed.

The Twitter account of this poor, doubtless hardworking woman is decorated with that little blue and yellow Ukrainian flag.

The answer to your question, Geraldine, is that God has nothing to do with it. This has been done to you by the real devil of your leadership class, the very same devil that brainwashed you into flying that little flag.

Quite contrary to what they’ve sold you, the proxy war in Ukraine has fuck-all to do with sovereignty, or democracy and liberty, or heroes and villains, any more than the endless imperial wars in Vietnam or Iraq or Syria or Yemen or hundreds of other places ever did.

You live in a beautiful green place that is owned, alas, by a capitalist oligarchy who picks your leaders for you and shoves them down your throat in a parody of democratic values, and it is in their interests that stupid sanctions happened, and those stupid sanctions resulted directly in your $10K electric bill, AND … you should get ready for worse still, in the absence of real and revolutionary change.

I’m writing this, as I write much of what I write, for the Geraldines of this world, to beg them please to wake the fuck up to the reality of the Matrix around them before it is too late.

If she understood the truth of how in the name of God this is possible, there is no way in hell that she could be blithely flying that blue and yellow flag of nazi pride, which is in itself just another meme that papers over the even deeper and dirtier reality of pure inhuman greed and economic slavery that this modern world of progress! runs on.

I’m not mad at her, I’m mad at them. I don’t think she’s stupid, I just think she’s all too typically, brutally, average.

Colors on the street
Red, white and blue
People shuffling their feet
People sleeping in their shoes
There’s a warning sign on the road ahead
There’s a lot of people saying we’d be better off dead

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

I am no priest of Satan. I’m just a struggling half-ass sage with a declaration of true independence in my head and hand.

***

I have to keep reminding myself that a real sage doesn’t care if he’s smarter than you or not.

A real sage needs to learn how to not even care whether your blinders come off … much less engage in trying to rip them off his own damned self like some kind of bullshit John Brown reincarnate.

In two or ten or twenty years I won’t even be here to chant my lamentations and jeremiads, and none of this will matter.

All we have is the moment. I only ask and pray that you and I both live in it with full awareness, and act accordingly.

And Geraldine too.

Amen.

Right here, 130 years into the past. There’s pavement now.

And other mixed blessings, everywhere I look.

I was up early, more than 5 hours before my interview.

I cannot tell you how much I am enjoying having a bathtub again.

Out among the healthy monsoon-fed violets running riot in the yards, I completed a long looping circuit from twentyfive years back by saying hello to a hummingbird who actually perched on a branch for a minute and bowed namaste to me. I responded in kind.

I drove around for a few of those hours, scoping out where to park the big truck up near the Uni without having to walk too far, measuring distances from the temp home and the fresh lot and the coffee place and the Co-op and the Library. All of it is within two miles or thereabouts. I expect to be biking it on an average day, but I was intending to look like the successful candidate on this one. So I laid out an extra shirt on the passenger seat, instead of stuffing one into the saddlebags; a small concession to the way things are in the gainfully employed world.

Just a little, you gotta keep up appearances … speaking of which …

About 45 minutes before showtime, I stopped back the house, intending to use the bathroom.

The rental house kinda has two front doors, with a mud room in between. It’s like that at my house in SandRock too … I consider this little portal an essential for a residential space–keeping bugs out, keeping cats in, and other happy things.

However.

The key provided by the landlady worked fine on the real front door, but …

Not on the inner one.

Which I had locked from inside and pulled shut when I left. What. The. Fuck.

So here’s what I did, you ready?

In the mud room, with the curtains carefully drawn, I took a dump in a mostly empty bag of birdseed and wiped up with fastfood napkins from the glovebox.

Yyyyep.

Then I hosed down my hands with peroxide (still carrying that around from the covid days), and I went straight to my first job interview in five years.

It went very very well, thank you.

The whole thing was some kind of twisted perfect metaphor for my entire mad fucking life.

On the way back I stopped at the Co-op and I bought water, and milk for coffee, and hummus, and a very nice seven-dollar sandwich: turkey bacon avocado.

If I had any sense I would have bought some lockpicks too, but I don’t.

I came back here and parked and ate my sandwich and considered my options.

I tried every other screen, window, door, but nothing doing.

The offending door has a pane of glass in it on the top part. Giving that a good smack and replacing it would have worked, but I wanted to try something with a little more nuance first.

I watched a lot of YouTube videos about picking locks, and I tried all the advice that I could, given what tools I had on hand. None of it worked, but I’m glad to know some of those techniques, which may come in handy someday where the security isn’t so stout.

I worked steadily and stoically on the job for three sweaty hours.

In the end, with the sky darkening and getting ready to pour, I grabbed the stubborn knob with a pair of vice grips and twisted it until it gave in with a groaning death rattle.

So now I have to replace that shit, but I can do it myself at least, and it’ll set me back about twenty bucks, and it will take me way less than three hours I’m sure.

Plus, I’ll have a lock with a damn key, and so will the landlady, when she makes it back from her sojourn in the Peruvian highlands.

I got a good story out of it …

The moral of which is …

All blessings are mixed, and our brains and selves make up the mixtures personally. It’s the universal human job.

Monday and I got the job done. It was: to drive my very own mother road with a big load, and unload it in the right place. The very best place, for the moment.

This is the guy who greeted me there.

I relocated him to the open field, but if I’d have read up first, I might have kept him around. Turns out he’s a good and harmless scorpion who loves to eat the bad kind, and millipedes too.

Live and learn.

Here is some deeply quiet night sky, too.

Sunday and I got the job done. It was: to pack up what I couldn’t live without for some number of months.

I stacked no furniture except the fancy office chair. There are some infrastructure pieces, like an RV fridge, an RV mattress, a mobile power supply, and a hot shower in a box. I’m unlikely to use any of that soon. They’re in the cargo trailer because they belong in the trailer, eventually, when it morphs into a camper.

Beyond that, toolboxes, the cream of the pots and pans, some bulk food in fancy buckets, clothes, minimal linens, and a kind of overstuffed version of what you’d pack for a three-week stay in resort. Like, I brought a hand. soap. pump. That’s what I mean by overstuffed.

It fills the small supercab back seat of the truck, and something like half the floor of the trailer, e-bike included. Viewed in that light it seems like shockingly little, and that makes me happy. The rental awaits my kit unloaded into it, of a Monday. Tuesday, I interview.

After that, the job is: house, on land.

On the FB Marketplace that I won’t go near, she found a house solution for under 20K. It’s a really tiny house, like a hundred square feet, and no existing hot water solution, in spite of the fact that there’s a sink and shower. That’s the downside. The upside would be that it’s unbelievably cheap, and would be pretty simple to have up and running completely when the lease on the rental is up in about exactly five months.

Whereas I’d be only started, on an arched cabin–it wouldn’t be habitable yet, in any realistic likelihood, in that short time frame.

Also, the tiny is eleven feet tall, and fully mobile. It would make a nice guest cottage or AirB&B after we replaced it with something more realistic for the long term.

So maybe.

But that’s a topic for another day.

***

Political offhand for this day.

According to no less a radical rag than Bloomberg News:

“1 In 6 American homes … have fallen behind on their energy bills“.

Already fallen behind. It will surely go to a third of American homes, and very probably on to half, come the far solstice.

But oh we are (actually) lucky this time. It’s going to be far, far worse in Europe, where ‘energy prices’ are four and six and eight times what they are in North America (with the exception of a radically nuclear-powered Sweden).

The good news for the average working stiff in say, Britain, is that there’s an actual serious social safety net in place.

The bad news, in for example Germany, is that the boomerang sanctions could easily mean that energy is simply unavailable at any price, subsidized or not. They are already talking about rolling blackouts, and ‘warming shelters’ that are not houses or apartments.

The people will have no one to blame for the crisis but their own feckless, stupid, Atlanticist, NATO-sucking leadership.

And they will, throughout the West. It might even be a hopeful sign, for anyone revolutionarily inclined. No one knows for sure yet.

Thunder over the lake:
The image of Converting The Maiden.
Thus the superior man
Understands the transitory
In the light of the eternity of the end.

***

Which is to say, de-rusting and paint and rack reinstalled on the truck and even bedliner laid down, but …

The RTT, the rooftop tent, will have to wait for another full day unto itself.

It was a warm hardworking productive afternoon. As evening came it was suddenly apparent that I didn’t have enough mental bandwidth in the tank to do the measurements and make the necessary cuts and fabrication changes to the rack to get the tent mounted.

It was a minor disappointment and perfectly alright.

