I have just smoked one of Fyfe's ancient dried out nugs I found on the floor. Or maybe a piece of carpet that had taken on an illusory appearance of biological lushness somehow, and so taken several of the more unpleasant cancer fade-out years off the end of my life in the smoking. It doesn't matter. My mother enrolled me in North Platte Catholic schools when she effectively inherited my grandmother's job as cafeteria head there. She asked me if I wanted to and I was ambivalent. My child self was confused by the question's very existence looking back. So she acted on her own to put me in St. Pats for reasons of heritage and appearance, she's an alumnus herself, and because North Platte is frontier enough for the difference between Protestant white people and Catholic white people to still matter in some ways. I regret not objecting now. I read Paul's Basquiat books and look at his own paintings and it makes me think of how the scratchy neon cartoon look as of the late 80s/early90's as filtered through mid-afternoon public television still informs my being and always will if I live a thousand years. I think of my dim memories as a little kid in public school, how that seemed to give me a slightly better 5th hand connection to the coastal pulse of the nations' actual mainstream. A sense of civic being maybe, a sense of fellow being based more on common downtown experience than on common blood and culture. Perhaps that's what right wingers hate about public schools, though to casually say that is to ascribe them with a superhuman self-awareness as well of course as a deliberately evil motive convenient to my own stance. I can't really say. All I know is that a Lexington Latino at Occupy Lincoln, (rather shady sort truth be told, loosed out of prison and dumped in camp by the LPD as passive-aggressive sabotage) told me that I seemed like a guy who could be comfortable in both a big city and a small town and that's so. A blockful of squat townhouse yards in Denver KC or Chicago has always felt as natively familiar to me as twenty miles of pavement through the Sandhills like the fetal twin brother that I ate is talking to me or something.
I like Rod Stewart's old songs though I'm sure I'd hate the guy if I met him. That's are there is to a "guilty pleasure" about a particular song or artist isn't it? I think that "Love Isn't Always on Time" song is more popular now than at the time of its release. Or at least I don't recall having ever heard it until I had already graduated UNL and now it's on classic radio more routinely than Kanye is on modern top 40. Be it so because the guitar on that one is legit, and from Toto too go figure, the same lamers who did that dentist-office ass "Africa" song.
I started smoking weed at a moderately young age, 15. Mexican brick by necessity. "Kine bud" was anything else, whatever cultivated shit that somehow made its way to NP from California by way of Denver, generally twice the price per weight. I was only moderately one of "those guys" about smoking weed. I would rock a tie-dye every now and then but not like every day. I never pretended that the Grateful Dead were any better than ok though I did pretend to myself that that the Kottenmouth Kings were ipso facto good because they rapped about smoking weed even though deep down I always knew that they not only sucked but superlatively sucked. I did have a lava lamp but what of that? What went wrong in our culture that led us to pretend that appreciation for the inherent sweetness of lava lamps requires drugs? I never did get a pot leaf poster, let alone a pot leaf tattoo on my waist like a homegirl I had sex with once. She lives in Kearney with a kid now the last I heard. To think upon it now I don't think I have ever deeply identified with or loved the things or people that give me pleasure because I've always experienced pleasure in a disassociated, third-person sort of way, especially when having sex.
My most comparatively serious relationship was with Tiffany during my college dropout years. We moved to an apartment down the street from Wesleyan and looking back I think I just wanted a rentmate who was willing to move to the city and was a fairly decent friend who happened to have a vulva. That seems crass or even downright evil I realize but it's how it is. In these times I would wake up at three PM have two cups of coffee a slice of Casey's pizza and ten minutes of the World Herald for breakfast before it was back to the Barton's "rum" and brickweed at four PM. I enjoy orgasm to the same degree as a moderately chilled rum & orange juice I suppose. Those extended multi-sex sessions with that most people around me describe as the highlight of their lives were a dreadful chore to me like family church functions as a kid. There's something within myself especially then but even now to some degree that wants to remain a sort of closeted not out of fear as being found out for whatever but for its own sake. I've never considered sex to be any more physically gross than what the body does anyway. It's the abstract of being desired by another, of intensely existing in any other mind except my own and thus not totally owning myself, of "we" having a common feeling together, of "we" existing as we. That's what repels. Others speak of breaking down the wall between themselves and someone else as if nothing could be a more obvious and universal Need that of course I must feel to, so they say. When a date ask if I'm willing to make a commitment my answer of "commitment to what" is usually enough to end it right then and there. Tiffany had been abused as a child. Tiffany needed Lithium to live. Tiffany thought I hated her when I took my hours long walks to avoid her when it was just someone else/Others in general that I had overdosed on and she was always the one I hated least of all. Money got tight. We took in a another North Platte kid named Caleb, even more fucked than either of us, (Entire orders of the multiplication table beyond lovable eccentric) into meth well beyond even the normal degree of bad. I would come home from my job of the week to find six gang associates shooting up in my bathroom. Tiffany complained that she couldn't walk naked through the house like she could when it was just her and me. I didn't like her doing that when it was just her and me. I would have like to have been a billionaire so I could be naked alone and never talk forever but I didn't like her being in my kitchen while I cooked my supper waiting to prepare whatever it was that pleased herself. I still don't know what her favorite food is. I don't she had one. She never did eat enough. She's back in North Platte with a fellow named Reuben now last I heard.
I think I could fake a relationship a little better now. I've learned how to better camouflage the fact of being a schizoid solipsist with no human core as such. I know better than to tell my mom out loud that it's pointless for me to have kids; because the permanent shutdown of my own brain shall entail the end of all reality, and whether there's anyone afterwards who remembers and loves me well what kind of fucking moron could possibly think that matters oh right sorry mom my bad.
Saddam Hussein's execution is an early example of viral internet experience. It's very clear that the man knew all along that he'd be going out like this (All Along as in since childhood that is) and that he'd been practicing his defiant death for a long time. I say this only because I've been waiting to bring up this ingeniously witty observation in conversation and realize now that the chance will probably never naturally flow up in natural speech. Why all of you insist on pretending to think that you "exist" for any other reason but to set up such lines for me I don't know.
Right across the pedestrian bridge over the tracks at 19th and Holdrege is a truck that's been in a wreck probably severe enough to have killed its riders. The windshield is three quarters smashed in and the interior has been on fire. The workers at the construction place on the block use it for storage: crowbars heavy-duty gloves etc. The windows are again non-existent mostly. You could probably rob the thing for either sale or personal use without consequence.
I know I'm not the only one who finds it striking that the near-south side of Lincoln is basically twenty first century urban in character, while the near north-sides character does indeed fit the "overgrown small town" label that some Omahans would attach to us. The pattern of auto machine and rail shops along Cornhusker with their largely white blue-collar (though also Middle Eastern blue-collar for the past quarter century) workers living in the neighborhoods behind. Their familiar family dramas of drugs, relationships gone wrong with a kid in the middle, the bonds of love, the pangs but also invigorating feels of hate, betrayal, the hazy narcotic feeling of an imagined golden past with no stress, the cultural affinity for fast cars, wrestling and of course football to state the elephant. A demographic pattern that begins right there at 19th and Holdrege and then follows the Burlington line northwest all the way to the corn on the east end of Havelock at around 74th or so. This is after all the part of town that Omahans' see the most of; the capitals' rail-toothed economic hard calorie eater physically facing Omaha and the greater East; so there are reasons beyond delusions of Cosmo grandeur for why some Omahans may see Lincoln as no more than the largest in a nesting doll chain of increasingly regional hubs as one heads out onto the High Plains. And the next westward signed destination point on I-80 is after all the reliable Jersey-joke next door for the one before. The kids in North Platte would laugh at the meth-hicks of Sidney while Kearney kids laughed at us for the same while Grand Island kids....
About ten or eleven years,ago, when I was still an undergrad a group of black kids called the Dudley Street Boys, (a self-defining handle. They were adolescents who lived on the north side street one block down from Holdrege) took a ride all the way down too SouthPointe to steal guns from the Scheels there. A few weeks later they got caught. They called themselves a gang and they did after all have a name and commit a gun-related crime together so there I suppose you have it. As I recall a few of the guns they stole were later used in murders robberies etc. on one coast or another. That's what guns are for and I'm sure that the same thing would have happened if they'd been bought up front over the Scheels counter.
About four years ago I got caught in a summer storm while walking and a group of white dudes drinking on the porch near commanded me to join them. This was along 22nd by all the sketchy auto detailing shops etc by the defunct Mopac railroad. The white dudes were sketchy too. We drank Busch's and smoked weed out of one of those old school little metal pipes that make every strain taste shitty. We watched a compilation of police chase videos on Fox. One of them, a prototypical "big" bubba you might say, was conventionally employed as a security guard. The rest didn't say how they made their cash directly though from what they did say I got the impression that they were among those half-thief/half-scavengers who trowled through the neighboring alleys looking for metal electronics etc. They were racist in a very directly spoken way, at least to me with my blue eyes and the Husker shirt that I remember probably too perfectly to have actually been real now that I think of it. They referred to the black kids in the neighborhood as "niglets". They spoke of the Dudley Street boys in the tones of some menacing dread but never mentioned anything particular, beyond the well known fact of their having jacked a box store out in the burbs, that made the Dudleys such a dread horror. Even so these guys clearly got a weird sense of personal validation from the existence of black kids who had committed a crime and had a common name. It makes me recall reactions to black athletes who did things they shouldn't have. Micheal Vick, Adrian Peterson or even OJ Simpson. Not the disapproval in itself to what were indisputably bad things to do but the very apparent indulgence in the intensity of that disapproval, the insinuation of "Hah I knew it". The rain stopped after an hour, and when I confessed to having forgotten one of the dudes names while leaving he reminded me that it was Randy and looked mad enough to fight.
