No, I don’t know why either.

A prince on the bridge
Of a castle moat heard,
“Lay-ee! Odl-lay-ee!
Odl-lay, hee-hoo!”

On Friday I made, almost made, a third little film in the current crop. But then I got it home and I fucked it up in the edit by being too quick to delete some of the source files.

You’ll have to take my word for the fact that it was utterly brilliant.

There are three things salvaged from the wreck.

The thumbnail:

The data:

There are a number of alt-canon paths for the eastern approach to Heron Pond, and which one I take on any given day is just a matter of mood, and the mud. The public more-visible path is about an hour in time and four-ish miles in length. The hidden one is closer to five miles, and fifteen more minutes. Either way is better than fine.

The sooth:

Stupidly wrecking the film is, ultimately, something I can forgive myself for.

Because, all that aside, I DID walk, ten thousand whole steps in one sunshine go.

“Good boy”.

This isn’t a video and it’s not even a hike.

Meanwhile, responding in that other comments section …

Sliding off the road and dying in Pueblo wouldn’t be any kind of tragedy at all.

Not compared to continuing to heed belated maternal warnings about keeping “safe” at any cost.

Your fear isn’t helping me; never has and never will.

Especially in the context of all that’s happened in the last six months, your misgivings are doing nothing except to infuriate me further.

A rage that I am so hungry to weed out of what remains of my life.

One way or another and regardless of the collaterals, that much I will do. Sorry not sorry.

Oh, and a walk, too, filmed or unfilmed, while I am still above ground and the sun is shining.

I’m walking. I’m working hard, without stress.

I’m doing cat care right. The scabs have healed and Kali is glowing. But I have to be on it at 11 AM when she’s getting really hungry, and give her the food with the meds that keeps her from horking when her appetite overrides her disdain for the smell.

I have to be on it, toward sunset, to feed her again with the real medicine.

Once that all stays down (with the blessing), then I can stuff her with turkey, with tiny pieces of the grass-fed organic cheddar, trying to but some meat on her bones.

And maybe get a video edited and posted if I’m really good besides.

I wish I had a little more money, but I don’t wish it very hard.

I used to wish that I had someone in my life, especially early on, that wanted and supported what was right for the real me (as opposed to wanting what was Best), and sometimes I still do, but that’s (mostly) a willfully dumb indulgence on my part.

Instead, for my new year resolution thing, I’m going to just start wishing that next time I come back, it is as a real boy among the reindeer, and that, even now, this hopelessly deep into civilized times, that they will carry my shelter on a sled, and feed me their own flesh, in caloric emergencies. Take me home, dear real-life Blitzen and Donner Party, to a place where there is no comfort, but only pure glacial melt to drink, and where there are still … wild herds.

The Coldest Place on Earth

I have about as much faith in reincarnation as I do in God, and that’s not a lot.

But even an old boy can dream.

This is my choice, for dreaming on.

Why the US is almost always at war

Yes, true.

Building 7 Did Not Kill Itself: Richard Gage, AIA on DarkHorse

True enough.

But I am learning, to care less about all that shit.

And to care more, about
The Magdalenian Culture

I’m not sure if you have to seem a little off to see the truth or seeing the truth makes you a little off.

From the comments section here.

I went deeper into that shit and yes, it’s “important” for the reasons they outline at the end.

But on the actual solstice, it wasn’t important in the moment, to me at least.

Instead, I slingshotted around it and had a less active, more contemplative day.

I don’t think I want to talk about it yet, and right now it feels like I don’t want to talk much at all.

Instead I leave you, for a day or two or three, with this. It’s a flowering evergreen.

Europe’s leaders have led it into the deep freeze.

With no way out of it, or even a plan for escape.

In case you don’t know who Yanis is, be advised that he is nominally European himself, a former senior member of the political leadership in Greece.

Good luck there on the moral high ground, ya’ll.

***

Oh and by the way …

This is not a Yanis video.

Good luck to us all, besides.

***

The Crisis Facing (Gen Z) Men

I recommend that every time Weinstein says the word ‘Civilization’, you pause the conversation, consider what he means by it, and then ask yourself if you’re for what he means …

Or not.

An-Prim is not prescriptive. Keep that in mind, but at the same time, ask the hard questions.

Why does the concept of re-wilding appeal to you?

Is there any difference between re-wilding and de-domestication?

What about becoming uncivilized

Or at least less civilized?

Can any of them be legitimately considered as reasonable responses to the ugliness of the hypercivilized world we’ve built in these our overdeveloped countries?

I’m asking for a group of friends.

Called the higher primates.

I told you that in these months and years I often feel loose in time, sliding backwards many decades and reliving teen fragments or pieces from my thirties as if they were happening Now, in dreams or in half-waking or sometimes even up and fully caffeinated. It happened vividly just before I sat to write this. I was back in a high school journalism class taught by Marvin the First, and I was getting and losing my first real job, as a reporter, for the Courier.

Probably I should be writing about that. There’s a slim chance I will, offline, but for our purposes, as I said, the inner sanctum is currently closed. So instead I’m going to slide further today.

Oldest deliberate fire dates back 400,000 years, and was made by Neanderthals (1.9K views, 6 days ago)

A story which, if true, poses a challenge to my/our ideas about the deep human past. Not a decisive challenge, but an interesting one.

Taming fire used to be part of a whole cluster of nominal advances (including cooked food and Storytelling) comprising the “Great Leap Forward”, theorized to date back about 50 thousand years, and sometimes implied to be the genesis period of ‘fully modern’ humans (whatever that means).

Which in turn meant that the model of humanity’s Eden existed for 40 thousand years, from the GLF until the great fiasco of sedentism, agriculture, rulers, and History commenced.

Some months ago someone asked me, “Well, what is an ancestrally appropriate diet? What did they eat, um, ‘in the beginning’?”. My answer was based on that period of 40 thousand years alone. It still is, but only to a point, because if ‘we’ were cooking for ten times as long as previously thought, that’s a much larger theoretical dataset and might provide a more comprehensively robust answer.

It doesn’t change the fact that a diet heavily skewed toward grains is not as good for you as it is good for the profit margins of kings or whoever rules the granary. But still …

Potentially instructive.

I also think that this story brings Us into much closer kinship with subspecies neanderthalis, although that’s more speculation that Science.

***

There remains the question of: So Fuckin’ What?

This position holds firm in saying ‘maybe you’re exactly right, mr. bigbrain, but I don’t see how it matters. Civilization and/or Your Fiasco happened, and it’s not un-happening, so … what good are all your theories, for purposes of telling us what to do next–how to live?’.

Quite possibly not much good at all. (Except maybe … aesthetically.)

But …

I would contend that if you cast all this knowledge and prehistory aside as useless guesswork …

You’re never again in full good faith going to be Opining Confidently about what Human Nature even is. And …

Your very morality cannot legitimately be rooted in some completely made-up idea of what is Natural, or un-natural.

***

The best anarcho-primitivism is not Prescriptive, which is why the most rabid anti-prims insist that all of it must be. It’s very helpful in the construction of straw men. I am calling bullshit on that as a philosophical strategy for the promotion of tough hard-nosed pragmatism and the Oh Well, Nothing’s To Be Done About It Now school.

And the horse James T. Kirk rode in on, too.

***

Is recycling purely and simply the Right Thing to do?

How do you know?

How should … I know?

Is it still true if I have to drag my glass 90 miles in order to recycle it, using a fossil-fuel burning engine?

And …

Did I, as a young animal so brimming with bright-eyed integrity, ever really have a chance,

being born into our world, this world, the world as we know it, ten thousand years after the Fall?

The marvins and the fire are whispering to me softly

No not really, mijito

Youre not a victim, but even so

This is the truth of your tragedy

So mote it be.

I’ve ignored the truoble down south as long as I can and longer than I should’ve.

Let’s kick things off by addressing that.

US Naval Seizures In The Caribbean Are Only The Beginning | Amb. Chas Freeman

***

Similarly, on the other side of the world:

U.S. Ramps Up Proxy War; Cambodia Vs. Thailand

***

Meanwhile in the Internecine Wars:

MAGA World DESPERATE To MUZZLE Candace Owens

***

And the war you swore no-forgetting on:

Dems Drop New Epstein Photos With Woody Allen, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Dershowitz the Zionist, Donald Trump, Noam Chomsky, and others

The Cohn Zohn: Instant Reaction to Brandon Aiyuk’s Latest Social Media Post

Rob Reiner and Son Nick Argued at Conan O’Brien’s Christmas Party the Day Before Director Found Dead

Two stories, completely unrelated, except that they both are happening in the context of Civilization, and have something to teach us about what mental health might possibly mean within that context.

Old English forst or frost
from Proto-Germanic frustaz, from the verb *freusanan “to freeze” (source of Old English freosan “to freeze”),
from suffixed form of PIE *preus- “to freeze;
or to burn”

Like a man

The desert, she is littered.

***

Another festive box arrived today.

It turned out to be merch, a mug and a t-shirt, labeled for a coffee roaster directly competitive with my own company, from a gifter who has never directly supported that enterprise of my own.

I have no terran idea what to say or feel about it; what the emotional or metaphysical symbolism of it could plausibly be.

If it had been stuff from a coffee shop, like the Mothership, I wouldn’t be so utterly baffled. But … another roaster? No, the cloud of unknowing is fully and tangibly realized.

I can hear the collective of the genetic mind humming echolalic: But it was done from love. Perhaps so:

(from PIE root *leubh-; “The core idea is a positive inclination toward someone or something”.

positive, early 14c., originally a legal term meaning “formally laid down, decreed or legislated by authority” [opposed to natural], from Old French positif and directly from Latin positivus “settled by agreement”.)

Personally, in the immediate aftermath of receiving it, I can accept that and agree to a civilized, semi-settled and domesticated nod, and a murmured thank-you.

So thank you. In all appropriate sincerity, for the authoritative inclination, and

Happy holidays, to you; to yours, regardless of race, creed, color, or ah, pronouns, as they would say yonder, in HR.

***

All that said, and while I am not going full dark here for the true holy days, it is time to close the inner sanctum to public view, for a week or whatever seems right. I have some outer sanctum topics lined up on approach for you to hold the place. This weekend as the moment approaches, we are expecting record high temperatures above 70, with full sun, and it is authoritatively imperative upon me to use that blessing with focused intent. So shall I.

If the texts or voicemails go unanswered for a couple of days, please don’t be “worried about me” as the saying used to rattle on uselessly. The silence will not mean sickness this time, Goddess willing, but rather the numinously glowing opposite so mote it be.

Después de un tiempo and please don’t stop leubhing me.