I still have my one full day ahead for choosing what to take and turning into cargo for the trailer for the four hours of carefully drifting south.

“If you want want a rundown on the novels and non-fiction books I’ve published, click the tabs that say JOHN’S BOOKS. If you want to look up a bit of biographical stuff, click the tab marked BIOGRAPHY. If you’re interested in a few critical REFERENCES, click that tab.

If you’re an environmentalist and you think the human race can still save our planet from global warming, click the tab marked LOTSA LUCK.

I used to be the last writer in America without a website, but obviously this is no longer the case. However, I draw the line at e-mail and the Internet. If you want to get in touch with me for any reason you’ll have to use snail mail. The address is:

John Nichols
P.O. Box 1165
Taos, New Mexico 87571

You better hurry, though. As of February, 2022 I’m 81 years old, my heart is locked in A-fib, I’m still in terminal congestive heart failure, I take Lanoxin, carvedilol, coumadin and triamterene every day, and my doctor says my aortic valve is really sucking wind. And I’ve repeated this litany for the last decade.”

***

This is posted to http://www.johnnicholsbooks.com.

There is no tab marked Lotsa Luck.

I think I love this guy, and this part of his cranky website, more than I love most of his books. So far, I think The Wizard of Loneliness is perfect, and that the Milagro Beanfield War is a broken and lovely masterpiece. Beyond that, the ones I’ve tried to read have been a slog for various reasons, and I haven’t had the chance to try anything he wrote after the Trilogy.

I hope I’ve got another twenty years so I can make it, earn it, to full curmudgeon status like he has. But right now it is much more important to me to learn how to stay in the present moment, however long those moments last.

Here’s how it all worked out.

The new naturopath was yesterday and the meds are in hand today.

Also today was the one for retrieval of the trailer (they took three months to half-ass a proper electrical system, but they only charged me three hundred bucks). I got it home and dropped it in its slot and got to work on the truck–most of the paintwork is done.

Tomorrow thus becomes the one true day of the bedliner and the rack and the roof top tent …

And Sunday is the load-out, with a departure that night or more likely early Monday morning.

Theoretically that’s a night in situ before the interview Tuesday and then, either way, a new life begins.

I’m supposed to be documenting all of it you know, but this isn’t even belletrism, much less the path to being the Ytube millionaire.

It will have to do, and … it will. Perhaps even nicely.

This is my life, this is my work, right here talking to you.

It doesn’t pay that much, and I have ambitions about a house. So I applied for a job, and got an interview set up, and that whole thing is driving me forward and south right now, as soon, as possible.

Reconnecting with ‘references’ has been an adventure too. I finally wrote back to one a week after he agreed to Refer. This is someone haven’t seen in over twenty years.

Conversely, there is the one I just met for the first time in the gray light of this morning. A spirit, I am pretty sure.

The head of the World Health Organization is not a medical doctor, and …

He is using his position to prop up one side in the Ethiopian civil war, instead of using it to for anything related to ‘health’.

If you even knew there was a new Ethiopian civil war, you’re better-informed than I am.

Corrupt WHO Chief Sides With Bad Guys In Ethiopia Conflict

From the same source–did you know that the French Foreign Legion is now in Yemen to ‘secure’ gas? Or that Uncle Joe recently deployed a batch of US soldiers to the same country, because ‘fighting terrorism’?

We’re still in Syria too by the way. For the same reason; details in the link.

Thank God the enlightened democracies of the west decided to get out of the colonialism business, ennit.

Even if the Fair World Order notions being promoted by Russia and China, and being embraced by the so-called third world–even if those promises turn out to be mostly smoke and mirrors, the people in all these places will be no worse off for daring to hope and believe in them.

And they know it.

Tell me again, the one about this country having its problems and all, but how lucky we are to be one of the advantage-takers, instead of being born among the exploited.

I’m sure everyone gainfully employed aboard the Death Star felt pretty much exactly the same way.

A car bombing near Moscow. A photogenic 29-year-woman named Darya is blown to bits. She was a commentator on RT, but more significantly the daughter of the political and cultural philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, and she largely shared her father’s views.

… and an uglier pile of oxymoronic views is hard to imagine. Dugin is a Russian fascist. He is what the western media claim Putin is, an expansionist and imperialist. Beyond that, an arch-conservative–in an American context he’d be a militaristic flag-waving family-values Republican.

That same western media is happily referring to him as ‘Putin’s brain’ in one of those stupid mimetic phrases of evil intent they love so much (horse paste, anyone?). There is no evidence that the two men have ever even met.

In the same manner they’re calling it terrorism, which it clearly is not. This was an assassination pure and simple, targeted even, though perhaps it was the father who was targeted rather than the daughter–it was his car that was rigged to explode.

Rigged by whom? The Ukrainians are denying it, in spite of both Dugins appearing on their public list of enemies. Some group no one ever heard of before is claiming credit. And the Russian security state is naming and blaming a woman who is said to work for the Ukrainian FSB, and claimed to be an Azov-branded Nazi as well.

It’s hard to believe we’ll ever know for sure. It’s also hard to get too worked up about fascists blowing up fascists, if that turns out to be what happened.

But it’s a human tragedy certainly, and potentially one that we will all be dragged into geopolitically in the end.

Officials in Nevada demolish tiny homes built for homeless in Las Vegas

There were otherwise homeless people living in the tiny homes, which were placed there by the property owner for that purpose.

There were no complaints from neighborhood residents or businesses.

A ‘code compliance’ officer drove by and saw something he didn’t like.

His notes went up the chain to the politicians in the city of North Las Vegas.

Then the cops and the bulldozers came and wiped out the homes, fifty square feet of safe space each for very poor people.

The officials were unwilling to talk to the local TV journalists who covered the story.

For shame.

I did some additional digging.

Here is the website for New Leaf, the org who is trying to do something constructive in Vegas.

Here is the website for Community Supported Shelters, the org in Oregon who designed the cheap ‘Conestoga Huts’ mentioned in the story.

I also found an org down in the dream town where I’m headed soon, and I’m going to throw some of my time at them, in between my own battles with code compliance officers over permanent shelter.

Mussolini, in one of his more honest moments said, “Fascism should be more properly called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.” For Americans it is universally associated with despotic regimes in other countries. It can’t happen here. Huey Long, the self-styled populist governor of Louisiana, once warned, “If fascism ever comes to America, it will come wrapped in an American flag.” —Alternative Radio

Source: Biden Threatens Mexico Over Oil

Imperialism and colonialism, far from being artifacts of some remote stage of history, are alive and well today. Every country is infested with oligarchs, and would-be oligarchs (the Empire calls the latter ‘warlords’). It’s a consequence of what we blithely refer to as Civilization, and a consequence of greed living in every heart, yours and mine included. It will kill us all in the end.

For a hundred years at least, modern thinking about societies and civilization itself has been dominated by two broadly defined ways of seeing, the socialistic and the fascistic (fascism being, as Mussolini knew well, simply the apex state of capitalism).

In the Cold War this was represented by the Commies on one side and the Capitalists on the other. Note that these are primarily economic systems, and that political ones like ‘democracy’ are irrelevant to the discussion, except to people who conflate and confuse those two things, much like those who think the breakup of the USSR in the nineties signified the death of the socialistic tendency, or “the end of history”, a sly dig at the Marxist way of seeing things.

The socialistic tendency is alive and well in places like Mexico, and the fact that they socialized their oil industry like a lot of countries do is good evidence for that.

The corporatists who run America don’t like it one bit, and are doing everything in their neo-colonial power to try to stop it.

The NYT headline in the picture is really quite shocking, at least to me. What business is it of the Biden Administration, how Mexico proceeds to organize its resources internally and domestically?

Well, it’s a threat to the real American masters, the corporatist class for whom Biden or Trump or Obama or Bush are merely figureheads. Mexico’s socialized oil threatens their profits, so they kicked Biden’s ass and told him to threaten back like a good puppet, because what possible good is he to anyone otherwise?

The reason voting for a Democrat or a Republican changes nothing is because both halves of the uniparty are owned by the same people. If you challenge that truth even a little, you are quickly reminded of the facts. Bernie Sanders. Nina Turner. AOC. So long as you limit yourself to feel-good platitudes about the working class, or socialized medicine, or black lives mattering, or whatever tripe falls out of your mouth on any given day, it’s all good. Take one real step in the direction of real change, and the banhammer comes down with a shocking and obliterating force. JFK. RFK. MLK. Malcom X. Fred Hampton. Patrice Lumumba. And thousands of people you will never hear about.