I had a friend named Matt Moore in college. Cool bro, solid liberal, liked to drink and smoke and trip a lot. Aspiring Entomologist from West Omaha family money. Got mad at me when I left the tropical cockroach I'd had to care for as part of my token science credit class out to die in the prairie winter. He said that it wasn't like one of those nasty cockroaches and I said "oh so it's of those high end cockroaches then? Like the Lexus of cockroaches?" Matt said he was surprised that the Dudley Street boys were intelligent enough to pull the robbery off. Which is to say that he was surprised that black kids were smart enough to rob a Scheels and get caught. Matt could be racist in both a casual, half-conscious and yet startlingly direct way like that sometimes. His girlfriend in college Mari was Czech like I am, from the Bohemian majority country to the west of Wahoo. She was getting into the bug game too, had herself precociously together in a way that Matt just didn't. She threw me a going away party (hah) before I moved to Chicago that was really nice. Then a couple years after that she was instantly killed at age 24 or 5 when her sober but not-yet fully awake brother missed a stop sign on a Oregon vacation & her side of the car was hit by a semi at highway speed. It was three months before I learned. I had seen that her Facebook page had suddenly become full of the sort of exaggerated praise usually given to toddlers, especially in regards to her just released master's thesis which she got an A on as I recall, but I didn't pay enough attention to glean that something was "Up" from that.
I close with my thoughts on Mrs. Beach, my grade school music teacher during my short stint in public school. Mrs. Beach was warm, encouraging, motherly, a beloved figure in the North Platte community. I also recall how she in effect military-drafted us on too all those God Damn Christmas plays, Wizard of Oz adaptations etc, teaching us to pimp cute fro grown ups pleasure in our childhood as our first act of primal submission to established authority. I recall what an exaggerated, protest-too-much persona she was to think back on it; that perhaps the small town tendency towards conservative conformity is largely explained by individuals being compelled to fill a overly generic social niche though really I probably just overanalyze here yet again. Fuck that Beach anyhow is all I meant to say.
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Wednesday, August 17, 2016
Egregious
In Kansas identical twin boys were once forced to fight to the death
barehanded. The winner would eat the loser’s brain, be granted two wives, and
appointed sheriff of whatever county he chose while his mother sang the old
Mayflower hymn "Life is the Seed of Death and we Come to Sow anon
anon." The practice was banned in 1983. No Kansas Democrat has been
elected to statewide office since. "Old Twin Killer Two Wives"
remains common slang for "sheriff" throughout the Great Plains.
No culture is innocent of the Martyr's fallacy. That old movie "Quills" for example has it all wrong. The Marquis de Sade actually lived as long and comfortably as most Marquises and died in his sleep not quite a day after having buttsex with his teenage girlfriend. So I've read anyhow. I haven't really looked into the sources for this and can only guess that one who'd have Sade for a boyfriend would be the sort to write a thousand pages on "The Last Buttsex of Sade". "The 120 Days of Sodom" is ridiculous by the way and I don't mean in the sense of a good basketball player. It may feel heroic to presume that anything conventionally shocking must be liberating by definition but the actual work of Burroughs lower end Von Trier or Pink Flamingoes etc., is just a deadening stream of shit piled on top of shit literally or otherwise. That one movie from Europe I saw for example; either Spain or France I'm pretty sure. A teenage boy comes across his newly dead father's porn stash and responds to this discovery by throwing the mags into a trashcan, pissing on them, masturbating on them, (not to them by any means just on them) and then dousing it all in butane and setting it alight. The kids mother flirts with him repeatedly while referring to herself as "a bitch and a slut." Later a group of men at a touristy restaurant have a spontaneous jerkoff contest. No one asks them to so much as keep the noise down. At last the kids mom french-kisses him while fondling his junk and then immediately slits her own throat. Roll credits. One may compare all this shit to Herzog, for example, who while intentionally shocking himself also has something to say about authority, masculinity, the illusion of triumphing over nature vs. the just as illusory romantization of it and how all of this blends together to make people stupid.
The Chili Peppers' "One Hot Minute" isn't as bad as people say. "Aeroplane" is one of their best songs straight up and overall I'd say this desk is the best of their Currently on Drugs Right Now work. Most people haven't heard a bit of their leering, dope sweat bro music from before Mother's Milk and this is for the best.
I would trace my immunity to bad trips to a point at age twenty or so when I watched Apocalypse now alone on mushrooms. It was orgasm-level stimulation as you may well assume and unqualifiedly positive. After the movie I went outside just to be outside. Across a church yard from my apartment there was a pink house with purple window frames where a woman in this I swear to God Ms. Gingerbread style getup was watering her plants. I stared at her and her house for a time, maybe an hour. Then I went home and watched Apocalypse Now alone on Mushrooms again.
No culture is innocent of the Martyr's fallacy. That old movie "Quills" for example has it all wrong. The Marquis de Sade actually lived as long and comfortably as most Marquises and died in his sleep not quite a day after having buttsex with his teenage girlfriend. So I've read anyhow. I haven't really looked into the sources for this and can only guess that one who'd have Sade for a boyfriend would be the sort to write a thousand pages on "The Last Buttsex of Sade". "The 120 Days of Sodom" is ridiculous by the way and I don't mean in the sense of a good basketball player. It may feel heroic to presume that anything conventionally shocking must be liberating by definition but the actual work of Burroughs lower end Von Trier or Pink Flamingoes etc., is just a deadening stream of shit piled on top of shit literally or otherwise. That one movie from Europe I saw for example; either Spain or France I'm pretty sure. A teenage boy comes across his newly dead father's porn stash and responds to this discovery by throwing the mags into a trashcan, pissing on them, masturbating on them, (not to them by any means just on them) and then dousing it all in butane and setting it alight. The kids mother flirts with him repeatedly while referring to herself as "a bitch and a slut." Later a group of men at a touristy restaurant have a spontaneous jerkoff contest. No one asks them to so much as keep the noise down. At last the kids mom french-kisses him while fondling his junk and then immediately slits her own throat. Roll credits. One may compare all this shit to Herzog, for example, who while intentionally shocking himself also has something to say about authority, masculinity, the illusion of triumphing over nature vs. the just as illusory romantization of it and how all of this blends together to make people stupid.
The Chili Peppers' "One Hot Minute" isn't as bad as people say. "Aeroplane" is one of their best songs straight up and overall I'd say this desk is the best of their Currently on Drugs Right Now work. Most people haven't heard a bit of their leering, dope sweat bro music from before Mother's Milk and this is for the best.
I would trace my immunity to bad trips to a point at age twenty or so when I watched Apocalypse now alone on mushrooms. It was orgasm-level stimulation as you may well assume and unqualifiedly positive. After the movie I went outside just to be outside. Across a church yard from my apartment there was a pink house with purple window frames where a woman in this I swear to God Ms. Gingerbread style getup was watering her plants. I stared at her and her house for a time, maybe an hour. Then I went home and watched Apocalypse Now alone on Mushrooms again.
Tuesday, July 19, 2016
Affect is All There Is
The US isn't actually filled to the brim with creationists who dropped out of grade school to go to church more. I know that's what we claim out loud on surveys but never mind. Fundamentalists have influence beyond their numbers, generally white and well-to-do. They are also of course very loud and because of this have planted a common idea that fundamentalism is the historic Christian default. I emphasize that they have not 'brainwashed' anyone but have planted an idea of what's normal. Humans do not commonly give much thought to religion. By that I don't mean to say that no one who gives it any thought could believe. Their are genius believers. I mean that it is actually quite rare for any culture at any time to be overflowing with piety. (Iraq has the same percentage of avowed atheists as we do for example.) We've been led to believe that this has been the civilizational norm until just yesterday but no, it never was. We know that the culturally prevailing religion we happen to have is "normal" so we "believe" it; and it's been planted in our heads that creationism is elemental to the normal religion and thus to being normal. Still in the end we mainly sleep in on Sundays and of course we know that there is a far less profound difference between apes and ourselves than between apes and jellyfish.
Homophobia and hostility to abortion are indeed the historic norm in Christianity, but were not considered to be all that vital to it for nineteen hundred years. It is was only after these positions came under public challenge that they suddenly became Very Important. But let's talk about facial hair now. The dogmatically bearded Greeks and the dogmatically shaved Romans. The facial hair that was countercultural in the 1960's or hipster today was standard for the mecha-WASP presidents of the 1880's. The idea that "our" customs are eternal because they are exclusively ideal or otherwise inarguably good. We must all know that this is shit deep down.