It is endlessly appealing (this time) to think about a Via Nova that is theoretically obtainable in the medium term. Twenty thousand away, or less? as opposed to the six figure new-basecamp versions now out of reach.

But all of it is for the shrinking future, and therefore speculative and theoretical. That is the appeal.

So after all the inner shouting has stilled itself

We loop back 24 and 48 hours: “Just because you can’t lick ’em that doesn’t mean you have to join ’em”, and

the mundanity of moving in a straight line in the Regimen, which is within practical reach, starting with today.

“But … you could sell the useless land, and just buy the trailer!”

Shhh-shh-shh-shh. Maybe yes baby.

But it doesn’t matter, starting with today.

Today, I can eat better still, and I can walk, and I can make an appointment to get the secondary meds that lower BP, and I can take one step toward ridding myself of addiction.

Even though that’s so much less … fun.

So in addition to dutifully adhering to said regimen, and tweaking it perpetually, Sir, the other question is

What do you consider fun? and please answer with respect also to what is obtainable today–not boarding an airplane to gawk at cave art, not even going to concerts full of people who are shockingly old like me.

I have some notions.

I doubt you’ll like them, but I can’t afford to keep thinking about that.

Best case, I can afford a beautifully crafted regimen, and to reward myself for executing it faithfully by tracking down

the essence of

Cheap Fun.

That is an answer, dear Lumo, that is both far better and far worse than I expected. I am wryly amused.

The issue I have is that while 30 years ago Burning Man sounded very fun, today, knowing what I know about what it has become, it doesn’t sound fun at all.

But it’s a pointer.

Maybe instead of going to the festival, Fun will take some form of embodying the Burning Man; rising from his ashes.

Oh.

And.

I wish the Rams had lost and that Old Man Rivers would’ve led the Colts all the way to victory instead of losing ugly by a hairsbreadth, but overall there was a lot to celebrate on a football Sunday. Go, you improbable Vikings–2026 will be a better year, and so say we all.

Trans- is “beyond”, but also “across”. The point here is to make it possible to embody the regimen anywhere; to make it mobile for purposes of yes-a-longer but primarily happier span of life.

Five to twenty thousand, realistically, plus whatever it takes to make both truck and especially wagon capable of towing it easily.

Start saving now so you can get there before it’s too late mijito. It matters more than ever getting to live in Silver again, because it’s grounded on pavement and dirt instead of lofty visions from half a lifetime ago.

A bed, king or queen, takes up 32-42 square feet of that, on one end or the other. The middle where the roof peaks and standing full length is easist is where the galley kitchen lives. Whatever is left on the other end is where sitting at a (possibly dinette-based) table/office happens.

And of course, there are ways to expand the living space in non-brutal weather by using tarps, awnings, screens, much of which I already own assets for.

I wrote the first version of these plans exactly 50 years ago, a fact that fills me with dread and wonder.

And oh, by the way, getting down to real-time cases. we can kiss the proposed budget above goodbye and replace it with one that reads “30-50K”.

from PIE root *reg- “move in a straight line”, and suggesting once more that rules can be had without rulers

This is about softening the aorta and opening the heart as much as seems prudent and practical.

For the next twelve days, months, years.

I’m dropping off from the hardest keto line and reintroducing pintos and other sources of soluble fiber.

“Just because you can’t lick ’em that doesn’t mean you have to join ’em”.

Note that this is the moral polar opposite of the one about leading, following, or getting the hell out of the way.

It’s also the very reason I watch old movies. I’m measuring their morality and resonating with it on the rare occasions that I can.

Tokyo Joe failed. (I think the reason why is that is was trying to be Casablanca, except that the enemy wasn’t fascists, it was cartoon communists.)

This one succeeds, and resonates.

Man in the Middle (1964 Classic Film, Robert Mitchum & Trevor Howard)

Robert Mitchum is always worth watching. Trevor Howard does his thing to perfection.

The knockout performance comes from France Nguyễn Vân Nga.

You’ve seen her before. Either in South Pacific, or as the title character in the ST episode “Elaan of Troyius”, or elsewhere in a career spanning 50 years.

The Wikipedia entry says she is still with us today, living her best life in Beverly Hills.

May we all do one thing this well before our time is up.

***

One other item of note is that the man who wrote the book this is based on was blacklisted.

By the same kinds of red-blooded murikans that wanted you to swallow the world according to Tokyo Joe, and every other full glass of bullshit about everything from race to economics to what makes a person truly good, or bad.

Some months later, we the people still have no idea who killed Charlie Kirk, and in fact there is no good evidence that even the actual gunman is, or has ever been, in custody.

The Latest, Part One and Part Two, none of which is getting us any closer to knowing.

Yes, you didn’t even know who the guy was, before he was murdered. Yes, it’s apparent over time that he really was a racist douche. And, yes, maybe you don’t care about his death because he was just another lunatic Trumper as far as you know.

You can not-care about any of that, and still find the evolving fable instructive about what kind of place you really live in, all deep red or true blue mythological bullshit aside.

For the first half I was thinking it was just as good as Casablanca.

In the end it didn’t turn out nearly that well.

Tokyo Joe (Humphrey Bogart, Alexander Knox, Florence Marly)

Dibs On Malignantler.

Rangifer pseudoparvus was not a reindeer nor even a caribou.

On the other hand sinter klaas wasn’t even real, at least not according to The Science.

Elsewise, what I think it would take if that’s what you really want.

Not that I’m imagining it actually is.

Fuck scripts anyway and have yourself a merry little trashday.

I’m confused. You mean like … Wisconsin?

Cinnabon Worker Fired For Racist Tirade Against Somali Customers

Halfway through Russell ties it in neatly to the one about “We choose our own reality”.

Which we do get to do.

Sometimes.

Just not nearly as often as the individualist american mythos berates us to believe, for multiple reasons of its own.

Around the time I was finishing up high school (and being parentally denied the scholarship I’d won myself alone, but let’s not get distracted right off the bat), there were a tiny handful of commercial tourist flights over Antarctica.

The big birds didn’t land on the seventh continent, but only overflew McMurdo Sound and its station, offering unprecedented views of spectacularly remote things, like the almost continuously erupting volcano of Mount Erebus, before returning to the civilized antipodes from whence they came after eleven hours non-stop.

The final flight crashed amidst a long and foul scandal, and that was that. Never again since, and not for a long time yet if ever, would anyone have that specific opportunity to gamble with wonder and death.

With all due respect to both the evil criminals and the innocent victims, it’s a pretty great story.

Litany of LIES | The Mount Erebus Disaster

Enjoy. If you want to.

***

In Greek mythology, Erebus is the personification of darkness, or ‘gloom’.

Look how seasonally appropriate I’m being ennit.

(Kenny monetizes his madness and does a much more efficient job of it than I am.)

With each cooler passing day the bitterness grows, not higher or hotter, but deeper, settling in my bones. I revisit old wounds, and old spit-out proverbs that went nowhere and then died as cliches, struggling with what strength I have to pull-up pull-up and avoid the same fate for myself.

I walked some, in the same way I used to drive around, casting my mind out over this historically accidental town and the world beyond in an attempt to start the master list all over again with first things first. It used to be easy–the place up the hill was where I showed up at certain times of the week, and because I did so lots of money flowed in to my accounts magically.

Now it’s both harder and easier. I don’t have to show up or keep anyone happy, and a fraction of the money still magically flows, just enough to cover the bare essentials; not enough to fund any substantial projects. Overall I like this way much better.

I nag myself, about devising ways toward More Cash, the generation of dinero, to fund the pull-up bootstrap projects, but ideally without sacrificing any or many of the hours of pure freedom …

Or whatever tries to pass for freedom within the confines of an overdeveloped world without buffalo for food and shelter, or free running unpoisoned water to drink.

The avant-garde composer John Cage studied the birds in his New York City park and commented ruefully on another cliche, the one about ‘free as a bird’. “They’re not free,” he concluded. “They’re fighting over bits of food”.

So say we all.

Walking up the familiar alley, I noticed something. Most all of the other people I encounter there are men. Most all of them are native. Most all of them are obviously addicted to something destructive.

I too am a sort of man, and a sort of dispossessed native, and I too am addicted to various flavors of ruin.

Today though, there was one man out there that was whiter than me. He was walking his dog, and although I am used to perceiving myself as the oldest inhabitant of these alleys, he was obviously much older. Old enough to call me son.

“Bless you son,” he told me, because in response to his comment about the sunny weather I replied, “It’s the kind of day I pray for”, before I started muttering something vague about PhotoTherapy.

But he just fixated on the word ‘pray’, and convinced himself that I was a Christian, and blessed me.

No, father. I don’t believe in your christ or your nameless God, and that’s not who I pray to for the Light, nor for shade when the seasons turn.

I’m only a prophet and a mere one indeed, in some broken-glass variation on the Lurlinist tradition.

Variegated.

VairTerred.

Self-scolding, self-healing when I’m at my best. Blessed.

How you feel about Candace Owens or Tim Pool or Charlie Kirk is relatively irrelevant.

How you feel about Miss Rachel and the people smearing her says a lot more about the condition of your soul.

“You have to see it to be it.”

I saw a mother, but I didn’t want to be a mother.

I saw a bad father, and it made me not-want to be that either.

I didn’t want to be a Shenkel-Elder, or even a genial hardworking One-Eyed Struglinski.

I saw Abbey and Thoreau and Abbie Hoffman only in print. That was a start–maybe I could be in-print too?

Much later, I heard Scott Carrier, and I said yes to being that, or rather … I recognized that he was probably what I had become anyway, both in the sense of soothsaying and in the way of Wreckage. He and I, growing in a certain Southwest way at roughly the same time, were on parallel tracks, both glancing off the beast of NPR according to the laws of social physics.

Having bounced off and abandoned the beast, we both saw a good share of professors and thus became that too. This time, I was better at It than he was. But not all that much better.

As far as I know he’s been silent for a long time now.

I have this, and a video now and then.

We both have a decade’s worth of endgame to sort out.

God bless us every one.

Old English forsacan.

Forsake is chiefly applied to leaving that by which ‘natural affection’ or a sense of duty should or might have led us to remain …

Instructive to note? that while forsake means to leave, forsaken is a state of having been the one left.

In my experience, oftentimes it is not trivial to sort out which is which.

This one time on the street in Gallup down by the good coffee place, we met a chirpy guy who told us that Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire was fake, because although old Ed wrote it as if he was alone during the days he spent as a ranger in the Arches Natural Moneymint, he in fact was cohabiting with a wife the whole time.

To which I reply belatedly:

Abbey called and wanted to call the book Desert Solipsism.

It was his publisher’s marketing department that insisted on naming it after a card game. More relatable, you know.