The smart thing is to keep your head down and your nose to the grindstone and be glad you have a job supporting the corrupt system that you can barely see the outlines of anyway.

Because Democracy. Because Freedom.

The Petrified Forest – Producers’ Showcase – Aired on May 30th 1955

An early television adaptation of a famous film from 1936. I loved it.

Natalie Schafer does an amazing job in a supporting role, and Henry Fonda, quite incredibly enough, manages to outshine Humphrey Bogart. You might see it all as a bit overwrought, and you might be right, but I’d watch it again anyway.

I’m not sure exactly where the action takes place, though there’s a mighty clue in the title. Beyond that, these essential real places get a mention:

The Gila Cliff Dwellings
Hillsboro, NM
Buckhorn, NM (“on route 11”, apparently before there was a US 180)
and Winslow too.

Wednesday I got my truck back. Again, and again there was no real and in-depth study of her larger global issues, but at least this time they apologized for the oversight and didn’t charge me. My experiences this year with small and medium sized business has been unbelievably haphazard. This one was a small Ford dealer. I’ll try again, but maybe not before the move.

Thursday, as I write this back on pre-post schedule has been very holy as it is supposed to be, as the one day of solitude in the current situation. I grabbed my 25 pounds of organic garbanzos off the Azure truck. This more or less completes my half-ass prepper stash. I already had 25 each of rice and pintos; I already had the buckets with the spinner lids, and the smaller glass half-gallon jars for easy access in the kitchen.

The garbanzos were about fifty bucks. Two dollars a pound. If it were only about economy, I should just be buying cans, which range between a buck and two, per pound. Maybe dried ones are better for you than canned–it probably depends on the can, and who knows. I think I’ll be using a mix of can and dry, so as to save while still having a solid stash. Maybe I’ll come up with another reason for preferring one or the other … cans are quick and easy, but there’s a nice ritual and maybe some benefit to soaking one’s own and creating them on the boil.

Afterwards, home and another downpour, with only a little lightning and one power cut that was over quick.

I’m very organized compared to how it has been. I feel almost on top of things for a change.

Today we’re just going to leave it to … CNN, of all the unlikely people. If even THEY … well, you know.

An ‘extreme heat belt’ will impact over 100 million Americans in the next 30 years
(more like 100 million more; see below)

“Temperatures above the threshold of the National Weather Service’s “extreme danger” category, when the heat index is more than 125 degrees Fahrenheit, is expected to affect about 8 million people in the US this year. But by 2053, 13 times that many people — 107 million — will experience that extremely dangerous heat, according to the study by the climate research group First Street Foundation”.

Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/15/weather/extreme-heat-belt-us-impact-study-climate/index.html

A rich man of the Empire, popping up in media everywhere, which historically presages some kind of political run.

I am so glad to not be him, in spite of all his wealth and accomplishment.

Liberty and capitalism, eh Mr. Mackey? What you mean in translation is more liberty for you, and less for everyone else, you squirrely-looking union-busting anti-People Ayn-Randian douche sombrero.

I love the part about socialists taking over the military, heh. I guess he means that modern generals care a little more than they used to about their troops, and are a little less prompt about pointing a firehose of maimed bloody americans at whatever hotspot he and his fatcat ilk want to profit from next.

As a simple practical matter, I’m with the allegedly socialist generals on that one. We’re at war with Russia because elites like this guy want us to be, and they are willing to fight Putin to the very last … Ukrainian. So why ship boys from Terre Haute or Gila Bend across the world? We can save the expense of doing that and have more cash to stuff in suitcases, to send to Raytheon via Zelensky in Ukranistan.

Do NOT click that link unless you’re ready to be angry. Possibly at the content. Possibly at me.

Click this one, alternatively, and hear a real socialist school Mr. Mackey to his face.

The host of this segment is a woman, ‘SabbySabs’, who I’ve come to appreciate more and more. Her take on the Dore v. Turner kerfuffle was the best one I saw, and that includes Dore’s own takedown.

She closes out reminding us of the damage we do to ourselves and the world when we take all this Red vs. Blue, right vs. left, Biden vs. Trump bullshit seriously, even though we know it’s nothing more than another distraction.

As closing outs go … good enough for me.

A pair of them. In the afternoon it was torrential enough. But then as it got full dark, the serious heavenly fireworks show commenced. There were crash bombs going off right over the house. That was not a localized phenomenon, because at least two power lines got hit and went down in the near proximity too. Before ten p.m. the lights went off, and stayed off for hours.

Then the aftermath stillness was illuminated only by the rising moon.

Down at the river the frogs began to call by the thousands. I hope Mr. Hoppy made it through alright. Maybe he jumped off to rejoin the tribe. Maybe he’s King now, or beggar … neither of course. What he is, is unbounded by meaningless human labels like these. He is just Critter. Maybe we are still too, and just imagine otherwise.

Life without electricity is a whole other life. Mostly I liked it. The candle I lit was lavender sage. The part I liked least was not daring to open the fridge, not knowing when or if the juice would flow cold again.

***

Earlier in the day, I got a date-certain of sorts for getting out of the north and on the blessed road to Eden Cienega. Long story short is I’ve got ten daysish, because that’s when there’s a long overdue appointment in Prettytown with the new naturopathic pro.

Storms of complication and I am surfing them with tentative adolescent poise.

At the exact moment this posts, my lease on the rental house down south begins.

I’m not there; I’m not in that bed or any other, and I likely won’t be in the right one for some days to come, but …

I did have a major productivity breakthrough.

For the first time in 4+ years I actually hit Send on a job application, and in honor of the occasion it’s a great job, or could be. It’s down there. It’s in a library. It pays … just enough to be worth showering every day.

The hardest part practically was cobbling together old references for the application. I just had emails back and forth with a guy I haven’t seen in over twenty years. Absolutely unprecedented for my kind. It went good and maybe a little better than good. It felt real and bit epic.

It’s meant writing all day and night in one form or another. The last paragraph I wrote before coming here to my blessed vairterean daily spill page was this:

As for me, I’m still an unenlightened piece of work, but I do put effort every day into polishing my rusty soul, and into my writing. I think I’m honestly happier than I’ve ever been before and maybe that’ll count for something on Secular Atheist Judgment Day.

Which day, we now know from our recently intense study of the Tao, is every damn day above the ground, ever milagro day.

well-whats-stopping-you? … halftoe, substack, 2022

… and, a half-ass prescription drug ‘subsidy’. One of the grand pieces of the glorious Inflation Reduction Act.
Just to be clear, it’s not you being subsidized. The subsidy is to big pharma–some small slice of the people will have their insanely overpriced drugs paid for by Daddy Joe’s administration (i.e., the taxpayer). It’s a giveaway to the for-profit ‘healthcare’ industry, in just the same way that the endless wars are giveaways to defense contractors.

The other grand piece is Look Hey Finally Climate, but it’s out of the exact same playbook as above.
Or, honestly, worse.
One researcher/activist refers to the legislation as the “Climate Suicide Pact“; seems to about cover it.

Voting for the allegedly lesser evil goes nowhere because, although it’s tempting to think the phrase is wry and pragmatic and sophisticated, those who practice it are self-admittedly still voting for evil. Hurrah, Democracy. Meanwhile, the whole and entire point of raiding Trump is to again try to engineer a situation where no one can throw away their vote on him ever for anything.

You heard it here first–it’s going to boomerang and blow up in their faces just like the sanctions. The midterms will be even worse, and the new Congress in the new year will keep on doing nothing for the People, being consumed instead with fighting the other half of the deep state and shielding the orange manager and holding hearings to see what they can inflict on the likes of Hunter Biden.

Tigers chasing each other around the tree, turning the Empire into butter for the rich and soylent-green for the poor, and composing new fiddle tunes while it burns, along with the ecosystem.

The organizational system on my laptop is complete and starting to look almost pretty.

This is a picture of a man going for a walk in Athens, Greece, and making a video about it. It caught my eye.

Stargazer cast iron, smooth as satin after the first meal cooked in it–three eggs, and some corn tortillas, no sticking issues.

I’m glad to be taking it south with me and I’m glad to recommend without reservation thus far.

(I stashed an additional post, written today, into the former blank spot at July 19th below.)

2: Not Liking, byapada: Aversion, hate, irritation,

Rejecting the moment and pushing it away. Two cool teaching stories in the first seven minutes. Am I the aversion type? Oh yeah I think so.