I've met the Kline who had the corner of 11th and G named after him. He was a good man or maybe a serial killer. He was civil to me for the thirty seconds we interacted and then he did other things for a few years and then he died. The block is now Lincoln's main Latino hub. Those who may be existentially unsettled by the very existence of such a thing need to understand that it doesn't matter and I mean that in the plainest possible sense. Kline is dead and there is only one degree of Not I. Your first-born son conjoined twin or partner you are cumming with right now are all the same degree of Not I as an anteater. The Unicameral man for my hometown wondered aloud "what's going to happen to Nebraska if we keep letting all these (ILLEGAL!!!) immigrants in. What's going to happen to Nebraska is that it is going to go dark for you and me and then stay dark. There shall be no taking America back but it will take us back. America will eat us. Wyuka will eat us. After that somebody else, whoever else, shall have not our thing but their own.
When I reflect upon the motives towards bigotry, especially the brutal things done to prevent "miscegenation," I conclude that the fire is driven not by fear of the unthinkable but by knowledge one finds intolerable. The knowledge that of course white and black could combine sexually socially or in any other way whenever we like. The knowledge that ethnicity is a byproduct of archaic transportation, that our ancestors fell in love or lust with whoever was in the same place and that's it. There is no self-definition to be found here, neither any transcendence of temporary self. There are only artificial We's. We are of no natural particular kind that we can continue existing through after personal death or of any intrinsically good kind that we can feel assured of being good through after we personally fail.
There have been several efforts to classify humankind by "race" basic units larger than a nation but smaller than the species itself. The lines are drawn by bigoted criteria though sometimes rational ones as well. But the paradigms still never of course quite work and never will. One such recentish attempt was Samuel Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking World Order" Huntington divides our species into nine basic civilizations. He uses NATO membership to mark the border between "The West" and Russish "Orthodox" civilization. He distinguishes Latin America as separate from The West but not Iberia. China and India are given their own realms which makes sense. Also Japan for I don't know why, of course they're different from the Chinese but more so than the Poles vis-a-vis the Scottish? Israel is grouped within the Middle East even though they quite famously stick out. Huntington states that the Middle East is simply wired for hostility towards the West. He states the Muslim countries have a history of making war upon their neighbors; which is of course true; and something that the man seems to truly consider more remarkable than the English making was on the Scottish and the Irish and the French or the French making war on England Spain Germany and Belgium all alike or the US marching on Toronto and Mexico City both in turn. Muslim culture is unique for wearing clothes and eating food.
It can be just as easily argued, because it is true, that Europe, indelibly Europeanized former colonies and the Middle East are all of the same 'cultural continent' or phylum. The Mediterranean can be crossed in a not-very-technical boat, to say nothing of the Bosporus. It is the Sahara, Siberia and the Himalayas that marked the effective end of a world for a formatively long time. "We" have the same civilizational roots in Egypt and Mesopotamia and being "all children of Abraham man" is only one sign of this out of many. Before the one true jealous god there were analogues between Greek and Babylonian gods. If anything one says about the inherent barbarism of the Middle East happens to be true then so must we be inherently barbarous. There is no way around that and there are those with cause to think so. I am a Caucasian in the middle of America; not to put too fine a point on it.
Homophobia and hostility to abortion are indeed the historic norm in Christianity, but were not considered to be all that vital to it for nineteen hundred years. It is was only after these positions came under public challenge that they suddenly became Very Important. But let's talk about facial hair now. The dogmatically bearded Greeks and the dogmatically shaved Romans. The facial hair that was countercultural in the 1960's or hipster today was standard for the mecha-WASP presidents of the 1880's. The idea that "our" customs are eternal because they are exclusively ideal or otherwise inarguably good. We must all know that this is shit deep down.
I've met the Kline who had the corner of 11th and G named after him. He was a good man or maybe a serial killer. He was civil to me for the thirty seconds we interacted and then he did other things for a few years and then he died. The block is now Lincoln's main Latino hub. Those who may be existentially unsettled by the very existence of such a thing need to understand that it doesn't matter and I mean that in the plainest possible sense. Kline is dead and there is only one degree of Not I. Your first-born son conjoined twin or partner you are cumming with right now are all the same degree of Not I as an anteater. The Unicameral man for my hometown wondered aloud "what's going to happen to Nebraska if we keep letting all these (ILLEGAL!!!) immigrants in. What's going to happen to Nebraska is that it is going to go dark for you and me and then stay dark. There shall be no taking America back but it will take us back. America will eat us. Wyuka will eat us. After that somebody else, whoever else, shall have not our thing but their own.
When I reflect upon the motives towards bigotry, especially the brutal things done to prevent "miscegenation," I conclude that the fire is driven not by fear of the unthinkable but by knowledge one finds intolerable. The knowledge that of course white and black could combine sexually socially or in any other way whenever we like. The knowledge that ethnicity is a byproduct of archaic transportation, that our ancestors fell in love or lust with whoever was in the same place and that's it. There is no self-definition to be found here, neither any transcendence of temporary self. There are only artificial We's. We are of no natural particular kind that we can continue existing through after personal death or of any intrinsically good kind that we can feel assured of being good through after we personally fail.
There have been several efforts to classify humankind by "race" basic units larger than a nation but smaller than the species itself. The lines are drawn by bigoted criteria though sometimes rational ones as well. But the paradigms still never of course quite work and never will. One such recentish attempt was Samuel Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking World Order" Huntington divides our species into nine basic civilizations. He uses NATO membership to mark the border between "The West" and Russish "Orthodox" civilization. He distinguishes Latin America as separate from The West but not Iberia. China and India are given their own realms which makes sense. Also Japan for I don't know why, of course they're different from the Chinese but more so than the Poles vis-a-vis the Scottish? Israel is grouped within the Middle East even though they quite famously stick out. Huntington states that the Middle East is simply wired for hostility towards the West. He states the Muslim countries have a history of making war upon their neighbors; which is of course true; and something that the man seems to truly consider more remarkable than the English making was on the Scottish and the Irish and the French or the French making war on England Spain Germany and Belgium all alike or the US marching on Toronto and Mexico City both in turn. Muslim culture is unique for wearing clothes and eating food.
It can be just as easily argued, because it is true, that Europe, indelibly Europeanized former colonies and the Middle East are all of the same 'cultural continent' or phylum. The Mediterranean can be crossed in a not-very-technical boat, to say nothing of the Bosporus. It is the Sahara, Siberia and the Himalayas that marked the effective end of a world for a formatively long time. "We" have the same civilizational roots in Egypt and Mesopotamia and being "all children of Abraham man" is only one sign of this out of many. Before the one true jealous god there were analogues between Greek and Babylonian gods. If anything one says about the inherent barbarism of the Middle East happens to be true then so must we be inherently barbarous. There is no way around that and there are those with cause to think so. I am a Caucasian in the middle of America; not to put too fine a point on it.
Friday, June 24, 2016
Attention All Planets of The Solar Federation....
I've been reading a bit on Reagan's ruinous policy or rather attitude towards mental health infrastructure. The way he gutted funding as both CA governor and president; leaving those who were medically known as unable to bootstrap themselves out on the streets to fucking ay try to anyhow. Reagan was fixed on the idea that there was no true mental illness as such but only disobedience. It stands to reason that a conservative mind, one with an especially deep need for predictability and control, would be loathe to accept the existence of illusions from within that can't be controlled. And anyhow Marx did say something about false consciousness once. There's the fire escape. It is wrong to suggest such a thing as one's brain unchoosingly misfiring because Marx.
Javert, the narc from Les Miserables for whom 'all crime was in the foremost rebellion.' (quoted from imprecise memory) The guy who killed himself rather than accept the unavoidable need for gray morals. Real-life authoritarians do not generally do that and it was too much. Too Much is just what Les Mis is as a story. It is all-caps 19th century ROMANTIC. Everybody is just more more and suicide is the go-to option for anyone who feels any degree of bad at all. A dude on the barricades giving an impromptu six-page speech on the glories of martyrdom. Still it does have its points. If crime is primarily disobedience, if the very existence of murder rape or general mayhem serve as proof that these crimes are over-lightly punished then in theory at least there is a clean formula and structure for placing all fires of the human heart under control. That is the authoritarian appeal which poisons our real-world politics. It is the appeal of 'toughness' for the sake of toughness. The convenient notion that the pleasurable rush of having just won a fight is in itself of vital social benefit.
Political correctness is no more than the utterly practical knowledge that if I were a singer who put out an album called "Control" and the cover was me in a militarish costume staring you down the message conveyed would be very different from Janet Jackson's.
My stepdad is in Vietnam. That much is established fact. He says that the reds shot his plane down and captured him three different times and that he escaped three different times or was it four? I don't think so. He says that on his return to the Seattle airport he was accosted by a hippie who called him a baby killer until a fatherly wise sheriff intervened. Bull Fucking Shit Dad. The John Wayneish tone that he gave the sheriff was I don't know pathetic and awesome at the same time right? He says that after the war he worked as a sheriff's deputy in interior Oregon and personally killed a pair of infamous murderers and thieves. I don't think so again but hell maybe. He says that on 9/11 he was across the river in Jersey when 'hell came'. Nope. I happened to be home in North Platte on that day and he was the one who woke me up to tell me. I recall him trying to make talk with me in banal slogans while I ignored him trying to gather this thing that I had slept through. He said something about "America having learned a lesson" meaning, so far as I can guess, that the very fact this thing happened was proof that we had been softhearted and blind.