(and so note–to hell with publishers)

And, as anyone who has ever spent a minute in a marriage knows, cohabiting and solipsism are not mutually exclusive phenomena.

So, buddy, I think your story, while true, is the actual fake.

The fragmentary moments I’ve spent co-habiting in recent years have not interrupted my solipsism, my state of

only, single, sole; forsaken; extraordinary.

But we are spending a lot of quality time in an effort to bridge the gap, the one that exists between every single mother’s son among us;

between you and me.

I believe in the essential nobility of that pursuit.

PS: The reason most often cited for being forced to use social media, or turning ourselves into phone drones more generally, goes something like, “well it’s the only way to stay in touch”.

Man, talk about useless fakery.

In Touch, if it means anything anymore, means exactly that.

Touch.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it right, dear shared societal world of norms and theories out beyond the solus wall.

The Worst Airline I’ve EVER Seen

It’s pretty bad? But it’s also pure propaganda to sell you hard on the idea that not only rules, but rulers and factotums with authority are a blessing.

I still don’t believe that and I doubt I ever will.

To flip their ethnic-cleansing wicked script on them, I would instead argue that the only good airline is a dead airline, and that the same is true for most all modern corporations, capitalist or otherwise, and also for billionaires and other tycoons themselves.

This is probably where we will always disagree hardest. So be it.

This is my pretty dead friend Dolores Mary Eileen O’Riordan.

This is my twitchy broken live friend Kenny, which–I mean it’s ridiculous, but some things that he says here made me so fuckin’ jealous that it started to crack the shell of the bitterness and put me back on the less traveled path to Going My Own Way.

Which–with equal ridiculousness–is a scrap of lyric that really does just so happen to cut both ways with perfectly equal savagery.

Meaning, I can scream it at you with the same force I’m screaming it at myself, and be right twice over.

For the last six months I’ve felt very frustrated.

For the last three, I’ve felt actively embittered.

The most holy day of the year for me, the winter solstice, is coming soon, and the query of that day, as it is evolving, seems to be boy: ain’t you sick of wallowing in that shit yet?

They answer is trending toward: yeahfuck, I fuckin’ guess.

It’s attractive, to keep playing the role of the man twisted into knots by never having been cared for well. But not …

endlessly attractive.

I wrote this whole thing about the dissonance

between the very early Christmases when I was apparently honestly cherished and bright

and the years that came hot on Santa’s heels when all that shattered into broken glass in the gutters which

I came to know as my only natural and perhaps even rightful Home.

But I’m not going to publish it, because that is … collaboration

with the wallowing. (How can you miss me, if I won’t get the hell out of the Way?)

Which I am sick to fuckin’ death of, and How can I … ever change things that I feel?

You can go your own way.

You can call it another LonelyDay, another

What’s going on behind the scenes
when you make the choice to fly.
This is the best case. There are thousands of ways, documented on this guy’s channel and others, where it can and sometimes does go so much worse.

It’s easy to quote the outdated scriptures about the safest way to travel. It’s trivial to snicker about horses, buggies, and “if god meant for us to fly” canards.

God is irrelevant, but no deity ever intended for our lives to be this complex, crazy-making tangle of overheated shit.

They sent me another screechy email today about a $33 charge for bloodwork, completely ignoring my last reply which essentially said: You want your bill paid, send me an invoice, IN THE MAIL. And I will send you a check. In the MAIL. Oh no. You can go here to pay online. You can call us. Gott in Himmel and fuck your self-serving ideas about convenience.

Post offices and written checks are quite complicated enough artifacts of civilization already, like driving one’s own car.

I don’t want to evolve past that stage to your tune, assholes.

Or take off my shoes for your security theater.

If you want to live …

Live simply.

(So that others may simply live, or for any other reason.)

Life expectancy for American men is struggling back upwards toward pre-Covid levels. Right now it stands at 76 years, although that figure is not adjusted for factors like socioeconomic class, which matter pretty significantly.

Statistically that gives me maybe a dozen trips around the sun, more, of course, or less.

I don’t think I want to spend them all here in étrange fogbound stasis in the 1946 house, foreign, alien, unusual, unfamiliar, curious, distant, inhospitable.

Will the old gringo take his rolling road show down to Mexico in search of the rush all over again before checkout time?

Time will tell, in precisely spilled daily doses; don’t touch that

mando de distanica.

Growing up, the alleged principles of our alleged faith did not make allowances for the worldly celebrations, but all the turkey and cranberry things were on sale, according to the alt-belief, so this was normally a rare day of abundance regardless.

Thus by default the thanks giving became my favorite holiday–it was, at least, something tipped toward a minor good, instead of just shame, like being forbidden to participate in, say, fourth-grade valentine’s day card exchange.

I still long for hearts and love.

This morning I boiled a package of charcutnuvo breakfast links that came in the Azure order earlier in the week. $6.91, and yes, on holiday sale. The main eating event, if there is one, will be tacos that use up the rest of the meat from the last batch, and at least one avocado before it spoils, because my soul overflows with prudence and providence, as far as anybody knows.

The phone pings without cease and the cat has found a new favorite spot on top of the dryer. I think because:
–it’s high enough
–it’s under one of the heat vents
–it’s the right angle for getting carefully petted every time I have to go into the bathroom where the dryer lives.

The sun, He is shining.

Moreover, tomorrow is supposed to bring one last gasp of a high over sixty Fahrenheit.

I will open the screens and invite it in.

Singing praises and alleluia, for his is the power and the glory and the radiance forever and amen.

I’ve been using the one small space heater more. The last few days, I let the gas stove run free to take the kitchen chill off. And today, right after a warming shower, I flipped the furnace on at last. November 26 is probably a month later than I’ve ever done it before. Am I proud?

A little.

It’s set at sixty-three for now.

It will rise and fall with pride and budget.

Maybe there is such a thing as the perfect temperature, but it’s a fairly elusive creature between 5000 and 6000 feet.

I think I got this. It was trash day and Azure pick-up day and deliciously sunny. I wish I’d got more sun, but I did get a lot done.

There’s sort of two weeks left in the billing cycle and December is almost and sort of covered and there’s a hundred for each of those weeks until things roll over and I get another crack at making it a comfortable month.

The cat is still spending too much time at the top of the world and essentially no time on the west side of the house. Other than that she is, in this phase, seemingly healthy enough.

Maybe by the solstice things will be primed to roll over for more real.

Life. Heartbeats.

For now.

What if Dr. Frank N. Furter and Mr. French were really

the same person?

Waking rested in the dawn, the clock said six-something. But when I looked again a moment later, now it read 10. Four evaporated hours of timeless invisible sleeping; my body must have needed it. This time I did roll over and up out of bed. To make the coffee, to feed the kittens.

Even pale and cloud-filtered as it was, stepping out into the light felt like such a healing.

I’m going to go back into the bedroom whenever the need for sleep consumes me, but now I’m going to start setting an alarm again. Not to be on time at some vapid job, but to be caffeinated before the first rays of that light.

Six-ten feels about right for now for rising, to catch the early dim rays of seven.

Let’s watch and see.

I stayed up all night and all day because I was very fretful about the cat. At dusk I finally crashed hard for four or five hours. I dreamed that We were selling ‘everything’ off, liquidating assets. When I found out that my pickup was let go for a mere $1900 and that I wasn’t even going to see that pittance, I was extremely pissed–heartbroken really. I stayed that way for what felt like a long time.

When I started to wake up and realized that the truck was still here in reality it was a big relief and I was grateful.

***

Tangent time.

The part of the system called “division of labor”, or specialization, isn’t working out. For me or in general

First it was the plumbers. The people my patron called in for me were stupid and arrogant, and they would have been crazy expensive too, except I yelled at them, through her speakerphone, and in a moderately civil way, that they would never see a dime, and were invited to go fuck themselves. Then I got on Yelp and found somebody else, and they were brilliant, and cheap. A rare success story. Ironically they weren’t really plumbers but HVAC guys. I still haven’t had them back to look at the HVAC, but neither the AC nor the HV are being used. For now. So it’s okay. For now.

Then it was the mechanics. I’ve dealt with a couple dozen of them in recent years, and I’ve got to say that I haven’t been truly satisfied with a single one of them. Half are really bad, half are kinda okay-ish sometimes, and only a couple have inspired any fair measure of trust in me at all. Case in point–the latest one.

Patron offered to get my PS pump fixed in between plumbers. I had some new guys do it because they are easy walking distance from my house. They did so. Except … when I got the car back it had no power steering, and I had to take it back in and listen to them wonder out loud what *I* did wrong. It turned out that the pump they installed was defective right from the factory.

This shouldn’t have been a big deal, and it wasn’t really, but it wouldn’t have been any kind of deal if they had simply test-driven their own work before handing it back to me. C-minus, amigos. Oh, and they had the gall to magnanimously inform me that they were waiving the charges for installing the second new pump. I mean … god damn right you are, mfers.

The expert mechanics in Fort Collins were something of a disappointment. So were the experts in Flag. I don’t imagine you want to care about the details, so I’ll spare you.

And now … the veterinarians.

***

Kitty has been a constant concern for months now and it reached a peak in the wee hours of Friday, and like I said, I was fretting.

I turned to the AI for help and learned a bunch of things that the one local vet should have told me already when I was paying her, repeatedly. Again, you don’t care about the details, but I cut her kitty meds in half and found out what the pros use to treat cats who are scratching and chewing their own skin bloody, a follow-on symptom from Kali’s original problem.

This cutting-out-the-experts approach mirrors pretty precisely what happened when I had the chronically sick Alli turned into my problem and went along with quarantining her in what used to be my bedroom, for literal years–until I got fed up, did my own research, and learned that she never really had to be segregated for that long in the first place.

My bedroom is finally my bedroom again, and that adorably gross orphan furball is doing as well as can be expected.

***

I don’t think very many people in this world of businesses actually know what the fuck they’re doing, or care deeply about truly doing it well.

The point of the game isn’t excellence. The point of the game is to do the least and get paid the most.

I was really quite guilty of it myself, in my working days.

It’s how you play it smart, and of course everybody’s smart now, because they have a phone with them at all times.

***

Expertise is a kind of arms race.

I feel a lot of very different things about AI, but mainly I feel it’s a Gun.

Another step fake-forward technologically, that can be leveraged to advantage in situations both violent or mercenary.

This world we’ve chosen to build is both, on purpose, because that’s how our greed, yours and mine and his and hers, wants it to be.

We’re so civilized ennit.

So very banal toward the evils that surround us and sometimes fill us.

I’m fretting now about that, and de-domestication, and about how to save my kittybaby’s life.

This idea that making it hotter inside this house, and particularly turning on the furnace, will make either me or the cats healthier … I just disagree with it on some instinctual level.