Eat slower, walk slower. Study the force of hate/fear. What is it? How does it feel? (It is … a strategy for safety and it’s intractable because it works for that, short-term, maybe.

The more separateness, the more fear. Fear and anger toward one’s own weakness is central to it. Feeling that is really hard, and necessary to the project of freedom.

Digression: The first of the four noble truths.

1. All existence is dukkha. The word dukkha has been variously translated as ‘suffering’, ‘anguish’, ‘pain’, or ‘unsatisfactoriness’. The Buddha’s insight was that our lives are a struggle, and we do not find ultimate happiness or satisfaction in anything we experience. This is the problem of existence.

You can try to reject this and be eternally at war with the fact of suffering. Or you can accept the shitty way the world really is and try to find the path to freedom from suffering, which won’t involve avoiding it.

Fear is imagination running away with itself down a bad road. If what we fear happened in the past, then it’s a re-imagining or a re-living of the suffering or trauma. So maybe living in the moment, even letting the moment be full to the brim with this imaginary fear and the pain it causes, can be useful like setting a backfire is useful.

The fear is always ultimately about what happens after you die.

“Is there skillful worry–maybe you could call it planning?” A good wry question.

***

The talk about Greed/Wanting was posted a month ago. This one about aversion, two weeks ago. There aren’t ones yet for the last three hindrances. So I’ll be looking deeper for ways to address them. Or maybe loop to the four noble truths or the eightfold path … something. It’s all good.

“The Buddha picked in particular five very common entanglements or difficulties that would come
as one simply sat down to begin to pay attention to one’s life”. —Jack Kornfield

Five very common entanglements = five hindrances, like we said, but … it was the second part here that grabbed me.

When I hear the word ‘meditation’ it feels very freighted to me, with tradition and ceremony and ritual and piety, with the smell of incense and a mad seriousness.

I think I’d like to let go of all that, and just siddown and pay attention instead.

The man also talks about the ‘powerful forces that run the world’, only he doesn’t use the phrase to mean the Bezos and the Gates and the rest of the rich assholes at the top. He means instead: Judgement. Fear. Wanting. Doubt. Anything that keeps us from the reality of the moment, keeps us from an open heart and a clear mind.

I’m five minutes in, and here he begins to talk about what I really want to hear, which is how to address these forces. (Not to overcome them, as I almost said, but instead ‘the way that one might work with them’.

***

1: Wanting Mind, Desiring Mind, the ‘if only I had’ Mind (kamacchanda)

He puts greed here too, which interests me.
If only I had a little more money. If only I had that one perfect lover. Wanting is normal. Wanting is … exhausting.

Accept wanting as part of the landscape of a life. Notice and study this force and then sensations it brings when it arises. Give it space in the mindful heart and see what it does. Understand it as weather; can you be present with it without reacting until you know what is the right thing to do with it? What is the backstory of the force of wanting and wanting … where in your early life experience does it come from?

(I need to know more about this Mindful Heart. I feel what it means but I don’t rationally know what it means. … )

He quotes a Wendell Berry poem called The Peace of Wild Things.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The F250 story is not officially over yet, but it is, probably, a dead issue. Tonight I’m honestly believing that my incredulity about that low low price actually shook up the salesman and his manager to the point where they started to reconsider what the hell they were doing, as a for-profit business.

I’m supposed to hear more “tomorrow” but I decided to move on from thinking about it, pending that, and I had a very productive day doing little things that don’t translate well into a post for you to read.

So … I’m going to talk briefly about The Milagro Beanfield War and its author.

It’s a book I started to read in the distant past when I first got very interested in New Mexico. I’m sure I didn’t finish it back then. The first chapters are hard to get into–the reader is so flooded with characters, and has so little idea which characters actually matter, that it turns into a slog.

This time I persevered and was rewarded accordingly.

It’s a giant sprawling mess of a novel and it suffers some, from daring to dip about a toe and a half into magical realism without committing fully.

The basic premise: a town full of hard luck characters, mostly Chicano/a, mostly calling the town of Milagro home for many generations and hundreds of years, eventually find common cause in wrecking the ruinous plans of a white developer backed by every level of state government, and eventually succeeding in that aim against all odds.

The book has two sequels and I’m just starting on the middle one in the trilogy, which so far promises to be a much less happy and quirky tale–early on, the bad guys are winning, and given the fact that as readers we know that the fictional Chamisaville is actually Taos, another miracle seems historically unlikely this time.

These are novels about how greed works in the real world, and about how it turns everything it touches to shit, usually.

John Nichols is the author. He tells how he got interested in questions of greed and empire here in four minutes.

What He Saw In 1964 Blew The Top Of His Head Off & Radicalized Him

I think he’s pretty much right on with his opinions on everyday realpolitik, whether in northern NM or Guatemala or anywhere. It all dovetails nicely with my own views on how human nature leads (perhaps inevitably) to civilization, and how civilization exploding out of control, fueled by ever larger piles of money and power (perhaps inevitably) dooms us.

In this he and I differ from the Marxists. Our shared vision is essentially anarchic.

There’s something comforting and also … final, I think, in hearing someone else say it. As if some basic question has now been settled and can be put to rest without being compelled to think about it constantly.

Unless it’s for distracting fun.

And in that spirit, here’s today’s political link. Based on what I just said, you can feel free to ignore it of course.

Trump, Mar-a-Lago raid (etc)

And yet so strangely undepressed too … maybe I shouldn’t even say it; jinx and all, but it … ‘ll be okay I
know.

Ever since that
Graham.Phillips
Five.Hindrances
Raw.Deal.Noir nexus of moments, during which also I haven’t even told you about blasting through a re-reading of The Milagro Beanfield War first, I’ve been Better in some way.

I’ve been bedding around eleven and waking eight hours later. I’ve been neither depressed nor manic, not even of a Monday. I’ve been calm and almost dare I say serene. I’m posting a day ahead of myself here and I seem to have no end of things to say. It’s not a chore at all to come here and debrief with you.

Monday. Eightish in the morning. I was ready to get up and go to the dealership in Winslow in my unflat-bed Ford as planned. We were slow getting out of the house and for a moment I was tempted to be impatient. I checked a bank account to be sure of what I could pull out on the way. Suddenly there was 700 dollars more in it than the day before.

It took me quite a while to figure out where it had come from, and I still don’t know precisely. But someone, without leaving their name, had dropped a donation into a bucket I had set up many months ago and forgot about. I’d done that for the stated purpose of crowdfunding a house, to be put on the lot, down in the dream city I’ll be headed for, in a week, or ten days. We marveled, blessed, and concocted theories about the secret identity of the anonymous benefactor.

Then we headed out on the day’s business.

The service manager was dubious about finding a tech who would be both capable of and willing to be working on a truck that rolled off the line in Windsor, Ontario, in late 1998, but he called back to say that his old guy was back from lunch and had agreed, perhaps with an amused smile, to check it out at least. And oh–the part for the seventeen-year-old recall on the truck? In stock. Que milagro, seriously.

On the way out of the dealer’s lot, she got all enamored with an SUV, used and of a different make, a trade-in.

We had some good coffee at the only place to get good coffee there, and headed back home as the monsoon gathered.

When we landed, she started looking at this SUV on the web. It’s a longshot, because they’ve only been making this model for three years and so the stock of used ones is very limited, and right now used ones cost almost the same as new because covid and sanctions and inflation and shit, up over 40K at the cheapest.

I hit the autotrader site for her to verify and validate that, and yep …

But before I left autotrader, I looked over a few of my old searches for pickups, and immediately there was a literally unbelievable deal sitting there right in front of my eyes–keep in mind, I’m not looking for a truck, I don’t need a truck, I have a truck … but god damned if they weren’t giving it away practically for free in this market.

$1,999. The same magic number. The model year of both the truck and the trailer, except both of those had cost more than than two piddling grand …

I studied the ad.

Almost every single thing about this other truck was exactly identical to the one I have, the one I had dropped off at the dealer earlier, right down to the trim level, the 4WD, the year, the exact engine, and the automatic transmission, the one I paid 6K for nine months ago … except …

It wasn’t a 150. It was a 250, and a Super Duty 250 at that. (Short version: It’s much more built and can haul literal tons more.)

Also, it was a regular bed pickup instead of my long one. It was two-tone blue instead of white. It had a fancy aftermarket stereo in it, and it had fifty thousand fewer miles on the Triton V-8. One owner, and records going back 22 years showing it had always been registered and always been serviced at the dealer in American Fork.

For 2K out the door–what?– except for taxes, and, well, whatever 1000 miles of gas costs these days, because American Fork is in suburban Salt Lake City.