Conservatives take it on faith that of course they are stronger more vigilant and in all ways Just Better on national security than the left. But I remember 1999. I remember that right-wingers, my stepdad included, were no more concerned with Al-Qaeda than anyone else. In their eyes the threat we were foolishly ignoring was Russia or China. Even so it is a crucial plank of Dad's self-esteem to view himself as manfully protective where others are naive. I would even say that he would rather die and get it over with than accept that there is an inherent mortal vulnerability that cannot be escaped with any level of power strength or courage. The man Needs to believe that the possibility of the US being harmed is not a given but only ever explained by our own failure of courage. He Needs to he is perpetually wise to a dire and immediate threat that the nation is perpetually ignorant of, and gives no thought to the simple impossibility of national survival if this were so. He is of course a thoroughgoing member of the 'guns for everyone everywhere' crowd. He spoke in disapproval of my grandpa 'giving up' and becoming fatalistic just because he was an 83-year old with stage IV cancer. Only Russian poets would ever die if we had the degree of willpower over death that this man 'believes' we do.
The US is not more intrinsically chauvinistic than other countries. We just haven't been well and truly kicked in the ass for it yet. (Unless you count our civil war, which I definitely should come to think of it. Call it 'not enough yet' then.) Our jingoistic mania after 9/11 has been compared to that of Europe at the start of World War I; which some people alive at the time have described as 'like being in love'. In Paris during August of 1914 a man in a cafe was beaten to death for not joining in a spontaneous signing of "La Marseillaise". He may have approved of the war for all anyone will ever know but he didn't join in the song because it was a coffee shop and who the fuck does that? The man died for failing to realize that he had woken up to a world now operating by Monty Python rules. If national survival magically depends on our personal approval of a conflict then suddenly we are Very Important. There is no longer a 'lightness of being' but a fucking epic gravity to everything about us and all that we do. If one buys into the idea that "we" are characters in history's climactic chapter than we are never alone. We can be constantly larger-than-life emotional with everyone around us; as if everyone were everyone else's mother child or lover. Accepting all of this as nonsense is theoretically easy. One only needs to go back to seeing oneself as a small person aging to death quietly with no masterpiece opera soundtrack behind them.
Our response to 9/11 and defeat in Vietnam has also been compared to Germany's "stabbed in the back myth" used to convince themselves that their loss in World War I was a matter of their own controlling. We and Germany are both rich countries whose people are accustomed to having our way. Getting what we want is How The World Works to our own eyes. Beyond final illness many white Americans need never face any more jarring reminder that this isn't so than a Democrat in the White House. Even this is too jarring to handle for some. We could do worse so far as empires go. We don't stack every head of a conquered city into a pyramid or crucify people. Still being rich and strong without being dicks about may simply be beyond what the human spirit can do. A rich man's dog doesn't care if it deserves its feather bed or not. Humans are obsessed with justice. We cannot stand to view the good things in our life as plain luck, let alone as gained by foul means on our behalf however far personally removed from ourselves. If white Americans are not the light of the world than what are we? Tyrants? Decadents? If we are not the eternal standard for what Americans are and should be than what? Country songs about how country the singer is and how being country is by far the greatest of all human glories. One Goodoldboysploitation reality show after another. From the nineties through today we have grown first obsessed and then outright manic about having our identities affirmed. We demand it from everyone and everything.
We greatly overestimate the level of control required for survival and basic comfort. We are liver-poisoned by our privilege. Most people of the world recognize, however grudgingly, the need to assess where they are and take whatever step they think fitting with no promise of success. Not because they are closer-to-the-earth wiser but because they just have to. This crucial survival skill has atrophied within ourselves. There was once a crash-test driver who needed years to truly learn in his muscles that gripping the wheel on impact would only hurt him worse.
Javert, the narc from Les Miserables for whom 'all crime was in the foremost rebellion.' (quoted from imprecise memory) The guy who killed himself rather than accept the unavoidable need for gray morals. Real-life authoritarians do not generally do that and it was too much. Too Much is just what Les Mis is as a story. It is all-caps 19th century ROMANTIC. Everybody is just more more and suicide is the go-to option for anyone who feels any degree of bad at all. A dude on the barricades giving an impromptu six-page speech on the glories of martyrdom. Still it does have its points. If crime is primarily disobedience, if the very existence of murder rape or general mayhem serve as proof that these crimes are over-lightly punished then in theory at least there is a clean formula and structure for placing all fires of the human heart under control. That is the authoritarian appeal which poisons our real-world politics. It is the appeal of 'toughness' for the sake of toughness. The convenient notion that the pleasurable rush of having just won a fight is in itself of vital social benefit.
Political correctness is no more than the utterly practical knowledge that if I were a singer who put out an album called "Control" and the cover was me in a militarish costume staring you down the message conveyed would be very different from Janet Jackson's.
My stepdad is in Vietnam. That much is established fact. He says that the reds shot his plane down and captured him three different times and that he escaped three different times or was it four? I don't think so. He says that on his return to the Seattle airport he was accosted by a hippie who called him a baby killer until a fatherly wise sheriff intervened. Bull Fucking Shit Dad. The John Wayneish tone that he gave the sheriff was I don't know pathetic and awesome at the same time right? He says that after the war he worked as a sheriff's deputy in interior Oregon and personally killed a pair of infamous murderers and thieves. I don't think so again but hell maybe. He says that on 9/11 he was across the river in Jersey when 'hell came'. Nope. I happened to be home in North Platte on that day and he was the one who woke me up to tell me. I recall him trying to make talk with me in banal slogans while I ignored him trying to gather this thing that I had slept through. He said something about "America having learned a lesson" meaning, so far as I can guess, that the very fact this thing happened was proof that we had been softhearted and blind.
Conservatives take it on faith that of course they are stronger more vigilant and in all ways Just Better on national security than the left. But I remember 1999. I remember that right-wingers, my stepdad included, were no more concerned with Al-Qaeda than anyone else. In their eyes the threat we were foolishly ignoring was Russia or China. Even so it is a crucial plank of Dad's self-esteem to view himself as manfully protective where others are naive. I would even say that he would rather die and get it over with than accept that there is an inherent mortal vulnerability that cannot be escaped with any level of power strength or courage. The man Needs to believe that the possibility of the US being harmed is not a given but only ever explained by our own failure of courage. He Needs to he is perpetually wise to a dire and immediate threat that the nation is perpetually ignorant of, and gives no thought to the simple impossibility of national survival if this were so. He is of course a thoroughgoing member of the 'guns for everyone everywhere' crowd. He spoke in disapproval of my grandpa 'giving up' and becoming fatalistic just because he was an 83-year old with stage IV cancer. Only Russian poets would ever die if we had the degree of willpower over death that this man 'believes' we do.
The US is not more intrinsically chauvinistic than other countries. We just haven't been well and truly kicked in the ass for it yet. (Unless you count our civil war, which I definitely should come to think of it. Call it 'not enough yet' then.) Our jingoistic mania after 9/11 has been compared to that of Europe at the start of World War I; which some people alive at the time have described as 'like being in love'. In Paris during August of 1914 a man in a cafe was beaten to death for not joining in a spontaneous signing of "La Marseillaise". He may have approved of the war for all anyone will ever know but he didn't join in the song because it was a coffee shop and who the fuck does that? The man died for failing to realize that he had woken up to a world now operating by Monty Python rules. If national survival magically depends on our personal approval of a conflict then suddenly we are Very Important. There is no longer a 'lightness of being' but a fucking epic gravity to everything about us and all that we do. If one buys into the idea that "we" are characters in history's climactic chapter than we are never alone. We can be constantly larger-than-life emotional with everyone around us; as if everyone were everyone else's mother child or lover. Accepting all of this as nonsense is theoretically easy. One only needs to go back to seeing oneself as a small person aging to death quietly with no masterpiece opera soundtrack behind them.
Our response to 9/11 and defeat in Vietnam has also been compared to Germany's "stabbed in the back myth" used to convince themselves that their loss in World War I was a matter of their own controlling. We and Germany are both rich countries whose people are accustomed to having our way. Getting what we want is How The World Works to our own eyes. Beyond final illness many white Americans need never face any more jarring reminder that this isn't so than a Democrat in the White House. Even this is too jarring to handle for some. We could do worse so far as empires go. We don't stack every head of a conquered city into a pyramid or crucify people. Still being rich and strong without being dicks about may simply be beyond what the human spirit can do. A rich man's dog doesn't care if it deserves its feather bed or not. Humans are obsessed with justice. We cannot stand to view the good things in our life as plain luck, let alone as gained by foul means on our behalf however far personally removed from ourselves. If white Americans are not the light of the world than what are we? Tyrants? Decadents? If we are not the eternal standard for what Americans are and should be than what? Country songs about how country the singer is and how being country is by far the greatest of all human glories. One Goodoldboysploitation reality show after another. From the nineties through today we have grown first obsessed and then outright manic about having our identities affirmed. We demand it from everyone and everything.
We greatly overestimate the level of control required for survival and basic comfort. We are liver-poisoned by our privilege. Most people of the world recognize, however grudgingly, the need to assess where they are and take whatever step they think fitting with no promise of success. Not because they are closer-to-the-earth wiser but because they just have to. This crucial survival skill has atrophied within ourselves. There was once a crash-test driver who needed years to truly learn in his muscles that gripping the wheel on impact would only hurt him worse.
Thursday, June 9, 2016
It's The End of The World.