At mid-day on a second afternoon of almost no sun, it’s sixty degrees in here.

Not quite perfectly comfortable. But nowhere near unhealthy, not even for a sick kitty.

It’s November on the way to December and at this latitude 60 is warmer than it is getting outside at any time of day.

It’s really good for sleeping, curled up and cozy.

I moderate it with sweaters and little blasts from localized electric space heaters.

Eventually it will drop to 55 and lower and then I will have to reconsider what my instincts are really saying, day by day.

It’s almost like a job ….

This is how it looked during the one hour of partial sun today. Where I’m standing it’s raining, not very gently, but there’s one dry hole in the clouds.

I cling to the light more than I cling to the heat.

Doña Esperanza’s ASMR energy healing & relaxation massage with soft whispering to help sleep

via Ecuador Live

i’ll be needing that

I don’t think it’s the right idea for me personally.

He Left Civilization to Build a Floating Self-Sustaining Island

But it’s a good one and maybe a model for someone nevertheless.

Lumo, is there such a thing as a wild chicken?

The species most commonly recognized as the “wild chicken” is the red junglefowl (Gallus gallus). It is the direct ancestor of the domestic chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus). Red junglefowl still exist in forests and grasslands across India, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and surrounding regions.

… and …
When domestic chickens escape or are released into the wild and establish self‑sustaining populations, they become feral chickens. These birds are essentially domesticated chickens that have reverted to a wild‑like lifestyle*. Feral populations can be found in many parts of the world, from the Hawaiian islands to parts of Australia, the Caribbean, and even some U.S. states.

Okay. Is there such a thing as a wild human?

The short answer is no—modern humans don’t exist in a truly “wild” state the way many animal species do.

I was afraid of that.

While we lack a truly wild human population, anthropologists describe hunter‑gatherer societies as the closest analogues to a “wild” mode of life:

Subsistence: They obtain food by hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plants rather than farming or industrial production.

Mobility: Groups are often nomadic or semi‑nomadic, moving seasonally to follow resources.

Social structure: Small bands (typically <100 individuals) with egalitarian decision‑making and limited material accumulation.

Examples include the San of Southern Africa, the Hadza of Tanzania, and the Mbuti of the Congo Basin.

***

Thus the evidence about “what we should do about it” suggests that the answer is to move in the direction of hunting and gathering our food, becoming more nomadic, living in community, and becoming more wildlike.

Not because that will allow us to ‘Go Back Again’.

Rather simply because living wilder allows us to at least start the project of de-domesticating ourselves.

Also because it’s a better aesthetic.

I feel certain you won’t agree, but that’s okay too. Go with God or something … I will too.

***

Lumo, what does it mean to de-domesticate ourselves?

De‑domestication is a provocative way of describing a deliberate shift away from the habits, environments, and cultural patterns that have arisen because humans have been “domesticated” by our own societies. Below is a concise framework that captures what the phrase usually implies, why people talk about it, and what practical steps (and limits) it entails.

There’s pages and pages more like this, culminating in a list of practical sensible steps to take, written in a self-help style: “Wake with sunrise, spend the first hour outdoors doing light movement … End the day with a brief reflection journal on paper”; all of it aimed at de-domesticating/rewilding ourselves and …

Provided by an Artificial Intelligence.

Yes, Alice, I believe we’re on the other side of the looking glass, and Toto too.

We already know that many Democrats and many Republicans, household names, are in the Epstein files.

We also know that none of them have ever paid any price for the horrible things they’ve done, and almost surely never will. That even if there are token attempts at prosecutions or shaming, that too will change nothing about how this sick world routinely works–how in some sense every one of us counts on it working.

Getting all wound up about the optics, either way, is a lot like rooting for one team to win a football game.

A pleasant distraction that means so little to reality that it might as well not matter at all.

All that said: Go Team Massie.

Why I Love Film Noir

Because: black and white with expressionist lighting, night, fog, smoking, drinking, a fast delivery style inflected by radio drama, and inner monologues revealed to us as … audience. Hello.

Most of all, because of the narrative relationship between the tough guy, and the femme fatale.

In retrospect, it’s obvious.

***

On the purely toughguy side of light, linkdump:

https://ziafactorynm.com/current-inventory.asp?builder=Cavco%20Durango

https://www.cavcohomes.com/our-retailers/us/nm/deming/solitaire-homes-of-deming/display-homes?page=1

https://www.cavco.com/our-retailers/us/nm?name=New%20Mexico%2C+USA

https://ziafactorynm.com/view-home.asp?Serial=S2-28643A&id=1703&Make=Cavco

HE KNEW: Trump ROCKED by EXPLOSIVE Epstein Leaks

House SECURES Vote To RELEASE EPSTEIN FILES

Why isn’t it enough to take the orange-colored pedo down?

Here’s WHO ELSE Is Named in NEW EPSTEIN LEAKS

Is There a Trotskyist-Neocon Connection? – w/ Caleb Maupin

***

There’s a reason I give you the news you already know in a form that includes a dose of this analysis.

“You have to rebuild their whole way of looking at reality.”

Maybe I don’t have to, Russell, but I have tried; will, try.

I failed; and will fail. Snitches get stitches and the messengers get buckshot holes in their smooth skin.

I decline to embrace, as a result, an identity as a victim.

I choose anyway to say sooth and do my best to live it, heedless of the percentages and the efficacies involved.

None of that, believe it or not, is an indictment of you personally, or the belief structures you cling to, because I know you too are doing whatever your best is.

Aren’t you?

Today is the last we’ll see of 70 degrees for a while. Maybe a long while.

Tomorrow is the last we’ll even see of 60 and of guaranteed sunlight all day.

And then …

Nighttimes drop back down below freezing. The cold dark season settles in, a month late.

I hope to be ready.

1: Damaged

2: Your Loving Arms

3: Justify My Love

Tell me your dreams
Am I in them?
Tell me your fears
Are you scared?
Tell me your stories
I’m not afraid of who you are
Poor is the man
Whose pleasures depend
On the permission of another

4: Filler

5: Broken

Broken like a crooked smile
A little hunched over but I walked that mile

Don’t you feel sorry for me!
Don’t you feel sorry for me?
Don’t you feel sorry for me
‘Cause I won’t change my story
Don’t take all my glory
Don’t you feel sorry for me

Coda

No one’s calling for me at the door.
and unpredictable won’t bother anymore.
and silently gets harder to ignore.
look straight ahead, there’s nothing left to see.
what’s done is done, this life has got it’s hold on me.
just let it go, what now can never be.

so many beautiful things
so many beautiful things

Feel You

Near Me

… to marvel darkly at how the mythologies inflicted upon us can live through generations …

The unspoken mythology we were born into, boiled down, amounts to: Fear is stronger than love.

I don’t want to believe it, but at the most basic visceral level, my not-wanting doesn’t make it my not-inheritance. My not-wanting doesn’t make it any less crippling to dreams, or to elusive delight in life.

It remains my cross and our cross as a tribe, to bear regardless.

I only have one other thing to say on the subject, and that is:

I refuse categorically to be blamed for The Fear existing, for its pervasive permutations, or for triggering it, in anyone, and especially not to anyone who nurtured it into me from childhood.

Suggesting to me that I should self-sacrificingly shoulder some major slice of that guilt will only make me a little more aFraid, and therefore inevitably do nothing more than just piss me off.

A self-righteous, brittle anger to be sure.

I own that much, but I will hoard my shame and ration it out only when I need for you to know.

I’m clawing out from under them, and empty cat food cans.

The refi might actually be a superior option to the HELOC or equity loan.

In some ways. Once the Fed lowers rates another couple of times.

Or maybe I’ll win some lottery that I don’t play any more.

I am not energized by any of the ways, but I consider them too often, in idle dreamy moments between clearing the real trash of days or decades.

As far as I know, I was the last person in my family to attend a meeting in a Kingdom Hall.

One Sunday morning in my first year of college, I got up early and walked miles out Willow Creek Road to attend services.

Then I walked back … “home” alone.

The exact details aside though, every one of us laid down our Truth Books at about the same time, and never looked back.

Inside a couple of years, they had all moved away and taken a new last name, which on the surface seems like the main difference between them and me. But it wasn’t.

The main difference was that they picked up new Truth Books–the Gospel According To The Commander, a faith which mostly abides in most of them to this day, fifty years down the line.

Whereas, for the most part, I abandoned books of truth written by anyone else and decided to write my own instead.

You’re reading it now.

I call it the Sooth Book. Possibly I’m trying to be funny, but I don’t think I’m succeeding.

***

Possibly, I’m right in the particulars of how I see civilization and the Fall from Grace for this species, sure.

But my correctness, it is said, begs an important question. Your version of the anarcho-primitive is all well and good, bro, but …

Given all that, what the hell are we supposed to do now? We can’t go back to Eden because it’s been wiped off the map.

How then shall we live? My pointy-headed sooth doesn’t have anything to say about that, does it?

No, it doesn’t. Not really. You are right, about that much. We can’t go Home again.

So then the only thing is to go forward, in some kind of toothless ungodly pragmatic optimism?

Personally I have to decline that offer, alas.

***

I don’t know what you should do. I barely know what I should do, but I have thoughts from time to time on the subject.

There is no hope for rewilding the planet. There is no more than a sliver, that we could even ever rewild our societies, or our, what do ya’ll call ’em? Our markets.

But I do think it’s marginally possible to undomesticate our … selves.

And that the buzzword of “rewilding” means, more or less, if it means anything–reversing our own self-domestication.

Or at least eviscerating our own compliant compliance, with the domestication imposed on us from outside.

You don’t really want a ‘netflix subscription’, seriously, do you?

I don’t believe you want to haul that fucking phone around with you every god damned place you go, even to bed sometimes, or all the time.

I don’t believe that any sane person would want to ever subject themselves to the inhumane indignities necessary just to indulge themselves in the convenience of commercial air travel these days. Much less routinely.

Or decline to live in the sticks because the sticks are just too inconveniently far from an airport or a Walmart or a Chipotle or even an organic food store.

I don’t believe that any sane healthy person would want to be Employed, and that bitching about how the homeless don’t really want jobs says way more about the bitcher than it does about the homeless.

I realize that most all of this directly contravenes what it says in the commander’s gospel, which exhorts us to embrace leadership, be content with following, or … or what?

Do the truly unthinkable.

Devote our minds and spirits wholeheartedly to finding the mythical kingdom of Helloutta.

Which is not a place, or a time long past.

But rather, a painful and usually unrewarding authoring, for our individual selves a radically untamed modus vivendi that meets our own actual spiritual needs.

In my arguably humble opinion.

It’s a doublewide just like the zoning people want. It’s 1700 square feet.