So, and this is a very un-Vairtere way to operate, I straightaway called up the dealership and asked for sales. I told the guy I’d seen the ad, and that I wanted to know what in hell was wrong with it, that they were letting it go for that ridiculous price. In a tone that was bideny, c’mon man, level with me jack, I was born at night but not last night …

He joshed right back at me and said wellsir, I sure could charge you more if you insist, but the deal is not a troll or a bait and switch… the only thing I know of that’s wrong is that the check-engine light is on, and it’s on because the cylinder number six in that V-8 is not firing. Which, might mean a spark plug, aaaand it might mean an engine replacement …

I said, tell you what amigo. Slap a plug in it for me, see where that leaves us, and we’ll talk some more. The truth is, I don’t really need a truck, and I am not feeling happy about dropping everything and driving 500 miles north tomorrow. But if this really is two grand plus whatever a spark plug costs, and not two grand plus whatever a new engine costs … yeah, I’m still interested. Put my name at the top of the list and like I said, we’ll talk.

I think he probably left work shortly after that. At any rate, no additional data yet.

I did spend the evening studying F250s of the SuperDuty variety. I did study the 37 pictures on autotrader assiduously (and there is rust, not a lot, but not none either, and of course there’s no picture of the underneath). I pulled the Carfax on it, and that’s where I learned about the one owner who had it serviced at the one dealer for 22 years straight, and also that it had never been wrecked, and also that Carfax considers the title to be clean. And that in their opinion, the truck should bluebook between $5500-8500.

It looks very much, and may be, like something too good to be true.

I’ll listen quietly to what Mr. Service Manager has to say in the morning, and I’ll decide what to do then.

But here’s the thing. IF I could really go fetch it for something like what they’re asking, and IF I could get it at least four hundred miles closer to home under it’s own power without it shooting a rod out the side of the Triton … this is pretty close to a no-lose proposition.

Even stone cold dead I could probably get my 2K back out of it. And if I made it home, limping or no, it’s worth twice that easy.

Or … or … lordlord …

See, the truck I own, the F150, is worth the same or very close to the same as a new engine, in this market. And the truck I own … well, eventually it would need a new engine itself someday.

What I’m thinking is, even if the 2K F250 dies as I roll it into the driveway, I could sell the F150, take that cash, use it for the engine, and end up with one whole ‘new’ F250, Super Duty, for not much more than I’ve already spent, truckwise.

It would take time, and effort, and hassle, and yet, while all that sorts itself out, we do still have … a trailer, and a capable tow vehicle in the form of an E350 van not currently in use, probably headed south to the promised land in this worst case scenario … and two old cars for backup besides, here in the olden north.

Car poor, car rich …

Baby, I don’t know anything about anything.

Except that before I get too jazzed and shaky, I’m going to bed on time and leaving this whole pile for your literary pleasure, and heading off to crazy but peaceful dreams about who I really am since the milagro moment.

Raw Deal (1943)

A sweet little gem of a film noir featuring not one but two hard-luck dames in love with the same lug.

I want to point out something about noir and the culture that created it, something I noticed watching this one.

Noir philosophy states clearly, here and elsewhere, that the opposite of Worker is Outlaw.

Ann sums it up for Joe two-thirds of the way through the movie after he says to her, ‘Oh what do you know about it–you probably had your bread buttered on both sides for you since the day you were born’:

“You think you had to fight? Well the only way you know how to fight is that stupid way, with a gun.

Well there’s another way you probably never even heard of. It’s the daily fight that everyone has. To get food and an education and to land a job and keep it. And some self-respect … all I wanted was just a little Decency, that’s all!”.

Noir says: Look, it’s simple. There’s only one path to self-respect. You get an education, and then you get the kind of Job that it affords you, and you keep that Job, even if it’s only being a schoolteacher. Any deviation from that leads to jail if you’re lucky, and a bullet in the gut if you’re not.

In this worldview, even if you are born with a silver spoon in your mouth, there’s still no such thing as Respectability, or even Decency, without a Job. You’re just what they used to call a PlayBoy (play being the opposite of work), or what we call these days a ‘trust fund baby’ (a spoiled infantilized child with no path to mature self-respect).

The modern temptation to consider falling away from the only good path and giving in to the allure of Breaking Bad still falls squarely into the traditions of Noir from eighty years ago. Walter White doesn’t end up dying the decent cancer death he was supposed to, hooked up to the machines and surrounded by tearful loved ones. He dies completely alone and gutshot in some random enemy cellar.

***

Nose to the mass grindstone and a tiny quiet maybe even happy life, on the one hand. Love. Child bearing. Family.

Trying to buck the system and getting gunned down for it like a dog in the street, on the other.

Black and white, no exceptions … it has a certain appeal even if you feel a natural impulse to rebel against it.

***

It is also the ultimate conservatism.

If you lay your life and your days on the altar of the System and wholly become one of its workers, you will of course be inclined to believe that the system represents what is Right, in all the many ways.

The policeman is your friend, because he is the enemy of the outlaw. To the policeman, and by extension to you the worker, ‘having no visible means of support’ (being jobless) is in and of itself evidence of criminality, and punishable.

A police action, in Korea or Vietnam or Iraq or Ukraine or Taiwan, is only self-defense by the system, performed on behalf of all good gainfully employed and tax paying Americans. And so on, whether the charge is tiny like vagrancy or shoplifting, or massive and worldwide, like communism or ‘autocracy’. The detective must find a way to Truth and proving guilt, by the standards of the duly legislated penal codes. Justice must be served, at night court or Nuremberg, or Mỹ Lai.

Every part of the Democratic government is ultimately on the same side–the side of Right–but it remains your responsibility, your solemn obligation as a citizen, to vote for the representatives who are a little more right and a little less bad. It’s the only power over society you will ever have, and rejecting that obligation is a sin.

***

I’m exploding into kamacchanda. So I’ll stop there for now.

Noir is black and white, right and wrong, and in its simplicity it comforts us; in return, we love it with an open heart.

This thing I call I … loves noir too, naturally, as my birthright and my heritage.

But all that said I stand outside the comforting lines, out in the fogbound zone of gray.

I don’t know if that means I have integrity, or whether it means the opposite, and I don’t even know if it matters.

I am not my body. I am not my mind. I am not my emotions. I am not the worker, yet nor am I the outlaw: I’m the other kind.

I am consciousness unbound in a purple haze and I long to know my path.

Trying to approach THAT one as a non-rhetorical question.

***

Friday night my mind lowered the boom on itself like I told you.

Four in the morning Saturday I lay down but did not succeed in sleeping. That took until five or six–I didn’t pay close attention, but anyway I didn’t wake until one in the afternoon, and I woke up stiff with pain born in the neck, pain in the neck, pain in the neck but growing out from there up above the eyes, down into the heart.

That was a few hours ago, and it’s been a good four hours, since. I medicated, naproxen; I attended carefully to the state of the kitchen, I took a shower, and as it became evening and the thunder cast its rumbly ideas across the sky I started to try to understand for real.

I started out looking for what enlightened minds had to say on the subject of fear, but that wasn’t exactly what I found.

***

I learned instead about the five hindrances.

1: The Things We Like, kamacchanda
Input from the five or seven senses that are pleasurable enough that you stay and wallow in them instead of staying focused on your journey and path. These things look good, sound good, and feel good enough that staying wrapped up in them becomes obsessive.

Traditional addictions are an obvious example–alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, cocaine, shopping or porn. But sometimes they’re more subtle. I think the arousing outrage of constantly watching Fox or MSNBC qualifies. So does constantly seeking out more and better contrarian opinions and worldviews like I do, layering on extra research to give historical context and refine them into ‘my own’, and bringing the produce of that research to you here so you are invited to marvel at my erudition and perspicacity. Even though it’s burdensome or tedious at times, I fundamentally like it, so I do it over and over and I let it get in the way of my path. Call it the seductive pleasure of being pissed off.

2: The Things We Don’t Like, byapada
Aversion, hatred, irritation, rejection. It’s easy to see how these things knock us off the path.

It might be the stupid dog next door barking at nothing, or the memory deeply rooted of betrayal and injury perpetrated on us by someone who was supposed to be a friend. It can even overlap with number one above, like rain does. Usually I love the rain, but sometimes it keeps me from taking the next logical step on the path. Same for the heat, same for the wind … either way, in the moment, we are saying No to it and letting it be a hindrance whether or not it should be one to our best peaceful warrior selves.