I was recently at a discussion of sexism in the media where the new "Women's Ghostbusters" was brought up. I wondered aloud about why even avowed anti-feminists gave a damn. I made some crack about Hemingway having never written about the manly bonds of ghostbusting on the plains of Andalusia. Why was Ghostbusting gender coded? Ghostbusting plays no role in domestic life or reproduction. Ghostbusting is not real. Just as I was starting to have a similar thought the moderator pointed out that "aggressive heroism" is coded male; and I realized that yes, that's it. I recalled the climactic scene of the Ghostbusters strutting up to the Gozor hotel while priests and rabbis led chants of "Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters..." whilea song called "Saving the Day" played on the soundtrack. It is something a a bachelor fantasy too. Bros with a fire pole. Bill Murray was a long damn way from sad old arthouse Murray he was still frattish drum role Murray.
The tellingly labeled "dickless" EPA man was completely in the right now that I think of it. Am I supposed to be so enthralled by glorious private enterprise as to trust drunken academic frauds with a nuclear reactor in Manhattan? And shouldn't sentient beings have some kind of civil rights instead of being summarily hunted down and crammed into a 6X6 inch nuclear jail? What about that jogger ghost who was just jogging but got sucked in to applause anyway? That's fucking livism. If simply existing after death is unacceptable then go blast the first church down the block with your atomic plasma sperm you tyrannical fucks.
Whenever I come across an internet thread about woman's basketball there is always without fail or prompt those who must point out that women's basketball is Just Worse, will always be Just Worse, that its mere existence is a PC affect of pretending that women can play basketball. Arguments against no actual opponents but ghost feminists, ghost liberals and ghost hippies while everyone else tries to discuss the Tennessee/Notre Dame game.
In reality the NCAA rents domes or big pro arenas for the woman's Final Four because crowds require it. Enough people sincerely care about women's basketball to require it. When Husker women's volleyball wins the national title we don't orgy on O street like we did for the football team in the nineties but its still a plaque we care about winning pretty strongly. When Title IX was passed in the seventies and high school girls were "allowed" to play sports there were some grumbles here but it was soon learned that this was actually a neat fit with our established rural jack-of-all-trades culture. In the Nebraska Sandhills there are muscled women who drink Busch wrench trucks and do not see themselves as the least bit gender rebellious. Anyhow it's one more team that might be good enough to make state giving everyone a party in Lincoln and a reminder to Omaha that they exist. The trolls carry on as if the legitimacy of women's sports is still in hot dispute when Nah. Not for many decades and not in the most conservative by-the-way place imaginable.
Even if it were somehow known that the realm of sports Belongs to men by dictate of God nature etc. then what of it? How would this make my own male being in any way grander? What meaningful validation could one suppose there to be here? I am led to think of the old hagiographic sports movies about Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Knute Rockney, the neverending ripe personality cults around quarterbacks, Charles Barkley's "I am not a Role Model" shoe commercial & the indignant replies that only dangerous fools could think they have the option of being athletes without being models for strapping young Lads. To this day we continue putting on the act of being shocked when a pro athlete gets caught acting like a twentysomething with money on a Friday night. There's no small amount of racism against "thug" athletes here and also a bullheaded persistence of Nike worship. The bizarre sense of obligation to presume a link between sporting victory and moral character. We have the sense that every contest between men that entails a bit of sweat is a symbolic Bunker Hill; a confirmation of the old idea that men do the most strenuous and dangerous work and are thus entitled to rule.
The sight of two near-equal opponents matching each other move-for-move while daring the other to do likewise in the very same act is indeed inspiring; be they women or men or dogs playing tug-of-war. It brings about a deep patriotic feeling for life itself and being of it.The intensity of this feeling can be sublime but that's not to say it is a feeling of great moral edification. It is only just fun. I say only just but fuck any righteous ass who doesn't think that's enough. We do not live to serve morals. Morals are servile to fun. We only have morals so that we can live longer and have more fun. We are born with a certain set of genitals not to command us who to be but to have some damned fun; or perhaps to have some kids so they can have fun if we think that would be fun. Womanhood is a hat. Womanhood is product placement for Kinky brand soft liquor in a late season episode of True Blood. Manhood is a hat. Manhood is an orphaned boxing glove at a garage sale that's marked for ten bucks but fuck that I'll give you two in quarters and you know you'll take it. Fun is God. Fun is Truth and it is God.
The tellingly labeled "dickless" EPA man was completely in the right now that I think of it. Am I supposed to be so enthralled by glorious private enterprise as to trust drunken academic frauds with a nuclear reactor in Manhattan? And shouldn't sentient beings have some kind of civil rights instead of being summarily hunted down and crammed into a 6X6 inch nuclear jail? What about that jogger ghost who was just jogging but got sucked in to applause anyway? That's fucking livism. If simply existing after death is unacceptable then go blast the first church down the block with your atomic plasma sperm you tyrannical fucks.
Whenever I come across an internet thread about woman's basketball there is always without fail or prompt those who must point out that women's basketball is Just Worse, will always be Just Worse, that its mere existence is a PC affect of pretending that women can play basketball. Arguments against no actual opponents but ghost feminists, ghost liberals and ghost hippies while everyone else tries to discuss the Tennessee/Notre Dame game.
In reality the NCAA rents domes or big pro arenas for the woman's Final Four because crowds require it. Enough people sincerely care about women's basketball to require it. When Husker women's volleyball wins the national title we don't orgy on O street like we did for the football team in the nineties but its still a plaque we care about winning pretty strongly. When Title IX was passed in the seventies and high school girls were "allowed" to play sports there were some grumbles here but it was soon learned that this was actually a neat fit with our established rural jack-of-all-trades culture. In the Nebraska Sandhills there are muscled women who drink Busch wrench trucks and do not see themselves as the least bit gender rebellious. Anyhow it's one more team that might be good enough to make state giving everyone a party in Lincoln and a reminder to Omaha that they exist. The trolls carry on as if the legitimacy of women's sports is still in hot dispute when Nah. Not for many decades and not in the most conservative by-the-way place imaginable.
Even if it were somehow known that the realm of sports Belongs to men by dictate of God nature etc. then what of it? How would this make my own male being in any way grander? What meaningful validation could one suppose there to be here? I am led to think of the old hagiographic sports movies about Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Knute Rockney, the neverending ripe personality cults around quarterbacks, Charles Barkley's "I am not a Role Model" shoe commercial & the indignant replies that only dangerous fools could think they have the option of being athletes without being models for strapping young Lads. To this day we continue putting on the act of being shocked when a pro athlete gets caught acting like a twentysomething with money on a Friday night. There's no small amount of racism against "thug" athletes here and also a bullheaded persistence of Nike worship. The bizarre sense of obligation to presume a link between sporting victory and moral character. We have the sense that every contest between men that entails a bit of sweat is a symbolic Bunker Hill; a confirmation of the old idea that men do the most strenuous and dangerous work and are thus entitled to rule.
The sight of two near-equal opponents matching each other move-for-move while daring the other to do likewise in the very same act is indeed inspiring; be they women or men or dogs playing tug-of-war. It brings about a deep patriotic feeling for life itself and being of it.The intensity of this feeling can be sublime but that's not to say it is a feeling of great moral edification. It is only just fun. I say only just but fuck any righteous ass who doesn't think that's enough. We do not live to serve morals. Morals are servile to fun. We only have morals so that we can live longer and have more fun. We are born with a certain set of genitals not to command us who to be but to have some damned fun; or perhaps to have some kids so they can have fun if we think that would be fun. Womanhood is a hat. Womanhood is product placement for Kinky brand soft liquor in a late season episode of True Blood. Manhood is a hat. Manhood is an orphaned boxing glove at a garage sale that's marked for ten bucks but fuck that I'll give you two in quarters and you know you'll take it. Fun is God. Fun is Truth and it is God.
Fame Is War
I once flipped through a book in the library called "The Top 1000" or some such. Its premise was a new algorithm using internet searches etc to determine the thousand biggest names in history. Jesus was number one as he always is for such things. I'd hate to be one to carry on about 'Eurocentrism Man" but second place went to Napoleon and he strikes me as a bottom half of the top ten guy maybe. Mohammad came in eighth as I recall and I don't see how he's anything less than a dead lock for second unless you place Abraham first, which one could make a good case for. And as for Glover Cleveland being in the top hundred at all (98th) get the fuck out with that shit.
I wholeheartedly agree with the left-wing consensus that reverence for the "founding fathers" is mainly bad. Yet when I read sociopolitical works from the mid twentieth century it becomes strikingly clear that Washingtonismo is a fraction of what it was when my parents were in school. This tells me among other things that we need not despair over the civil/rights identity movements of the sixties & seventies having plowed the sea, having accomplished nothing but inspire a brutal political thermidor against them. The risings have had real and lasting effect on general American thought patterns. We are less hierarchical now. There's a monarchical/great man impulse hungover from feudal Europe that's been permanently weakened. The Cult of The Founders, rebels against Britain, is a thing that has been intentionally cultivated by those who wished to permanently cement US culture as not just fundamentally white but specifically British for all eternity. (There are still living people, if not for much longer, who remember the DAR being a force) This effort has in the main been abandoned for the futility it has always been. Though I have recently glossed through a right-wing column which said that we once revered the founders and were now more inclined to dismiss them as slavers. That for reasons not quite spelled out this was not only bad but apocalyptically bad. Precisely how society benefits from revering Great Men is never spelled out. Some people would simply instill a general habit of submission for the sake of having it. Some well-to-do white men would have such a habit be the norm so that they themselves are submitted to, or at least by their own families withing there own homes.