Direct Link to Zia Factory Outlet

Typical listed price (Zia Factory Outlet)
≈ $78,000 (base price; excludes delivery, site prep, taxes, and any optional upgrades)

Dealer contact
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Also: A 1493 square foot variation on the theme, confirming the $78K base price, for a model actually in current inventory.

Cogito ergo sum, said Descartes. So then, I be. Beyond that we can’t really know much. My consciousness exists. I can go out on a limb and conjecture that yours does too, but … that’s pretty much the extent of what is strictly knowable.

But molecules, you say. Quarks. The seemingly palpable evil that is Orange, and his immigration policy.

Yeah. Maybe. Speculative, if we’re being strictly honest.

“It is what it is”.

No it fucking isn’t.

It is what your conscious chooses to decide it is.

I want to go Home now, wherever that may be tonight, and I want to stay there and I want to proceed with my lively cogito-ing and summing.

I want to feed my cat, assuming she too continues to abide.

At least it feels like that’s what I want.

There’s a lot more that could be filed under that category, but right now it feels like what I want is to say no more.

***

Then there’s your eminently practical question. Maybe everything you say is precisely right old son, but what dafuck do we do about it?

Care A Lot? i suppose, for so long as we have the stomach for it.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/were-calling-it-143123742

Or if you must: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU–7Ipd2SE

24 hours after I walked around the hotel and shot this video, we were forcefully awakened by some Escondido dipshit’s car alarm going off under the window of our room at the same hotel at six in the morning.

Hammering home the point reverse-beautifully.

Me and the AI, visual edition.

There’s a separate tool that lets you pause at any given paragraph in a story and let it try to generate images based on on that paragraph (plus everything that’s happened in the story up until then).

So I did that.

These images are some of the results of trying that many times with one of the things I’ve written.

This time in my life reminds me of 20+ years ago, about the time the RME was being born, when I was beginning to learn HTML and CSS and making my first good beautiful web pages from scratch.

In isolation from the rest of everything, that is an unalloyed good thing.

The next few days I’ll be traveling, so you may expect brief service outages here; in the event that you think what I’m doing qualifies as Service. I do–to the extent that I have Patrons and this is how I’m serving them for the blessing of their support. Again, you have my thanks.

There are healthier approaches to life and its people than mine. Those approaches are no longer open to me. On this side, trauma dreaming comes so easily and valentine truelove is a fairytale, due to

the ways I’m broken by shame.

I do intermittenly feel you near me

anyway. Especially when you ask me to tell you a story.

The images come from a DLC for FNV if you’re curious, but they’re not as important as the words,
I am drowning in.

I’ve been playing with some AI tools, in particular one called a Story Generator.

Except … It doesn’t generate stories. It responds to thematic prompting and specific details generated by the, um, Author. This prompting happens at the start, and again after every paragraph that the machine spits out. The writer, for lack of a better term, can also edit the text directly and manually as the sentences stack.

And I do, heavily.

The bad news is: Ick. Fake creativity! Remember the HemingWay!

The good news is: I’ve completed several relatively satisfying stories over the course of a couple of days for … the first time in my life.

I told you I’d steal back.

It’s early days, and I don’t know yet what I’ll do with the results of this process. Post it for free? Polish and have a poke at monetizing it?

Maybe neither, maybe both.

Because … I’m enjoying myself, and what I do or don’t do regarding publication will also be about enjoying myself.

In the future, some posts here will be fragmentary teasers, like yesterday’s.

I’m guessing most will continue to look more like this one. Hand carved, rough and as real as anything in the mere five thousand year history of Lit can be.

I’m … vibrating with a quiet excitement.

Also, the cat is doing unexpectedly better, knock on wood.

The bartender slid the whiskey glass across the chipped formica. “Last one, Seth. You look like wasteland warmed over.”

Seth Morgan wiped dust from his beard with a trembling hand. He didn’t taste the bourbon—only the grave dirt under his nails. Four hours since he’d shoveled Arizona clay onto his father’s coffin. The old man’s last word still echoed: Disappointment.

Near the jukebox, Valentina Reyes traced the barbed thorns of her turquoise ring. Her rattlesnake coat hissed against the vinyl booth as she inhaled Seth’s grief; bitter and electric, like ozone before rain. Botanist by day, she cataloged such pheromones. Tonight, she’d harvest them. The ring pulsed against her knuckle, hungry.

She slid onto the stool beside him. Bourbon fumes mingled with her gardenia perfume. “Your father died owing me.” A blatant lie told in a tone of scraped velvet. Seth stiffened, knuckles whitening around his glass. Predictable, she thought. Grief made men brittle.

Her fingers closed around his wrist—cold despite the desert heat. The ring’s thorns bit deep, obsidian-sharp whispers. Seth gasped quietly, a choked sound, not at the pain but at the sudden flood of images: monsoon storms over Canyon de Chelly, his mother’s laugh buried decades ago. Val’s pupils dilated. Hastsehogan’s joke, she seemed to murmur softly. Make them crave the stab.

To be continued. Probably. Either here, or there.

I’m noticing a massive spike in views here. You would think that’s a good thing, but I doubt it.

A lot of it seems to be multiple hits on random ancient posts. Not human behavior.

Pretty sure it’s AI trying to train itself to sound like quasi-normal written language in large doses.

So here’s the deal, planet-brains.

I’m contributing to your shit. Okay. That will make us even when I steal yours.

Seems fair. More or less.

***

At the same time, the phones are getting absolutely drenched in spam, most of it wanting to set me up for 53 or 66 thousand dollars in loans–‘Your file is almost complete! Call us!’ …

It might be pure scams. If not, it’s impure scams, an attempt to indebt me for whatever I make or ever could possibly make until I die.

It’s shockingly tempting to snatch at any five-figure straw, in the wake of recent disappointments.

I have one thing holding me back, and it’s a code that says my role as sooth sayer is to promote revolution.

Which I why I take care of myself. As best I know how, which isn’t all that good, and yet an honest attempt at the maintenance of an integrity that means less and less to this vapid, putrid, dying brave new world.

For some as yet nebulous higher purpose that may or may not come my way.

Bring it, bitches.

“I would say … about 80% of the time it’s wrong.”

As in: Walking into a modern auto parts store regardless of which brand, staffed by illiterates with phones, you only have a 20% chance of walking out with what you actually came in for, and need.

It’s not me saying it. It’s a guy who visit these stores multiple times in an average week. A guy who not only has no reason to lie, but is often sponsored by such stores.

Even if he’s embellishing and only half-right, that goes a very long way toward explaining why this world generally, and commercial consumer transactions specifically, suck so bad in the brave new world.

I feel very sure that it’s not just about auto parts.

And … this doesn’t count situations where you get the right thing, but it’s defective, as recently happened to me with the power steering pump.

Or a million other bad variations on the same theme.

White people problems? Sure. Maybe.

But this is not the picnic of progress we grew up expecting, or anything close.

This, by which I mean daily life and trying to survive it, is hard. It’s not just you.

The era of the Oregon Trail was less than two centuries ago, pretty much no-time by any standard. A couple of lifetimes.

Almost half a million people took that trail, facing cholera and starvation and drowning and other disasters, and poured into the Willamette Valley and points nearby. La, Civilization.

150 years after they did, The Oregon Trail was just … a video game.

In our postmodernist world of video games, the mythos says that typhoid and malnutrition and all the other hardships are imaginary objects in a rearview mirror.

But the mythos is mistaken about that.

And about most everything else too.

Good

I got a thoughtful order for hand-delivery of 3 bags of Anaprim next week. (Thank you.)

If you too are low on stock and attending the event, let me know and I’ll add you to the roast queue.

***

Bad

Following up on the blood sport: We Are All Carson Wentz’s Shoulder, and there’s no such thing as a boss who loves you.

***

Soothin

Date            Dawn      Sunrise    Sunset    Dusk                   Day Length
2025-12-21 7:00 AM 7:28 AM 5:16 PM 5:44 PM              9:47:46

Without knowing anything about temperatures or weather, we can still prepare for the limiting of the light.

So, roughly, up Sixish, and crashing as soon after the other Six as the body will want to (even if that’s midnight), means losing the least amount of photonic goodness and thus presumably staving off the dark moods. For the next two months.

Last night I only slept five hours, and then had to crash down for another 3-4 just to catch up, and feel totally warm again all the way through.

In theory that’s the second-best way, but in practice the fatnap came at the height of the sun, so my thinking is that second-best is not truly all that good after all.

Every equinox is a Slow Learn.

At least the furnace is still off, for what that’s worth–some dozens of dollars monthly I’m sussing.

How Billionaires Broke The NFL’s Most Loyal Fans

Broke as in spirit and/or broke as in penniless.

Or both.

Murka.

Probably the last eighty degree day this year, quite late. Thus The Warming is a good thing in the narrow quotidian shortsighted sense.

I opened all the windows and doors and got it up to 72 degrees inside, for basically free. Soon it will cost extra, to not be cold. I can afford that much with a little belt tightening, and a Patreon account. Thanks for helping.

The cat seems to be holding her own; knock on wood.

***

Also.

I have a lot to say about the subjects discussed in the video linked below.

Broadly speaking I am issuing a concurring opinion. I’ve always like sh0eOnHead, but I think she’s wrong this time, and I wonder about if she’s had a kid, and if that has had anything to do with her apparent drift back toward the center.

There Are No More Normal Guys

That much said, for now I’m going to content myself with just retweeting it. Enjoy.

The sick kitty I love Process, as it has worked out best over time.

Coffee time in the morning, or 8 AM maybe: She gets a Lickable Treat with a full daily dose of the liquid that is supposed to keep her from vomiting.

An hour later, she gets another lickable treat with half the actual thyroid meds. Then I wait and pray that she keeps it down.

Generally speaking at this point I hide away the normal bowl of dry food for the day, unless the other cats are acting skinny and starved.

At dinnertime, say 4 pm, those two steps are repeated, except that the dose of anti-puke is not full. Maybe a third the size. Extra insurance.

If she holds that all down for an hour, then I start carefully feeding her home-cooked turkey, which she really likes. As much of it as I dare, without stuffing her too full and risking an upchuck. At this point all the medications are in her, and I’m just trying to put a little meat on her thin tiny bones.

This can go on throughout the night, depending on if I’m up, depending on how much she seems to want. The trend is in the direction of More, More Please.

The process is going good. The amount of spitting up is less than its been for a long time, following the regimen strictly now for many days in a row.

Sometimes she’s listless and immobile. Other times she’s bright and frisky. Sometimes she approaches, demanding my love. Other times she hides herself away.

There isn’t any way yet to tell if all this prestidigitation will cure her or even return her to a fat and happy maintenance mode. I hope so and I fear not.