Afterthought: I believe that this one is related to the what the shrinks call ‘external locus of control’ … it may look very much like something outside ourselves is really stopping us. ‘I can’t think with that fucking dog barking’. ‘There is no way to make things better until my fucking mother gives me the money she rightly owes me’, or, ‘I can’t be an unbroken healthy successful person because my parents didn’t ever support me as a child’. ‘My stupid ugly boss is making it impossible for me to do right’.

The most pernicious thing about this one is that it often seems factual and true. Mostly, our parents really did fail to support our best selves, and mostly, they wail back that they did the best they could … ! Sometimes for sure, our lovers are sabotaging us. The stupid mutt really does make it hard to think. Every government ever, sometimes or always, is making it harder and harder to stay on the path and be you, or me, or anyone at all.

But: if our locus of control is ever more internal, in spite of the odds stacked against that happening … miracles are possible.

3: Sloth and Torpor, thinamiddha
Sloth is the heaviness of the body. Torpor is the dullness of the mind. Lack of energy, lack of motivation.

A nap too delicious to resist; telling ourselves that we are too weary to do anything useful to the journey right now, and slacking off instead. A real need to rest, a laziness that overcomes thought, or a surrender to ‘depression’ or some other variant of mental sickness.

4: Restlessness, uddhacca
A state of mind too unsettled to stay in the present, wandering off into the theoretical future or making judgments about the mythical past.

‘Monkey mind’: there seems to be no time left to reflect and see clearly. Flitter, flutter, close one video and roll a different one instead.

5: Skeptical Doubt, vicikikiccha
Indecisiveness. Lost in ongoing speculation about what the right thing to do might be. What will the others say about our choices? What if what if what if?

‘When the way is filled with doubt, more often you will just stop, instead of moving on’. What even is this mountain I am climbing? Is climbing it really the right thing? Is there a better mountain? Is there something better than climbing itself?

***

How are hindrances treated?

Topic for another show. I made burritos and then retreated early, strategically, in the direction of Thinamiddha.

For now we see through a glass, darkly;
but then face to face: now I know in part;
but then shall I know even as also I am known.
–1 Cor 13:12, KJV

Sometime perhaps I will dutifully study the thirteenth chapter of the first letter to the Corinthians, trying to figure out what that could possibly mean. For now it lies there on the page as a completely inscrutable koan, except for the fact that in the moment, in the beginning, it means … this.

It should be my windshield glass seen through darkly, my car; it isn’t.

It ought to be US 60 east of Reserve, New Mexico, but instead it is a road in a place now understood properly to be called the Luhansk People’s Republic, so very recently invaded or liberated or however the fuck you personally choose to think of it–why really should I care which word you choose?

Something like a week back I told you about the personal individual sanctioning, by his own government, of a British journalist named Graham Phillips. Without even a pretense of due process, that government took his house and whatever other assets of his they could get their venomously evil hands on because, they said, he was guilty of being a propagandist ‘video blogger’.

In my post I said that I hoped we’d hear from Graham himself soon on the matter. In reality his response was almost immediate. But I didn’t see it until tonight.

The windshield glass in the picture is his. The image is a still capture from his response video. His response video just blew me away and right now it’s making me question everything about the life I live myself.

I listened in wonder tinged with pitiful envy.

In my own life I always had some vague notion of being The Writer, even specifically a journalist some of the time.

Underneath the veneer of that lofty aim though, what I really wanted to be was finally secure and comfortable enough to write or drive around the back roads or get laid or whatever I felt like doing in the moment.

I chose the course of my life in order to get to that real goal with as little brain damage as possible. Meaning: as little contact with the authority of petty tyrants as possible; as little conformity to the rules as I could get away with; as minimally few hours of wasting my life in the Employ of anyone or any system as I could humanly manage.

Finding the path involved a looping series of false starts and partial successes.

Then, in my forties, I found a place and I stopped roaming around trying and trying again. I found a nothing town with a tiny college. I started there as a literal Webmaster. It morphed into some half-ass kind of distance learning coordinator. Finally I became faculty. A professor even driving out to the Rez once a week to teach, of all apparently noble things–having and holding the security and the comfort at the heart of my desires, and getting my hooks into it without doing any real harm to my self or my world.

It lasted that way for ten years, and I stacked up little piles of comfort and security in the form of a modest new car, an equity-building home purchase, a Roth IRA, a pension plan. There was nothing at all noble about it. There was no Art. There was no Activism. There was only my head just above the surging necessities of the working class life I’d always led, and the promising notion that someday I would never again have to go back to those necessary evils again. If only I could just keep compromising with my society a little longer. Then no more boss man looking over my shoulder ever. Then I’d be free. Then I’d be happy.

It all came down in a hammer blow from nowhere.

The petty tyrants schemed a vicious lying scheme and dumped me in the gutter on the drop of a dime.

It very nearly killed me dead. Not from the impact of the curbstone on my head, but from what went on inside it; how I reacted.

In a controlled panic, I applied for another seemingly identical job, at another seemingly identical college, still teaching, still within the state retirement system, and I got it, which seemed like salvation.

It wasn’t salvation at all and I have no one to blame for that but myself in the end.

In my heart and in my gut, when I first came to the nothing town with the tiny college, I already knew that it was the last best place for me to try to compromise myself with my society, to try to make a deal for the comfortable security my dingy battered craven soul ached for so desperately.

A few years after I got to it, they put surveillance cameras up on the three traffic lights in the nothing town, and it was a portentous omen. The world was shrinking and the killer virus of modernity and bureaucratic fascism had even reached out to here. The town shifted to accommodate the virus and the tiny college foolishly changed to welcome it too–what they had as a frontier legacy was thrown like pearls before swine, and the boss pigs swallowed every pearl like so much dirty corn, turning themselves into grunting robots to please their betters down in Maricopa.

I didn’t want to believe it. I shaded my eyes with my hand against it, and then modern reality rushed in and blindsided me and it was my own damn fault.

At the new identical college, the virus was at least a dozen years more evolved than it had been in the nothing town. A year later, unable to live with it, I applied at a third college because it was isolated up at a nice high elevation, and I desperately hoped that would mean that the pace of the virus was slower there too. But if anything, it was worse. At this third place, this last place, I made it two years, and they were the worst years of my life. My health tanked brutally, and my mental health especially. I let that all happen, for the worst reasons, and I suffered for it.

At the very end came the other virus, the one called Covid Nineteen, and in some twisted way it was a blessing for me, thirty human months ago or so. For a little while, the noisy modern world shut down. For a little while, unemployment and other checks trickled in to float me past the very worst of the madness. I moved back to the nothing town and the equity house, the ‘investment’ turning itself into a real temporary salvation.

Last year, halfway between that moving-back time and tonight, I cashed in the last big leftover asset and that’s what’s been floating me ever since. I paid off every bill but the mortgage. I bought a small piece of raw land in the new next best place, my dream place. I broke my last hard tie with the System I always hated and hate even more now. I bought a twenty year old pickup truck to park next to the only new car, which by now was ten years old. I made some plans and they’re still simmering on the back burner in separate little expensive pots. The important part is setting up a replacement salvation house on the small piece of raw land in the dream town, and selling off this old one in the nothing town. God knows if I’ll ever make it, but if I do I’ll theoretically be free at last, to write and screw and drive around without worrying what anyone thinks about any of it.

The point of this whole digressive tale is what happened when I watched the Graham Phillips response video.

For six minutes I gazed at and listened to someone provably better than I’ve ever been in my life.

I don’t know what advantages he grew up with, if any. I don’t know what was handed to him and what he worked for, starting out.

I do know that as I watched, I realized, in a way I never have before, just how broken and afraid I’ve been for so long, underneath my tall strong pose.

Advantaged or not, he did it right. He did what I should have done instead of crawling around ineptly trying to compromise myself for security and comfort. He lived out loud. He joined a side. He wrote and he drove and he let comfort and security take care of themselves.

When they inevitably came after him, “they” were not a tragic collection of bog-stupid cow-faced Deans and amoral Chairs, but the evil cream of his own national government. He calls out the woman who will be their next Prime Minister by name, as the soul with a personal interest in persecuting him illegally.

When they came after him, he didn’t break his own mind over it, folding in on himself like a paper condominium. He wasn’t broken or weak. He didn’t spit uselessly in their faces and run for the hills.

Instead, he … well, watch the goddamned video. Stare at his face and out through that glass for six minutes.

Afterward, you can maybe go check out his sniffily-written little Wikipedia page, and you can find plenty of reasons to question his tactics, or even hate him for the things he believes or the things he’s done.