We are an Anglophone nation who are markedly less English than Canada or Australia. I am glad for this though I have no contempt for either them or England. It gives me hope to see us perpetually evolve into a new thing, in vivacious defiance of those who demand One True Eternal Culture and system of values. It is largely our non-European marginalized who make us particular in spite of all and I am thankful. I love particularity and being particular above most all else. I hope not to come across as condescending with praise but teenage Jagger and Lennon thought America was cool mainly because they thought African-Americans were cool. That's just historic record.
I am of the post-imperial European diaspora and I am not whatever the fuck a Westerner is supposed to be. I am American and I am Nebraskan. My compatriots are the Natives African Americans and Latinos among me. It is no longer hidden from me that this is who we are among and are of. London Prague and Tehran for their part are all the same single degree of foreign who I strive to view with all due benevolence.
There are still those who bemoan "The Downfall of Western Civilization." (tm) Who claim either obliquely or directly that the light skinned can only either feel superior or suicidally self-loathing. Who damn the political correctness that has led to the decline of western civ courses at universities. Shakespeare Goethe and Plato are not actually being taught any less than ever but binding them together into a bullshit Westerness is apparently all-important. The mourners may speak as if they have common sense and ancient truth on their side but really it's all about wanting to believe that a generically similar appearance to Shakespeare or Goethe magically makes their accomplishments one's own now isn't it? ("How many slaves do you think I owned Mr. Hates America?" Well; how many airplanes did you invent motherfucker?) Let me shun political correctness myself and speak straightforwardly in pure simple truths. I agree with those who insist that Western Civilization is not inherently evil; because a thing has to exist before it can be evil. The Dead Meat Boys of the Western Front were able to see each other as intrinsically alien well enough now weren't they?
Rutherford Hayes came to the White House in a very shady manner; and in order to stave off violent challenges to this he ended Reconstuction in the South among other things. This made way for a savage regression to white dominance there and helped influence what would become a near genocidal mania against black people nationwide by the 1920's. The story of how Hayes came to power is important to our greater national story, yet for what he actually did with this power well; this was a time when presidents just didn't matter as much as we're accustomed to. Three got shot in thirty five years before anyone thought they should have a permanent bodyguard. Hayes signed tariffs and he had a beard like Grant and Garfield and Arthur did.
Rutherford Hayes is no one's Great Man, no one's top one thousand. Still his presidency happened to coincide with white settlement of the High Plains so there are things named for him out there. The last sizable town in westward Kansas until all the way to Denver itself. A county in southwest Nebraska, its borders absurdly drawn by Great Lakes standards of ideal size, as is so with many western counties. It is settled to the degree of not quite a person in a half per square mile for a total population of not quite a thousand. One more nonsense county removed from McCook, the nearest town conceivably big enough to ever seat an impartial jury. One who has seen the Plains from valleyed interstates may be shocked by Hayes Counties' ruggedness, its rocks, dunes, pine trees and stone age "roads" occasionally vertical as canyons demand and on which high school kids casually make their thirty mile commute to school at 70 mph, dreaming of being ranch lords themselves one day or maybe the swinger's life in Denver if they've been turned on to Kanye Sublime or whatever time-defying mismash of non-country music.
As you may guess Hayes County has had almost nothing in the way of true sociohistoric happening in its time. The one exception to this being the Great Buffalo Hunt of 1872. A junior Russian prince was touring the US at the time. He had already done New York Washington Chicago etc and then headed out west to kill a bison; because if one was visiting the US at this time they simply had to. It was like a hitchhiking foreign exchange student eating a cheeseburger and putting it on Instagram today. It simply wasn't not done.
So Prince Little Alex Son of Alex rode a train to North Platte where he was met by Buffalo Bill, (Who lived there at the time. You've no idea how weird it is to recall that most people aren't from NP and need to be told this) General Phil Sheridan (Grant's old Hard Man) General Custer (Yes that one) and Spotted Tale of the Lakota now reserved at Rosebud. One may add a priest a rabbi Wyclef Jesus Christ and Haile Salassie if this were a joke and it is but it really did happen too. They rode south out of the Platte Valley and into the hills, eventually finding a herd that had taken apocalyptic refuge as far from people as it could in not-yet Hayes County. There the men camped drank and killed. Custer and Cody trying to outfab each other to a nuclear-obnoxious degree I'm sure.
I look back on this with a vague sense of anger. Or rather a conceited sense that I should be angry at this God-Damned European crowned head who had his way with already badly-stressed American wildlife. Becky once told me of an African she met in France who went on a prolonged rant against safaris (Yeah they're still a thing) "Do you think that's normal!?" he said, "go ten thousand miles and spend a hundred grand just to blow away an elephant?" I feel this man's sense of insult in my own way. My own home turf has been Safarized, which is to say treated as if it were not quite real, as if it could not truly be a matter-of fact home of birth sex lunch and death for anyone, was rather a toy to be used by the actual real world. Though some of this to be fair might be benign; the tourist's natural rush of joy at experiencing a new world. Andof course I am not a colonized person myself, I no nothing of what it's like to be an indigenous African or American and being asked what it's like to be so damned exotic. I am not cut by the rub directly as others are but I do perceive it.
I think "Buffalo Commons" is a bridge too far but I do believe that the Prairie needs its own Yellowstone A fifty mile square of the Nebraska Sandhills would be ideal for this. Private enterprise can survive that one bit of ranch land reverting to federal commons. And so long as you leave out the tree-pissing conquest angle of hunting I'd be happy to see visitors get their fucking LARP on with white pioneer stereotypes. Bonnets, straw hats, beards, denim suspenders, hoop skirts, Jebidiahs, playing dead form cholera. It'd be beautiful. I shall never have the option of identity without baggage. There are worse things. From Iowa to Piedmont my land shines from indulgent rains.
I wholeheartedly agree with the left-wing consensus that reverence for the "founding fathers" is mainly bad. Yet when I read sociopolitical works from the mid twentieth century it becomes strikingly clear that Washingtonismo is a fraction of what it was when my parents were in school. This tells me among other things that we need not despair over the civil/rights identity movements of the sixties & seventies having plowed the sea, having accomplished nothing but inspire a brutal political thermidor against them. The risings have had real and lasting effect on general American thought patterns. We are less hierarchical now. There's a monarchical/great man impulse hungover from feudal Europe that's been permanently weakened. The Cult of The Founders, rebels against Britain, is a thing that has been intentionally cultivated by those who wished to permanently cement US culture as not just fundamentally white but specifically British for all eternity. (There are still living people, if not for much longer, who remember the DAR being a force) This effort has in the main been abandoned for the futility it has always been. Though I have recently glossed through a right-wing column which said that we once revered the founders and were now more inclined to dismiss them as slavers. That for reasons not quite spelled out this was not only bad but apocalyptically bad. Precisely how society benefits from revering Great Men is never spelled out. Some people would simply instill a general habit of submission for the sake of having it. Some well-to-do white men would have such a habit be the norm so that they themselves are submitted to, or at least by their own families withing there own homes.
We are an Anglophone nation who are markedly less English than Canada or Australia. I am glad for this though I have no contempt for either them or England. It gives me hope to see us perpetually evolve into a new thing, in vivacious defiance of those who demand One True Eternal Culture and system of values. It is largely our non-European marginalized who make us particular in spite of all and I am thankful. I love particularity and being particular above most all else. I hope not to come across as condescending with praise but teenage Jagger and Lennon thought America was cool mainly because they thought African-Americans were cool. That's just historic record.
I am of the post-imperial European diaspora and I am not whatever the fuck a Westerner is supposed to be. I am American and I am Nebraskan. My compatriots are the Natives African Americans and Latinos among me. It is no longer hidden from me that this is who we are among and are of. London Prague and Tehran for their part are all the same single degree of foreign who I strive to view with all due benevolence.
There are still those who bemoan "The Downfall of Western Civilization." (tm) Who claim either obliquely or directly that the light skinned can only either feel superior or suicidally self-loathing. Who damn the political correctness that has led to the decline of western civ courses at universities. Shakespeare Goethe and Plato are not actually being taught any less than ever but binding them together into a bullshit Westerness is apparently all-important. The mourners may speak as if they have common sense and ancient truth on their side but really it's all about wanting to believe that a generically similar appearance to Shakespeare or Goethe magically makes their accomplishments one's own now isn't it? ("How many slaves do you think I owned Mr. Hates America?" Well; how many airplanes did you invent motherfucker?) Let me shun political correctness myself and speak straightforwardly in pure simple truths. I agree with those who insist that Western Civilization is not inherently evil; because a thing has to exist before it can be evil. The Dead Meat Boys of the Western Front were able to see each other as intrinsically alien well enough now weren't they?
Rutherford Hayes came to the White House in a very shady manner; and in order to stave off violent challenges to this he ended Reconstuction in the South among other things. This made way for a savage regression to white dominance there and helped influence what would become a near genocidal mania against black people nationwide by the 1920's. The story of how Hayes came to power is important to our greater national story, yet for what he actually did with this power well; this was a time when presidents just didn't matter as much as we're accustomed to. Three got shot in thirty five years before anyone thought they should have a permanent bodyguard. Hayes signed tariffs and he had a beard like Grant and Garfield and Arthur did.