Time will tell.

***

Meanwhile, having put the rest of the house back into an organized mode, again, at least on the surface, and having blasted away at most all of the November bills, I am trying to be out in the sun while its powers of warming are still undiminished.

Out on the patio, the strays and I inspected the shell carefully. What would it really take to get it installed on the truck, and have a serious bed away from home? I came up with a process for that too.

The hardest trickiest part is the first step. One of the plexi windows toward the rear is cracked and partially missing, and I need to replace it, preferably but not necessarily with uncracked plexi of the same kind, cut to the same shape.

Two: Paint the whole thing inside and out. In my head this gets done with the ‘paint’ used for lining the bed of a pickup. I’ve seen whole jeeps painted with this stuff. It looks really cool and it seems really practical for driving around in the scratchy bush.

Three: toward the front, there are the holes of two overhead windows and a theoretical door into the truck cab, all needing to be sealed up somehow. I don’t care as much about these replacements, aesthetically. Plywood and insulation might be good enough. The important part is sealing it well enough to heat and cool the habitable interior of the shell cheaply and well, and without asphyxiation.

Four: Once that’s all done I can put the shell where it belongs. And in a perfect world, be able to remove it and re-install it with a minimum of fuss if that becomes necessary.

Which it might or might not. Anyway, that’s just about potential future flexibility and doesn’t concern me deeply. The first three and a half steps are enough to get me to what I … need? Crave.

***

The cat thing is an urgent and presumably temporary process.

The shell thing is not.

Both are embedded in a tangle of other processes, some of them Daily and some of them unique Projects.

The development of processes is itself a process, and maybe the one that fascinates me most consistently.

This is the nature of my being. Sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.

Either way it’s okay I wake up with myself.

Who do you trust? Who do you believe in?

There’s a line of thinking that says there’s a great big difference between the People that think humans are basically ‘good’ and the People that think we are basically ‘evil’.

Smoke and Mirrors.

I say that ‘people’ writ large are self-interested. Whoever they define as their familial tribe run a more or less distant second. Everyone else is an astronomically distant third.

That’s how we got where we are.

When we settled and started to stockpile the riches of grain in granaries, it was so “our children will have a better life”, and we traded the god-given birthright of our rootless freedom for the delusional security of that promise, and gave all the power to Kings. Or No-Kings, it’s the same shit in the end.

People who are truly even a little bit selfless are rare and precious.

I value them. I don’t claim to be one of them.

My trauma tells me: If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. So by and large, I do.

The NBA Scandal Gets So Much Worse

The Disturbing Truth Behind Frank Abagnale (Mr. Catch Me If You Can will go to his grave still scamming, and Tom Hanks will too)

Whatever Happened to Jared Fogle, the Subway Guy?

Roman Polanski, the very definition of the cinematic autuer, the summum bonum of the artist class. See also: Louis CK, and Kevin Spacey.

And yes, even Bill Burr. Even Dave Chappelle. Even the co-anchors and their hot takes about Riyadh, which takes, both wrong by the way, illustrate my point better than any of the rest of this.

Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and Noam Chomsky, back in the COVID days. All provably wrong now, and absolutely motivated in retrospect not by the gospel of Science or the Common Good, but by self-interest of various shaded flavors.

Even me.

I’m doing this for the clicks, you know.

It’s not really going well. That’s why I sound bitter sometimes.

The Bad

Trust me when I tell you that I abhor the redpublicans, and yes the trump too, whatever he is.

I already do, and trying to convince me that they’re bad just exasperates me. I know, I know.

Especially when the subtext amounts to lesser-evilism: well yeah, bluedems mostly awful but god, look at the only alternative; so much worse.

Just no. No.

If anything I feel more vitriolic toward the alleged only alternative, because on top of all the mess, they are hypocrites and willlful betrayers, of all that may have once been right.

Glenn got me thinking about that. Thanks, Mr. Greenwald.

Tangentially …

How Profit Motives Killed The Bees,

(Why “evidence-based” [and ‘Science’] means less than nothing. The Profitable Manufacture of Ignorance. And how ‘social media’ becomes a spiritual minefield in which we all can easily lose our thoughtful limbs. Like we did over COVID. Like we are, over climate change.)

The Good

I mentioned Manda Scott in the last one. She impressed me enough to want to know more.
There is more.

Her site is called Accidental Gods, and there’s a companion YouTube channel/podcast.

I’m not going to be binging on her, because her path is not my path. She retains a quiet reasonable hope and mine is gone.

But I did think to myself that she might well speak directly to the femmes among my readership, and perhaps even serve as a sort of model, or her presentation as a template.

Here’s hoping.

The Soothin’

Blade Runner Moods Compilation Album * Relaxing Blade Runner Vibes Soundscapes

I thought this was soundtrack, but it isn’t. It’s original composition ‘inspired’ by the cyberpunk classic by someone calling themselves LUX, and I like it.

When I found that out my first thought was GodYes, I can very much use this, low in the background, when I start making videos again.

But deep in LUX’s BandCamp page, it does alas say: ⓒ all rights reserved, and I won’t be stealing.

Because I’m pretty sure that with a little effort I can find something that works as well and is Creative Commons or something like it. Maybe I will.

In the meantime I hope this is at least a pointer to soothing, or possibly even soothin’. Enjoy.

You’re Witnessing the Death of American Capitalism

A very mainstream and slickly produced source tells you what you already know.

I have very little patience for the whimpering blue No-Kings nonsense about how Trump is the one bad actor bent on destroying freedom. He’s all that, for sure, but some of your favorite boss men are no different.

From the point of view of capital, the eradication of freedom is a feature of the system, not a bug.

Capital doesn’t give a shit who you vote for, so long as it owns every candidate.

Which it does.

Yay, ‘democracy’.

***

Thriving in the Human Hellscape

This is nominally a feel-good story about a few species who are suffering less rather than more, in the horrible world we’ve built.

But for every species on the margin that is arguably doing better, there are a dozen doing worse, and another dozen going extinct, and …

It’s still a literal hellscape, regardless.

***

Has Earth Already Crossed MAJOR Tipping Points?

~nods~

***

Because in essence, permafrost melting leads to melting permafrost and runaway methane plumes.

Methane is 85 times more potent at creating greenhouses effects, compared to the CO2 we’re instructed to fret about endlessly.

Arctic Sinkholes : NOVA on PBS

New Evidence We Are Entering An Ice Age Termination Event

In my heart I feel that if “we” somehow manage to dodge every bullet and survive the apocalypse, that wouldn’t even be a triumph, but rather a crime against natural justice, like prematurely granting parole to a mass murderer.

It’s very cheering no doubt to indulge ourselves in the Voyages of the Starship Enterprise, and meddle by proxy in the affairs of other worlds; all the worse and inferior species across the galaxy, infecting them with the same rot that’s killing everything meanwhile here in the real world.

I choose to indulge instead in the cold comfort of knowing we’ll never get the chance to fuck up any second Eden.

***

Sometimes of late you’ve implied that I need to forget all that and focus on the Beauty of this World.

It’s not much, but here’s the best I can do at the moment.

I instinctively love these mountains and I choose to think of myself as almost-native to them.

I’ve stumbled across a better name for them, and that does make me happy.

Their rightful name, in my twisted little view, is:

The Cordillera.

Without the capitalization, it’s a generic term for any chain of ranges.

But near here, and for a long way north and south, from the furthest tip of so-called south america and perhaps beyond, up to the rugged Arctic Circle, the capitalization is earned.

Cordillera
is particularly applied to the various large mountain systems of the American Cordillera, such as the Andes of South America, and way up clear into at least the Brooks Range in Alaska.

The etymology says it means: Rope.

Thus am I bound unto it for life. See the derivations for the word: religion. If you want.

The difference between abiding out here on the relative flatness of the Colorado Plateau, and moving to Silver, is that down there I would be nestled in the heart of La Cordilla Madre, instead of out on its fringes.

Home Base.

The only trips I really care about now are ones up and down the Rope. I wouldn’t mind seeing the Yukon parts of it, nor the Costa Rican ones, nor Bolivia and Tierra del Fuego.

Those adventures are optional and speculative. None of them will happen until I am towing my bed and kitchen, and most of them will never happen at all, in this life.

Keep your Greece. Keep your Spain. Good for you and all, but those were always just pipe dreams in the life I’ve lived, and I don’t need them any more.

Just bury my heart at Mangas Springs, or out on the edge of the peaks of the Wind River, and that’ll be plenty enough for this soul.

***

Rupert Read: civilisation is finished: so what is to be done?

Yes. And.

Dr. Read’s co-author, Manda Scott, said it simpler still three days ago as of this writing.

Forget about the heat spiking because methane continues to pour ever more rapidly into the atmosphere.

Forget about the plastics in the brain, and the for-profit carcinogens in the rain, and the starving people and the ugliness and the AI going rogue.

Let’s imagine that all that doesn’t matter in the end because the oceans are dead by 2045. A very real possibility.

Dead oceans means they don’t replenish the oxygen supply, and that supply drops by 50 percent, and keeps dropping

and those of us who breathe air suffocate.

How I wonder does one prep for that?

Personally, I am compelled to believe that this 20-year clock is ticking for me whether any of these particular varieties of armageddon befall us or not.

All I have is this moment, and at the outside either way maybe a couple more decades of such moments.

This is true more or less for all of us individually, and possibly true for the species as a collective too.

Awaken?

Awaken, and Resist.

It turns out I actually have developed a reasonably dedicated audience. It’s only three people, but what I write does have consequences for that half a handful of relationships.

I will keep that closer to the front of my mind going forward.

***

The Last Major Islands to be Discovered

My appetite for knowing about these kinds of things is virtually unlimited.

I can theorize that it’s because the bear and I have so much in common. But that’s fanciful at best, because the bear doesn’t take care of individuals of other species, and the bear doesn’t possess the mixed blessing of an internally combusting Truck.

Speaking of which.

***

Getting that ancient F-150 into more dependably useful shape has suddenly become the priority of my heart, for hard cold calculated reasons.

The outbackWagon is doubtless far more dependable as things stand.

But given that I don’t have seventeen or thirty grand laying around right now to turn it into the motel-killer I crave with such aching …

What makes sense is pouring the far smaller sums that are available into making the pickup just a little more dependable (fixing the ignition, and the rattle) AND a whole lot more useful (by first installing the camper shell for a barebones four-season rig, and then eventually considering again the rehab of the creaking old trailer that it can easily tow).

There are scraps of money involved in all that, but mostly it’s about spending time and effort.

Things I am arguably wealthy in.

In pursuit of the dream of a truly practical modern nomadics.