***

But–hear me–I’m not talking about how politically or morally pure this one man is. I’m not setting up a false idol, or trying to convince you one way or the other about anything at all, personal or political.

I’m telling you a quiet story about what this news story did to me just now.

I’m saying out loud to you: Right or wrong, he’s lived life bravely and continues to … while I have lived in so many ways, even if there were good sympathetic understandable reasons for it–like a coward.

I have sequestered myself every way I could, and reveled in tasting the Proustian Madeleine of horned toads and hoppy frogs.

That wasn’t wrong of me in any ultimate sense: I’m sure I had my reasons, blah blah blah.

But my deficiency of bravery hasn’t resulted in my happiness, either.

Would bravely grabbing life’s bull by the horns make me happy?

Nobody knows.

***

I’ve been my mother, stumbling through life so dependent on the kindness of the intimate strangers, and finding the next one and the next, always doing whatever I do with the pure intention of never falling back into the helplessness of poverty, no matter how much it costs or who might end up paying the bill or blood price for it.

I’ve been my head-broke father, paranoid schiz about every damn thing, and always taking the easiest, cheapest path to a false security and a comfortless comfort, never loving anyone as much as he loved himself, never afraid to punch a bad guy in the mouth, but always skittish about facing the less pleasant realities of my self. I stuff myself with organic rice instead of candy bars, and I never selfishly bailed on a child of my own, but … I’ve failed in being the man I really wanted to be, just the same.

At least so far.

The one thing I do have going for me is what my few scattered admirers have called my integrity. I don’t believe I have much more actual integrity than the next fool, by the dictionary definition of the word. I’m not above weakness. I’m not all that sound of body or mind. I see very little evidence of integration, in my history. I’ve segregated instead; I compartmentalized.

I’ve even lied to myself at times, while dancing with perfect stark honesty through a dozen wrecked relationships.

I just never … settled and died inside, the way most people do at thirty or forty or fifty or sixty.

I never quite gave up completely on myself, even after I gave up on my world and my country and even my species.

I have learned to accept that there are a precious few people in this world who never quite gave up on me either, and that I need them for that despite never wanting to need anyone for anything.

I have steadfastly refused to believe that my failures could ever be permanent or defining, to the point of crippling me for life.

In moments like those six terrible minutes of watching Graham be a fundamentally better person, a braver person, a happier person, than I am, I never gave in to the lie of Game Over.

I’ve learned to accept that it will be over someday, when they shovel dirt in my face, and that every day that goes by I get infinitely closer to that mortal fact.

I don’t have a lot of time left. I’m not going to waste it by trying to make things right.

They’re as right as they’ll ever be out there, and that’s not very. History says things will only get worse.

Inside my own heart, head, soul, though … there is a road winding through the mountains on two lane blacktop. I can see it through the glass, darkly, when I close my eyes and breathe.

The road calls to me, whispering to take its curves at a speed right up against the limits of the safe and sane, the secure and the comfortable. Mullein plant, datura leaf, coyote sprinting to the barbed wire on the other side, ripping his furry back but avoiding the hissing wheels of splattering time, for one more unholy day.

Pretty much the same as yesterday, only in the words of a salty old military man instead of my wide-eyed lyrical prose.

Colonel Douglas Macgregor Interview – Debunking Taiwan, Ukraine Lies

***

In other news, the leadership of the system in the Greatest Country has one foot in the grave and the other one wedged in the toilet.

Nancy, third in line:
The Poor Old Gal’s Attempt To Say Word Things After She Landed In Tapei

Kamala, next to the throne:
Why Does Kamala Harris Use Word Salad?

Capo Joe:
Saudi Arabia Slaps Biden In Face After $3 Billion Arms Sale

And Joe Again:

Well ain’t that real tragic. My heart, see it bleeding now.

***

I want to do something journalistically moral, for what it’s worth, and contrarian at the same time.

That screen grab above is taken from an Alex Christoforou video. The people I watch most are generally terrible at clearly labeling their sources, and oftentimes I’ll go out myself to try and track down the genealogy of the things that say, quote, or use.

In this case, I found that the source of the passage in this pic was Russian, and even IN Russian, with a hasty translation somewhere between here and there. I thought about tossing it as pure propaganda, partly because I was pissed off to discover that I’d essentially been lied to and was on the edge of lying in turn to you.

But then … I found two articles by the same CNN reporter, one from last month and one from yesterday, that almost amount to confirmation–if not of the actual words used, at least of the spirit and tone.

Jill Biden on President Joe Biden’s hindered progress: ‘He had so many hopes’

Joe and Jill’s long summer

In the second article we get this: “One person with knowledge of Biden’s agenda and state of mind tells CNN the first lady is concerned about the effects of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have had on her husband, and how her husband carries himself personally”.

I don’t know exactly what the reporter means by “carries himself personally”, or whose words those even are. To me though, the implication of the two articles taken together is that Jill’s husband is old, tired, depressed, and even a little confused, not just generally, but specifically because this President gig didn’t turn out to be the kind of heroic glorious endgame to a life in politics that he always dreamed it would be.

It turns out that he’s really bad at it, and people have noticed that like they do, and the polls say he is not the leader they expected him to be, and not the leader they want going forward. He’s done nothing consequential for the people who voted for him, not even keeping hard promises he made while campaigning, or at least doing what he himself can through executive order.

He went straight from the frying pan of Afghanistan to the fire of Ukraine on behalf of corrupt people, and the point of both conflicts was exactly to enrich the worst kind of people both here and over there. He’s pissing off China and driving them ever closer to a formal military alliance with Russia against the United States. The inaction of his party for fifty years culminated in the loss of abortion rights in half the country. The economy is tanking and it’s mostly a product of his waving the sword of sanctions around indiscriminately and chopping off the financial heads of his own people, the ones among them who can least afford it.

His own bumbling and ineffectiveness mean his party is going to be swept out in the midterms and he will be the lamest of lame ducks for the next two years, deepening the already cavernous uselessness of his presidency, and yet he goes around telling everyone he’s going to run again if it kills him, which it probably will. If he lives, he will lose to some rando Repub–he would probably lose if he ran against Putin himself at this point.

He snaps at reporters and makes his wife worried about him. That’s real sad.

Cry me a river, Corn Pop, you dog-faced pony soldier.

***

So there’s your real propaganda, elucidated properly, eyes dotted and tees crossed.

Meanwhile, my own life drowns in minutiae and sin.

The Empire nosedives.

The beat goes on.

“Pro-American business interests overthrew the Queen” of Hawaii in 1893. The new Murican Empire quickly annexed it.

Another one while we’re at it … The Republic of Texas declared independence in 1835 … from Mexico … only fourteen years after Mexico itself declared independence from Spain. The US snapped that one up too. When they tell you to remember the Alamo, they sure as hell don’t want you to remember it with any nuance, pardner.

In the wake of Pelosi’s baffling visit to the Formosan big island, there’s been another development that makes it a little more clear what the fuck she was really up to.

First a little background.

After WWII, the Chinese finally kicked out the Japanese and fought a big civil war, and the Communists won it hands down. The Kuomintang anti-communists (capitalists?) under Chang Kai-Shek fled with what was left of their army to Formosa, aka Taiwan County, China (“Chiang was an autocratic ruler, especially to the Taiwanese natives, who detested the ‘carpetbagger’ invaders”). On the mainland, Mao and the communists said “close enough”. It was sorta like if Robert E. Lee and his richest officers set up shop in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and Lincoln shrugged, instead of hunting him down to the last man.

The interesting part is that both the Kuomintang and the Commies were BOTH adamant from day one that there was only one China and no other way of seeing it was legitimate or tolerated. In fact, under Chang’s government, “those who advocated independence risked long prison terms and torture”. This was because Taiwanese seceding and setting up their own shop would be an acknowledgement that the whole rest of China was lost forever, and Kai-Shek considered that an unholy opinion.

The One-China policy doesn’t come from outside. It’s a worldview that has been shared by everyone over there, winner, loser, Commie or not, for over seventy years.

Between the Nixon and Carter administrations, the US basically threw up their hands and said: “Fine, guys, OneChina it is. If that’s the way you feel, we’re severing official diplomacy with little China, closing down ‘Taiwanese’ embassies and consulates, and recognizing that China is China.

It’s been that way now for forty, fifty years, and pretty much everybody in the rest of the world agrees.

Suddenly, Joe don’t like it, Nancy don’t like it, and the one percent of Taiwan, who no longer have a reason to ever think that they’ll retake the whole mainland, they don’t like it either, no mo.