Rutherford Hayes is no one's Great Man, no one's top one thousand. Still his presidency happened to coincide with white settlement of the High Plains so there are things named for him out there. The last sizable town in westward Kansas until all the way to Denver itself. A county in southwest Nebraska, its borders absurdly drawn by Great Lakes standards of ideal size, as is so with many western counties. It is settled to the degree of not quite a person in a half per square mile for a total population of not quite a thousand. One more nonsense county removed from McCook, the nearest town conceivably big enough to ever seat an impartial jury. One who has seen the Plains from valleyed interstates may be shocked by Hayes Counties' ruggedness, its rocks, dunes, pine trees and stone age "roads" occasionally vertical as canyons demand and on which high school kids casually make their thirty mile commute to school at 70 mph, dreaming of being ranch lords themselves one day or maybe the swinger's life in Denver if they've been turned on to Kanye Sublime or whatever time-defying mismash of non-country music.
As you may guess Hayes County has had almost nothing in the way of true sociohistoric happening in its time. The one exception to this being the Great Buffalo Hunt of 1872. A junior Russian prince was touring the US at the time. He had already done New York Washington Chicago etc and then headed out west to kill a bison; because if one was visiting the US at this time they simply had to. It was like a hitchhiking foreign exchange student eating a cheeseburger and putting it on Instagram today. It simply wasn't not done.
So Prince Little Alex Son of Alex rode a train to North Platte where he was met by Buffalo Bill, (Who lived there at the time. You've no idea how weird it is to recall that most people aren't from NP and need to be told this) General Phil Sheridan (Grant's old Hard Man) General Custer (Yes that one) and Spotted Tale of the Lakota now reserved at Rosebud. One may add a priest a rabbi Wyclef Jesus Christ and Haile Salassie if this were a joke and it is but it really did happen too. They rode south out of the Platte Valley and into the hills, eventually finding a herd that had taken apocalyptic refuge as far from people as it could in not-yet Hayes County. There the men camped drank and killed. Custer and Cody trying to outfab each other to a nuclear-obnoxious degree I'm sure.
I look back on this with a vague sense of anger. Or rather a conceited sense that I should be angry at this God-Damned European crowned head who had his way with already badly-stressed American wildlife. Becky once told me of an African she met in France who went on a prolonged rant against safaris (Yeah they're still a thing) "Do you think that's normal!?" he said, "go ten thousand miles and spend a hundred grand just to blow away an elephant?" I feel this man's sense of insult in my own way. My own home turf has been Safarized, which is to say treated as if it were not quite real, as if it could not truly be a matter-of fact home of birth sex lunch and death for anyone, was rather a toy to be used by the actual real world. Though some of this to be fair might be benign; the tourist's natural rush of joy at experiencing a new world. Andof course I am not a colonized person myself, I no nothing of what it's like to be an indigenous African or American and being asked what it's like to be so damned exotic. I am not cut by the rub directly as others are but I do perceive it.
I think "Buffalo Commons" is a bridge too far but I do believe that the Prairie needs its own Yellowstone A fifty mile square of the Nebraska Sandhills would be ideal for this. Private enterprise can survive that one bit of ranch land reverting to federal commons. And so long as you leave out the tree-pissing conquest angle of hunting I'd be happy to see visitors get their fucking LARP on with white pioneer stereotypes. Bonnets, straw hats, beards, denim suspenders, hoop skirts, Jebidiahs, playing dead form cholera. It'd be beautiful. I shall never have the option of identity without baggage. There are worse things. From Iowa to Piedmont my land shines from indulgent rains.
Wednesday, June 1, 2016
Disco Inferno
I was recently reading Thomas Sowell, the Stanford economist who for whatever reason chooses to ass to his comfortable income by also writing as a syndicated right-wing hack. Sowell wrote of being a young Marxist as a 1950's undergrad and while such conversion stories are suspicious sometimes I can take him on his word here. There are plenty of Marxist economists. There are plenty of hardcore laissez-faire economists. Those who have been both are a great deal more common than those who do not believe that their own field is the One Great Truth that all others flow from one way or the other. Never tell a baker that you don't like cookies.
In the first chapter of Europe Central there is an actor who pretends to be Lenin's already dead failed assassin in order to appease Lenin's mercy-inclined wife. (Yes this really happened BTW) Lenin's wife accuses the fake shooter of being "in the middle." She assumes that no one could prioritize free elections or civil liberties over controlling the means of production unless they were cravens who'd been intentionally seeking out the safe middle ground. I think this reveals something about how some come to believe that paradise is a place where mass executions are routine. Extremism is not bad Because it is extremism; and there's no truth to the notion that the right answer in a conflict is inclined to be in the middle. The middle position is neither more or less likely to be correct than the extremes. Indeed the very act of framing the spectrum its center and its left and right frontiers is itself an arbitrary choice. Nothing at all is inherently moderate or extreme independent of necessarily artificial paradigms. The possibility for using belief as a vehicle for being reasonable or bold does not exist. Whether you or I are bold enough to be radical or sober enough to be conventional is of no consequence.
The fundamental truths of humankind cannot possibly be about you or I in particular. That I suppose is the main thing that makes the fanatic wrong. I do not doubt that they are highly sincere in wanting to improve the world. (and violence does 'sometimes' make the world better than leaving what it destroys intact would have) But ultimately they are less concerned with improving the world than they are with personal identity, with seeing themselves as worthy, brave, strong and of unique generational importance. Nietzsche did not mean "God is Dead" as a taunt. In fact he correctly predicted the near-term hazard; that as religion declined the mental habits of a Europe accustomed to dogmatic grandeur & a view of itself as historically and civilizationly central would remain; that nationalism and other ideologies would become violently insistent. The easiest way to feel assured that we are not wasting our timebombed lives is to feel assured that we spend or lives doing universally mandatory things; and the supposedly ultra-group oriented Soviets were in truth eager inheritors of the Christian assumption that ultimate truth must define individual purpose before all else.
Commenters sometimes describe the modern Jihadists as "nihilists". That's a famously overused word on this matter and others. But I do agree that there is some level of a "fuck everything" impulse behind violent dogmatism. The idea of a truth more important than life can be a platform for vengeance against a world that dares continue being a place where enjoyable things happen after we die. The deliberate eagerness with which fanatics destroy entire human worlds, cities, parks, monuments that have stood for a thousand years. Whole communities of people murdered with orgasmic joy; their bonds to a century and a half through memory and relationship destroyed for that very sake. It's the Year Zero idea; everything that came before me was either meaningless, contemptible or there for no other sake but to bring me about. While everything that comes after me shall be as I invented it in all details forever. It goes beyond the obvious fact that we all want to be important. It is about becoming convinced that Warsaw has always been important Because I am destroying it right now, that my murder victims are important because I am the one murdering them. The obvious thing to say is that it is like being a god but not quite. The impact of being a nurturing Christ is problematically quiet though it may be vast. The impact of Burning Everything The Fuck Down is much more immediately obvious. It's the messianic impulse gone sour in the sun. The wounded feel of something one expected from life not being there. Not necessarily poverty or repression or desperation or injustice. Perhaps some wholly irrational entitlement born of false gender or ethnic superiority. But some wounded absence even still.
And of course the apocalypse impulse can linger at a slow burn for a long time before blowing up in self-fulfilling prophecy. The USA; which is in truth exceptionally calm at the moment, all things considered, has a famously robust Armageddon industry. One that is most popular not among white rural "rednecks" but white well-to-do suburbanites who find that the nation is not quite so literally "theirs" as they were led to expect.
Toward the end of Europe Central a doomed Warmacht soldier speaks of the books of Goethe becoming cosmic dust in a thousand years while he fires at the Russians. I like to think that in his last moments the scales had fallen from his eyes to reveal the true enemy. That he was now at war with the pompous spirit of early modern Europe that had murdered his world and various others beyond Europe in the centuries before.
ADD ON:
In the "Feminine Mystique" Betty Friedan writes that while Freud made important insights about hidden sexual desires he also went overboard in his impulse to tie all vagaries of the mind to the "hard science" of the body. This seems to be the consensus on Freud today. There are endless onion layers of irony in his neurotic need for 'Hard Truths' but save that for some other time maybe. The Ivy Tower and Ground level world have both long been infected by a notion that to proclaim objective truth is to be a priest-like authority entitled to deference and admiration; while to argue theory is to be some guy. This notion is exacerbated by the false authority that societies place on whiteness, maleness, Brahminess, any number of things in all the myriad cultures. Socially favored people are under special pressure to Know. Friedan states that Freud was influenced by this pressure. I would say that its mark can be found in the insistent universality of Marx and Hayek both. Which brings us back to old Thomas Sowell.
Sowell is a black conservative; such as there must be more than none of and is not my own place or dare I say anyone else's to damn him for. It is however clear that the man resents with a new lover's passion. I would guess that he imagines himself in a contest for prestige with other academics like Toni Morrison or Angela Davis and resents that he is not viewed as the inarguable victor over those he sees as bubble-headed deviants. I've said before that dogmatic zeal remains the norm within economics. These are people who want very badly to be Hard Scientists yet to study economics is to study a realm of subjective human behavior; and the history of thought in this field is one of epic denial that they exist in the same realm as the hippies off in English and sociology.