What does it mean to have a Leo Sun conjunct Pluto in the seventh house?

When these two planets are conjunct, the person’s sense of self isn’t just about ‘being noticed’ – it also carries a profound need to dig deeper, reveal truth, and reshape themselves and others. Their personal charisma can feel almost hypnotic (this includes self-hypnosis btw), and they may experience powerful inner urges to reinvent who they are.

The individual often defines themselves through close relationships. They may feel most alive when they’re deeply connected to another person.

Relationships are likely to be catalysts for major personal change. Partnerships may go through intense cycles of breaking down old patterns and, if they’re lucky, rebuilding stronger ones.

There can be a strong undercurrent of control, manipulation, or power struggles. The native may either attract partners who are equally intense.

All‑or‑nothing love – The person may swing between idealizing a partner (classic Leo optimism) and seeing the darker side (Pluto’s uncovering). Break‑ups can feel catastrophic, but they also serve as profound turning points.

Superficial or shallow connections feel unsatisfying. They crave partners who can handle emotional depth and who aren’t afraid of confronting uncomfortable truths.

Advice: Use the combined Leo‑Pluto energy to co‑create—whether it’s a business venture, artistic piece, or community initiative. Shared purpose can transform potential conflict into collaborative strength.

***

I like dialogue with the AI for a lot of reasons. There is no real way to cite the machine’s contributions. So the whole is my work, at least as much as it is anyone’s. And … changing the text manually and willfully, even whimsically, isn’t a desecration, but just another aspect or stage of the creativity.

Should you be willing to allow that it is in fact Creative.

Which I grant could be debated.

Because my story was true. I was certain of that. And it was extremely important, I felt, for the meaning of our journey to be made absolutely clear.

“They want me to go to Las Vegas at once, and make contact with a Portuguese photographer named Lacerda. He’ll have the details. All I have to do is check into my suite and he’ll seek me out.”

“You’re going to need plenty of legal advice before this thing is over,” he said. “And my first advice is that you should rent a very fast car with no top and get the hell out of L.A. for at least 48 hours.” He shook his head sadly. “This blows my weekend, because naturally I’ll have to go with you – and we’ll have to arm ourselves.”

“Why not?” I said. “If a thing like this is worth doing at all, it’s worth doing right.

***

“No es cierto que la gente deje de perseguir sus sueños porque envejece; envejece porque deja de perseguir sus sueños.” —Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores

***

Can Aliner build a custom‑spec camper for you?
Yes – Aliner will manufacture a camper to the exact specifications you request, but the process is handled through an authorized dealer rather than directly with the factory.

It sounds like good news but the details change that.

First, you have to go through a dealer to even start the process anyway.

Second, the kinds of ‘customizations’ listed are not what matter. For example, you can get the stock microwave removed (instead of never installed in the first place), but even that small change costs hundreds of dollars, rather than resulting in a savings. Meh.

So … the ideal becomes something from a dealer (better equipped in theory to accept a credit card), but just in the ballpark of what I would want (like a Ranger 12), maybe lightly used (for depreciation reasons), and possibly equipped to accomplish some custom work onsite, maybe even pre-sale (although I feel totally comfortable with something like pulling out a microwave).

A reasonable budget range would look something like
17K
to
25K, for something brand-new and quite close to perfect …
not counting what it costs to get my tow vehicle tow-capable (which is another reason to route through a dealer, because they could make that happen and roll it into the same bill).

With that all said, what matters is a pile of freed cash that large. Same as with the Silver domicile.

And what I am potentially willing to do, if anything, to get my dirty mitts on said pile(s).

Meanwhile …

Meditating upon that basic question, with special reference on precisely how I could manage to flip the equity in this existing house into both piles, while maintaining throughout the process a viable place to live in the meantime.

The laundry; the purposeful medicating of the cat.

Walking, every crisp autumnal day, whether I think I’m in the mood for it or not.

And, of course …

This.

Nevada’s Geography

On the bright side, because it’s a good four hours from any major city, there’s Great Basin National Park.

On the downside: The beauty is straight downwind from decades of nuclear bomb testing craters.

We made this a subtly horrible place, on purpose, this time because rooskis so evil.

If you look closely enough, and actually learn about anything around you here, you won’t be able to unsee it.

I can promise you that much from personal experience.

***

The sense of “an instance of great change in affairs” is recorded from mid-15c.

This sense becomes your solemn duty, and you won’t get there by staying in school and graduating into a good job.

Sorry.

For all of us.

***

And, oh, this.

Forward in time from the bombs, back in time from here.

Fear and Loathing, 1971.

I know what my weaknesses are
Probably better than you do
Revolutionary soothsayer
propaganda

The color of blue.
I thought I knew what my weaknesses were, anyway
Then the orange tree blossomed last Saturday.
There was nothing in it but pain for me

I know what can hurt me real bad
And what can’t hurt me anymore
I know how to rise up with the
sun

And I am learning what sleep’s good for
I thought I’d figured out the world and its circular way
And then I saw the sun fall down out of the sky the other day
There was nothing in it but pain for me

Squirrels climbing trees in bloom
Soft yellow light spilling into the room
My favorite records
My favorite books

The people I love
The people I almost love
Light beckoning, wind whistling
Hey hey

Hey hey
Day breaking, river rolling
Hey hey
La la la la la

The fact remains. This is a horrible place.

By This Horrible Place, I mean the brave new techno-world we build at our goodly Jobs every day, and in particular this lovely fake D/democratic pluralism to which we pledge our allegiance each day in our hearts.

I mean Allegiance to this flag, and to the assassinations by which it stands, large and epic, daily and small.

Diversity of the acceptable kind; a native man in a neat ponytail and a business suit trying to beat the oppressor at his own game, opening a casino of his own. That’s fine, because it threatens the systemic capitalist Order not at all.

If he were actually free, oh yes, no mistake, he would be a threat.

So the government Of The People paid mercenaries to sell poxed blankets, and paid them again to exterminate the buffalo by the millions for no reason, except for the brutal rationale which knew that poor pacified and domesticated red cattle ranchers on reservations could not threaten the Order, in the way that the mere existence of nomadic tribal hunters surely could have.

“They drove their pickup trucks out into the desert
Into a ditch along the side of the road
and acted like they were drunk
all the time.”

The truck radios tuned to the faint static of a country music station as the green bottle is passed around in mock tribal solidarity.

No threat, to the Imperium.

This is a horrible place.

Besides alcohol in the ditch, or peddling the gospel of Recovery, what is there to do about it?

Well, we could Lead, like the ponytail casino Indian running for the legislature, or a brave blimp captain.

We could Follow, by driving around big trucks full of raw McDonald’s french fries, or better yet, writing an app that facilitates their purchase, because that pays a lot better, and fosters idle globetrotting.

Or, scripture tells us with a sneer, we could get the hell out of the way.

Whatever that means, out beyond being a hunter with nothing left to hunt, and no way left to feed our families, and provide, like men.

How am I?

How indeed. This is a horrible place.

I feed the strays as best I can. I feed myself, as best I can.

“Just like every other swinging dick in this place–day by motherfucking day.”

I am old, though I refuse to let them make me feel old.

I am useless, except for the fact that I can pull all this together, and tell it to you in a way that maybe helps you see what I see.

For whatever that’s worth.

Which is currently a couple hundred a month in charitable Patreon donations

It will have to do.

Seven and a half hours circadian on my own, from 10:30 to 6. At this early hour it is cold. The indoor thermometer says sixtysix.

***

“When I say I’m gonna do something, I’ll do it. There’s no need to remind me every six months. Thanks.”

***

The Amtrak Station in the Middle of Nowhere

Source

By which I mean: aLiner, and pretty much solely in my head.

NO!
Top 10 reasons you shouldn’t buy an Aliner or A Frame RV trailer

MAYBE
PROS & CONS Of The A-Frame Camper: BEWARE!

YES
Why the Aliner Trailer Reigns Supreme in the Lightweight Camping Trailer Market!

Why did I buy an RV? And why an Aliner?

AND

2026 Aliner Scout Lite Std. / *A-FRAME LIGHTWEIGHT CAMPER WALKTHROUGH*

Interview with the man behind aLiner

Living with an A-Frame Camper – Full Review, Tour & Ownership Tips

Resources

https://aliner.com/aliner-campers/

Refining: Which Model?

2019 Aliner Classic & Ranger 12 (via Princess Craft, which is a TX dealer)

https://www.princesscraft.com/product/folding-pop-up-camper

The Classic is generally nicer; the Ranger weighs less.

In a perfect world I’d drive over to the factory in Texas and have them build me a custom model of minimum weight and only the features I need.

In a worst-case world, they’ve been making them a long time and there are used ones out there for 10K or even less.

AKA, little enough to put on a credit card, at the cost of some pain, and if I’m willing to settle for less than perfect.

While I go on waiting for the other thing, the Better Place, to magically solve itself.

Like a tool.

I’m going away to “Spain”
when I get my money saved

I’m gonna start tomorrow
I’m gonna kick tomorrow

I feel naked
without it

what else to do about it?

Well I mean sure, goddamn right no kings, but that was already decided 250 years ago. We had a revolution.

Alas, the System we put in place instead worked, sorta, for some people, for a while, but centuries later is nothing more than a completely broken farce of so-called democracy. Rallying around it will do nothing but make a few of The People feel marginally better for a little while longer. Until the morning after and the hair of the dog.

Meanwhile, here in the land of contingent anarchy, Kali is mostly keeping her meds down and holiday plans are gettin’ made and I get two nights of sleeping next to someone who isn’t a cat.

Pretty good. The step above just fine.

Sometimes I pout about my truck not having a winch, but listen.

I’d rather have no winch at all than a completely useless, violently expensive one that just exists ornamentally as a pure status symbol.

And that’s even without the new truck insisting it knows better than the driver, and stubbornly turning its whole six-figure self into a brick of immobilized metal, which must be rescued by professionals.

At further expense.

***

Later in the video, I learned that it could possibly be smarter to spend the pout money on one of these.

And keep pining, about the right winch.

I live almost completely without Community, intentional or otherwise, so serious intellectual conversations are rare.

But I had a brief one today, and a title was suggested to me:

Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon, 1930

The link is to a movie adaptation from 2020. I won’t be watching the film or reading the book because I have a serious un-intellectual problem to deal with regarding cat puke.

And also, I don’t need to see/read it, because I already know about the Cataclysm, which is ramping up fast, and I’m even now running short of appetite for singing to you about it like some dimestore Cassandra.

Oh my God, so perfect, right?

Source

Especially since it’s so cheap I could put it on a credit card …

Source

And it pops up to a max interior height of near 7 feet, in the ALiner tradition.

But now I have to let you (me, us) down and tell you why it isn’t perfect.