The next step comes courtesy of the one-headed oligarch party of the US. Senator Robert Menendez, the fake Democrat neocon, and Senator Lindsey Graham, the fake Republican neolib, have introduced legislation designed to put the whole thing into reverse and cash in.

As Pelosi Taiwan visit looms, Menendez bill would ‘gut’ One China policy

I can see clearly now the plane is gone.

I told you the other day that only seven percent of Taiwanese in a poll from last year wanted independence. Maybe I should have also told you that an even smaller percentage were in favor of full reunification with Beijing, and just becoming another province. For years and years and years, ninety-some percent of the Taiwanese themselves were strongly in favor of letting things bumble nebulously along just as they always had.

That’s beginning to shift now as Washington piles up the rhetoric, apparently committed to no end of money, weapons, and maybe even American lives to support yet another brave little ‘democracy’ full of corrupt shits like the ones who are in charge of (what’s left of) Ukraine.

Or the ‘pro-American business interests’ that betrayed their lovely Hawaiian Queen for thirty pieces of silver a hundred years ago.

Or any of dozens of puppet regimes the US has pushed to the throne or the ‘presidency’ out of short-term greed and expediency since, only to discard them when they were no longer useful. Like Mr. Sadaam Hussein of Iraq. Like Mr. Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.

It may very well come to pass that the Grahams and Pelosis and Menendezes and Bidens of this world proceed along their bloody merry path, wrapping themselves in the cloak of liberty and democracy and trying to turn Taiwan into their next banana republic, only this time with semiconductors.

The oligarchs of China are going to see that as an attack on their own sovereign soil, and based on what the US itself has been preaching in the decades since Nixon, it’s hard to see it as anything else.

Unless you let yourself be brainwashed into seeing it the way Your Democratic Institutions want you to see it.

***

All I really know for sure is that if some day next year I open up my phone and read a text message from my loved ones celebrating the indomitable spirit of the heroic President Tsai Ing-wen and her scrappy island’s freedom-loving people united in their resistance to the evil aggressor …

Or telling me how that horrible bad man Xi Jinping needs to be ‘eliminated’ …

Or that they don’t care if their next laptop costs ten thousand dollars if it means the shining light of all that is good and noble finds a foothold in this dark world with bad people everywhere trying to kill it …

I’m going to be very tempted to just have an aneurysm at last and settle in for a long comfortable dirt nap.

Please don’t send me to bed yet, darlings.

The entire Ukrainian front line in Donetsk is collapsing. That much is a fact. Additionally, there is a whole lot of speculation that the Biden administration is getting ready to cut ties with Mr. Hero Zelensky and throw his puppet ass under the bus–with a dozen different theories about why they would or will do so soon.

Somewhat more happily I got my truck back, and they’re promising the trailer too before the week is out, a promise which may or may not be kept ….

And finally, on a day that was supposed to be hot and dry here we instead got the most rain and the biggest thunderstorm yet. Even though that is inconvenient for me personally, it’s the best news, from the perspective of putting the local environment first.

Percentage of Americans who support “the recognition of Taiwan as an independent nation”: 69%
Percentage of Taiwanese who say “Taiwan should declare independence as soon as possible”: 6.8%
Source

My first question would be: “Yay Democracy. But by whom and for whom …?”

My second question is for Nancy, and it’s basically: What the christfuck are you doing, woman?

Again, it’s not rhetorical. Everyone knows that her little junket is bugging the crap out of the Chinese. But can that possibly be the whole point? WHY are we going out of our way to piss them off? What good does it do? What benefit is there to you or me, or even to some tiny sliver of oligarchical elites in any country?

The only vaguely rational thing I’ve heard is that Tapei is home to the best, most advanced chips n’ semiconductors in the world, which isn’t any real answer, but at least approximates a possible rationale.

Maybe it’s that plus money?

Full Video

Okay … but that would mean that America isn’t for Americans anymore; that it’s a freaky puppet show run for the sole benefit of politicians and other rich people.

Is that worse than not being able to rationally explain it? Yes. Yes it is.

I’d almost rather be confused.

***

So when China said earlier today that this provocation would result in a ‘targeted military response’ … what did they mean?

I have a theory for you, but first of all you have to let go of the half-ass pop-media idea that ‘Taiwan is an island’.

It’s actually dozens of islands. Most estimates say over 100. An exact single number is pretty much impossible to find, because of things like territorial disputes, rising sea levels, and the fact that nobody but the dullest of orthodox geographers can say for sure when a shoal becomes a rock, or a rock achieves the status of an island. All I can say for sure is that Pluto is a fucking planet whether they like it or not.

My singularly erudite opinions aside, some of the nominally Taiwanese islands form a chain called the Kinmen Archipelago.

Of particular interest is Great Kinmen. It is home to 130,000 human souls. It is just barely an island, separated from the mainland of the mighty Asian continent by only about a mile of water.

The people there feel much closer to the big China for the simple reason that they are closer. In practical terms, they would, for example, just love it if Beijing were to generously lay a mile of water pipe out to them … maybe a mile of sewer pipe running the other way, too.

So if I was a pissed-off Chinese president looking for the means to begin re-unifying Taiwan with the mothership, Great Kinmen Island is where I would start. Not with troops and bombs. Not with anger or pride at all. I’d say, hey Kinmen. How about a nice clean modern endless supply of drinking water? Maybe even a shiny new bridge? Just sign here and consider it done.

Take it over … democratically, without a single shot fired, and work your slow way out a hundred miles toward the big jewel of Formosa where Nancy’s plane landed. It might have to come down to shooting then, or … maybe the slow erosive effects of soft power will just begin to tip things in your favor.

China has a recent history of doing things this way all over the world, and it comes out looking pretty good for them when they do. Especially compared to the Empire that is busy blasting away at their own feet with both barrels, toes flying off left and right.

Twenty four bucks worth of beads for Manhattan, y’know?

Just promise me you’ll think about it, Xi.

(Maybe more here later no promises)

In May we solved the the ‘pots’ half of the kitchenware problem by throwing boatloads of money at Le Creuset. For smaller saucepans and the like, we’re still doing alright with fairly cheap legacy stainless steel.

Now, pans.

I flirted briefly with carbon steel and maybe I’ll still give it a try someday. But toward the end I started feeling that it was just a Euro version of the standard cast iron that is more popular here in Murica del Norte.

There are a couple of small knocks on cast iron. One: You don’t want to cook anything acidic in it, like vinegar or wine or (most significantly for me) tomatoes, because that destroys the seasoning, and exacerbates problem two–iron leaching out into you food.

Both of those issues can be situationally fixed by going for cast iron with an enamel coating.

The very best thing about uncoated cast iron is that it’s completely bombproof. So I decided I’d get one primarily for camp cooking, induction cooktop on the fancy end; raw firepit flame on the on the other.

After a long session of research, this is what I’m buying for sure: The Stargazer.

There’s another newer American cast iron company in second place. They’re called Field. In the fundamentals Field is very nearly as good as Stargazer. They’re just more expensive.

For home use, and tomato jobs, I’m going with enameled cast iron again. Le Creuset has a few options available, but spending three hundred bucks on just a frying pan (as opposed to a full dutch oven) just doesn’t have the same appeal.

The perfect solution has not appeared, but …

… for a third of the LeC price, i’m rather taken with this cute lil thang:

The pan part is shallow and small, but might could work to feed a solo sojourner, or two that aren’t big breakfasters. The cool part is that it also functions as a tight lid for the small enamel saucepan, and that together they form a dutch oven much smaller than the fancy ones we’ve already got. So … very versatile, and put together with the Stargazer that would make plenty of kitchenware toolkit for shorter camping runs.

We’ll see.

The reason I’m on this now is that I’ve been cooking a lot, and especially digging in to the 25 pounds of brown rice for a staple. The curry saucery for it is still evolving, but it’s based on onion, tomato, chiles, coconut milk, and too many spices. Sometimes I throw in chickpeas or whatever meat we have around ready to go, usually chicken.

The alternative meal is based on the other 25 pounds, of pinto beans. I like eating them alone, but they can also be the foundation for burritos.

The third thing is chilaquiles, cutting up and frying corn tortillas, tossing scrambled eggs over the top … cheese … salsa … chicken sausage too sometimes.

I saw the hoppy frog again for a third time. The trick seems to be going out at the right time, after sundown, and looking in the same right place.

The rain didn’t materialize at all today and I for one mourn that fact. Probably Hoppy does too.