First, the bed in it is only 72 inches on this brand-new gorgeous model. That’s not big enough.

Second, while I don’t care too much about stealthiness, this is far too obviously a thing for sleeping in, and I don’t want to invite knocks on its door from bored curious LEOs and other half-evolved life forms.

And third … this specific problem is already solved, for even cheaper. I have the Shell I found on the side of the road for free, and with some sweat equity, THAT will be the big-enough, less-obtrusive solution for sleeping in the pickup proper, even before towing anything.

Anyway, all of that is solving problems out of order.

The fixed bed inside the silver city limits comes first.

And second is how to sleep not in the pickup, but with the Subaru.

***

I’m keeping it on my radar regardless.

For the towed Subaru camper, some flavor of ALiner is still my current ideal.

And I’m inclined to start thinking about starting with a base of a trailer, which could hold something like this or be built up from scratch.

I owe, but I am not Owed.

In macroscopic terms I’m breaking even, and there may not be enough left over to bury me, but that’s not my problem because I have no desire to be buried or even to spend the hereafter in an urn of ash.

In some sense I think leaving assets behind would be almost as problematic as leaving debts

and that’s true in both the practical and metaphorical senses.

***

Yesterday was a bad day for the kitty. I spent half the day crafting recipes with her medicines in them, and the other half cleaning up the messes after she puked them all up.

So far this day has gone slightly better.

I’m doing what I can.

There and here.

I’m holding my own food down in the rain, so far, and that’s a blessing.

It all happened pretty much the planned way except for sleeping in the car. And we kilt the bottle of Educated Guess.

It cost me five I didn’t have at the mechanic and another two at the natural grocers. Worth it. Kali is alive still.

I collected a few seconds of video at last, of the harvest moon.

I collected this prophecy of three and three and three.

The leftovers of a storm named Priscilla.

That’s the whole story on a thumbnail and

I’ll do better by some weird metric on the morrow which is all any of us can ever do.

[Redacted] just edited their membership to $200.00.

Thank you!!

***

Come the morning of Monday, I run down to the Oasis to meet the Azure truck very early, and pick up my punkinseeds, et cetera.

With any luck, my October benefit will be in and I can pull a little of it, and go see if I can get more antipuke for Kali because she’s out, and hurting.

Then I should scoop up the little black kitten and run her into Prettytown, but I won’t because the run is far too complicated already.

The recycling. My own meds. The organic shopping. And a pit stop for the RME at R&A …

Among other things.

I believe in the future, I may sleep in my car. My radio tuned to the voice, of a star. Song dogs …

And these old hopes and fears, still at my side.

Solitude is a need just like sleep. Sometimes there is a deficit. That must be caught up.

Preach it Brother Liony.

Sing it uncle Hank.

Holey deficits to the left of me. Choking gluts to the right. Here I am, stuck-

There’s just fine and then there’s the B-side of it. The flip never intended to be a hit, at least not this hard of one.

Tomorrow she’s a Sunday and maybe in the morning I’ll be coming down at last.

Not working for the man is a start, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the end of jobs.

There is still scarce peace to hunt and out beyond that

Freedom to fish for.

She asked how I was doing and I said I was fine and she said:

Are you?

So am I?

***

Yes.

More accurately, I am just fine.

Neither more nor less than.

To the extent that I can remain focused on what Is, I am happy/enough.

Maintaining that focus is much harder than it sounds.

Sometimes I drift reversed in time, into the past, and god knows there’s plenty back there to wallow in all miserable.

Sometimes I drift ahead of myself, hyper, manic, all tangled up in what Might Be, in this or that glorious or at least arguably Better future.

If:then; If:then; but I was told

and I believed, god damn it

Gautama was right. Desire = Suffering.

***

What if, going forward, no one’s promises, expressed or implied, were ever kept, and therefore no chunks of belief littered my road as mortal hazards?

What if the auto mechanics and plumbers and doctors and insurance companies and alma maters could never be fully trusted, because of the capitalist profit motive or any other bad ugly broken reason?

What might life look like if I stopped making promises of my own?

Those are interesting questions and worth considering, but they are also the definition of drifting ahead of myself.

Instead of Being right here in this sorry-ass interstate town state of existence, and accepting it as what’s real.

They say that if you practice something for ten years you automatically become an expert in it.

I don’t believe that is necessarily true, and yet …

I have practiced that long, as of roughly today, and I really am an expert at … this. I can feel it.

For what it’s worth, and whatever it means.

The question of whether my expertise is useful for anything is left as an exercise for the Reader. I’ve heard things which suggest that it is; thank you brother and thank you sister. I’ve also heard the sound of nothing, echoes in the void. Whenever you ask me a question that I’ve already answered fully here

I know you’re not hearing me, and I think:

you say you miss me, and I take it at face value, but the assertion is not actually supported by the evidence.

I think about the man I was when I wrote that first post, and the girl I was with when I wrote it, and the place, and the event that motivated it.

I feel the time and life and sentences flowing at me and through me and past me.

I don’t feel any impulse to stop the flow.

It might be that the flow tributaries into a larger one at some point.

Or not.

I have no announcements to make on the subject upon this occasion. But I mark it, note it anyway and I whisper to myself.

Letting go, letting go, letting go.

We get a few weeks of perfect weather every year, and these are they.

***

I went to the mailbox in the perfect weather and found this.

Ways around the problem exist that don’t have the steep downsides of this one.

But they remain frustratingly elusive and theoretical.

This one is distastefully expensive …

… and … it consists of concrete reality rather than years of vapor, smoke, and mirrors.

and here’s all these Millbrae and San Carlos neat-necktied producers and commuters of America and Steel civilization rushing by with San Francisco Chronicles and green Call-Bulletins not even enough time to be disdainful

till the time of evening supper in homes of the railroad earth when high in the sky the magic stars ride above the following hotshot freight trains

I swim out of it in afternoons of sun hot meditation in my jeans with head on handkerchief
on brakeman’s lantern
or on Book

I look up at blue sky of perfect lostpurity

the switching moves of boxcars in that little alley which is so much like the alleys of Lowell and I hear far off in the sense of coming night that engine
calling our mountains.

nobody knew or far from cared who I was all my life
three thousand five hundred miles from birth
opened up and at last belonged to me
in great america.

***

In spite of what I tell myself about where my primary focus is supposed to be, I am spending all of it on keeping this one cat I love best alive and as healthy as possible.

***

Being domesticated is a fantasy, and a rewarding one.

But in reality, it would require an ungodly amount of time and attention given freely by a tamer.

The kind I give Kali.

It wouldn’t be right or even be workable, to demand it.

So i continue down the wild path alone, as things stand.

In some sense that’s everything important I have to say right now.

But every morning there is a creamy white blank page here asking quietly to be filled, and there is no one to care about that, except me.

It’s like with the poor homeless cats, whether or not they’re sick besides.

I don’t take jobs any more, but fillin’, spillin’, soothin’: it’s as close as I come to having one.

The blank page in turn provides me with raison d’être: “I don’t know how else to matter.”

Ennaways I can’t quit now, less than a week from the tenth anniversary.

After that it would become thinkable.

All I would need to give up on it would be some new and improved fresh reason to be, and matter.

Sounds Simple Enough, heh.

So the ultimate problem was roots in the sewer lines way down deep.

Last night I put 8 ounces of copper sulfate down the shitter, 4 times in a row. Two pounds for a treatment that is supposed to last 6 months. I have eight pounds left, and I hope I never have to use it all because the house sells well before two more years go by.

But of course, I’m not going anywhere

Until I have somewhere better to go.

There are four big primary things to fix, and all of them are five-figure problems, and only the biggest (Somewhere Better To Go) has to happen before I can in clear conscience turn my attention back to the little nagging problems, sell this place, and unlock the equity in it.

Which should provide plenty, to solve the remaining three things.

For now, alongside crafting good daily days, and maintaining, the focus has to be on a doublewide, or a tiny home, or an arched cabin, or giving up on Dorothy and swapping her for a shack within … three miles, this time, of the Co-op–and accomplishing that Silver roof with the least possible expenditure.

And, should there be no way to do that short of selling myself back into wage slavery, then giving up, and settling.

For what I already have.

Right here.

Which is eight pounds of copper sulfate.

Basically the pricetag of a “BetterPlace”/Silver Home, with or without counting what I spent on the lot I have, is 100K.

And for the Camper/mobileSanctuary, 50K.

(Wiping all extant debt is a number in between.)

I have various half-baked schemes that would get me both, for as little as half of that money, but none of them are a sure thing as of this writing. For a hot minute I thought the Durango guy could fix it all for even less, but that would be very dependent on the interpretations of the zoning gods, and having to trust in them is no happy prospect.

These five-figure numbers are my focus.

Perhaps that will explain why three figures, say for a toilet or an ignition switch, are not.

I don’t know of any simpler way to say it.

Trying to figure out simpler ways is costing me a lot of weariness, here in the day to every day, and what’s worse is that I know in my heart that narrative complication is not the thing stalling progress.

So I think I’ll stop doing that, for my own good, and maybe just perseverate in replying with a link to this post, over and over if necessary, whenever the subject is raised, and get on with the business of better mornings here in the hole.

“Even I make this video because I don’t know how else to matter.”

The I is an essayist who tries to matter anyway by telling the story of why his favorite movie is a Planet of the Apes movie.

That’s a hard sell of course. He comes near to the vicinity of pulling it off anyway.

For surprisingly similar reasons, my own ‘favorite movie’ can be officially listed as:

On the Beach (1959)

I doubt it matters.

But I spill you these sooths because I don’t know how else, etc.

***

Elsewhere:

Israel Finally Gets The South Park Treatment

So long as you remain buckled in on the doomed ugly Izzy bus, I will continue to pray for your soul.

Just head down there and see if they’ll run the same card again for another few hunnert.

Thanks, but that’s not happening.

This is! (insert heart emoji here to express all due gratitude)

And this.

And still not this.

Which did, admittedly and inexplicably, jump back up over two hundred thousand.

Which … makes more sense.

And leaves things back at the same square one where they have been all along, roots and all.

That said, there are 10 homes in Silver on Zillow this morning with at least one existing bedroom, for less than 100K.

And that, not the pickup ignition, IS the priority.

This is the rule, about caring. There are exceptions.

She spends more and more time in her safe space, closer to the sky.

Ultimately making art is scary
and there are all sorts of ways to
respond to that fear.

The same thing is true about Oppression.

***

What you see me as is different from what I am.

The same is true for what I see myself as.

2-3 miles from the co-op, 1584 square feet, plus an acre.

Why only 125K? I don’t know. But that’s roughly the price of a new doublewide to toss onto Dorothy.