Sometimes a black public conservative will take on the task of calling out liberals as The Real Racists and this tawdry business is one that Sowell takes on with glee. In one of these columns he mentions that Milton Friedman, the famous laissez-faire economist and Sowell's old colleague, could not have been racist because he had a black secretary who stayed at his side for decades. As for the fact that Sowell seriously made the argument that a white man who has a black woman in his employ can't be racist, never mind for now. What I'll point out here is that Sowell clearly feels entitled to have people amazed by the fact that he totally bro'd out with Milton Friedman and chooses to blame political correctness or some other artificial wickedness for why he is not as widely admired as Scottie Pippen Vin Diesel or what have you. He will not accept that he cannot hammer home standards he considers universal by force of will and cannot make people be impressed by himself. Not through Republican political victories or any other means. So he slides still further into resentment. Here and there one comes across flammable bogs in the earth. A million small angers at the world for not playing by what one imagines the rules to be.
ADD ON 2:
I don't think that some lower-class people are economic conservatives or otherwise conservative because of 'false consciousness.' Some people just choose to believe that some people are better than themselves over accepting that there are no objective means for knowing oneself to be a boon to the world. The notion that serving power is the ultimate good is a comforting blanket, an ancient and spontaneous blanket that need not be invented from on high. The enduring appeal of chivalry tales is nothing more than this. Once one is free there is no blanket no protective arms but only one's own cold embrace forevermore.
There's also the fact that if social hierarchy is opposed, (Whatever that hierarchy may be in time and place) then personal hierarchy must also be scrutinized. Husband over wife, parent over child, the small grace notes of agency control and assurance of mattering that a common person has in daily life. The old chair that isn't actually any better than the couch reserved strictly for grandpa.
Finally the fact that those who hold the levers of power may be very smart but are not Wiser by cosmic orders of magnitude than you or I is obviously frightening. Those who control nuclear bombs or millions of livelihoods are just creatures with fetishes phobias drug habits etc. The motive for denying this fact is easy to grasp. Think of the wild demands for submission and acquiescence that followed 9/11. One always sees the same knee-jerk towards kneeling among threatened people anywhere. If the magical thought that power knows how to handle crisis better because it is power is untrue, and of course it is; well.... It is the ultimate impossibility of control that gets people. The absence of any means to be safe. The lack of any means to know you are doing the right and true exclusive to your own kind, the absence of any inherent reward for doing good, or to save you from having a coronary and blacking out forever while straining to lift a box.
I do not think the ultimate human conflict is between the classes or otherwise external. The struggle is internal. It is the primal fight between the longing for autonomy on the one hand and longing to believe that Everything Will Be Alright If I Get With The Program on the other. The solution to this conflict is not to offer an opposing program, as the Marxists do. The solution is Fuck Every Program.
In the first chapter of Europe Central there is an actor who pretends to be Lenin's already dead failed assassin in order to appease Lenin's mercy-inclined wife. (Yes this really happened BTW) Lenin's wife accuses the fake shooter of being "in the middle." She assumes that no one could prioritize free elections or civil liberties over controlling the means of production unless they were cravens who'd been intentionally seeking out the safe middle ground. I think this reveals something about how some come to believe that paradise is a place where mass executions are routine. Extremism is not bad Because it is extremism; and there's no truth to the notion that the right answer in a conflict is inclined to be in the middle. The middle position is neither more or less likely to be correct than the extremes. Indeed the very act of framing the spectrum its center and its left and right frontiers is itself an arbitrary choice. Nothing at all is inherently moderate or extreme independent of necessarily artificial paradigms. The possibility for using belief as a vehicle for being reasonable or bold does not exist. Whether you or I are bold enough to be radical or sober enough to be conventional is of no consequence.
The fundamental truths of humankind cannot possibly be about you or I in particular. That I suppose is the main thing that makes the fanatic wrong. I do not doubt that they are highly sincere in wanting to improve the world. (and violence does 'sometimes' make the world better than leaving what it destroys intact would have) But ultimately they are less concerned with improving the world than they are with personal identity, with seeing themselves as worthy, brave, strong and of unique generational importance. Nietzsche did not mean "God is Dead" as a taunt. In fact he correctly predicted the near-term hazard; that as religion declined the mental habits of a Europe accustomed to dogmatic grandeur & a view of itself as historically and civilizationly central would remain; that nationalism and other ideologies would become violently insistent. The easiest way to feel assured that we are not wasting our timebombed lives is to feel assured that we spend or lives doing universally mandatory things; and the supposedly ultra-group oriented Soviets were in truth eager inheritors of the Christian assumption that ultimate truth must define individual purpose before all else.
Commenters sometimes describe the modern Jihadists as "nihilists". That's a famously overused word on this matter and others. But I do agree that there is some level of a "fuck everything" impulse behind violent dogmatism. The idea of a truth more important than life can be a platform for vengeance against a world that dares continue being a place where enjoyable things happen after we die. The deliberate eagerness with which fanatics destroy entire human worlds, cities, parks, monuments that have stood for a thousand years. Whole communities of people murdered with orgasmic joy; their bonds to a century and a half through memory and relationship destroyed for that very sake. It's the Year Zero idea; everything that came before me was either meaningless, contemptible or there for no other sake but to bring me about. While everything that comes after me shall be as I invented it in all details forever. It goes beyond the obvious fact that we all want to be important. It is about becoming convinced that Warsaw has always been important Because I am destroying it right now, that my murder victims are important because I am the one murdering them. The obvious thing to say is that it is like being a god but not quite. The impact of being a nurturing Christ is problematically quiet though it may be vast. The impact of Burning Everything The Fuck Down is much more immediately obvious. It's the messianic impulse gone sour in the sun. The wounded feel of something one expected from life not being there. Not necessarily poverty or repression or desperation or injustice. Perhaps some wholly irrational entitlement born of false gender or ethnic superiority. But some wounded absence even still.
And of course the apocalypse impulse can linger at a slow burn for a long time before blowing up in self-fulfilling prophecy. The USA; which is in truth exceptionally calm at the moment, all things considered, has a famously robust Armageddon industry. One that is most popular not among white rural "rednecks" but white well-to-do suburbanites who find that the nation is not quite so literally "theirs" as they were led to expect.
Toward the end of Europe Central a doomed Warmacht soldier speaks of the books of Goethe becoming cosmic dust in a thousand years while he fires at the Russians. I like to think that in his last moments the scales had fallen from his eyes to reveal the true enemy. That he was now at war with the pompous spirit of early modern Europe that had murdered his world and various others beyond Europe in the centuries before.
ADD ON:
In the "Feminine Mystique" Betty Friedan writes that while Freud made important insights about hidden sexual desires he also went overboard in his impulse to tie all vagaries of the mind to the "hard science" of the body. This seems to be the consensus on Freud today. There are endless onion layers of irony in his neurotic need for 'Hard Truths' but save that for some other time maybe. The Ivy Tower and Ground level world have both long been infected by a notion that to proclaim objective truth is to be a priest-like authority entitled to deference and admiration; while to argue theory is to be some guy. This notion is exacerbated by the false authority that societies place on whiteness, maleness, Brahminess, any number of things in all the myriad cultures. Socially favored people are under special pressure to Know. Friedan states that Freud was influenced by this pressure. I would say that its mark can be found in the insistent universality of Marx and Hayek both. Which brings us back to old Thomas Sowell.
Sowell is a black conservative; such as there must be more than none of and is not my own place or dare I say anyone else's to damn him for. It is however clear that the man resents with a new lover's passion. I would guess that he imagines himself in a contest for prestige with other academics like Toni Morrison or Angela Davis and resents that he is not viewed as the inarguable victor over those he sees as bubble-headed deviants. I've said before that dogmatic zeal remains the norm within economics. These are people who want very badly to be Hard Scientists yet to study economics is to study a realm of subjective human behavior; and the history of thought in this field is one of epic denial that they exist in the same realm as the hippies off in English and sociology.
Sometimes a black public conservative will take on the task of calling out liberals as The Real Racists and this tawdry business is one that Sowell takes on with glee. In one of these columns he mentions that Milton Friedman, the famous laissez-faire economist and Sowell's old colleague, could not have been racist because he had a black secretary who stayed at his side for decades. As for the fact that Sowell seriously made the argument that a white man who has a black woman in his employ can't be racist, never mind for now. What I'll point out here is that Sowell clearly feels entitled to have people amazed by the fact that he totally bro'd out with Milton Friedman and chooses to blame political correctness or some other artificial wickedness for why he is not as widely admired as Scottie Pippen Vin Diesel or what have you. He will not accept that he cannot hammer home standards he considers universal by force of will and cannot make people be impressed by himself. Not through Republican political victories or any other means. So he slides still further into resentment. Here and there one comes across flammable bogs in the earth. A million small angers at the world for not playing by what one imagines the rules to be.
ADD ON 2:
I don't think that some lower-class people are economic conservatives or otherwise conservative because of 'false consciousness.' Some people just choose to believe that some people are better than themselves over accepting that there are no objective means for knowing oneself to be a boon to the world. The notion that serving power is the ultimate good is a comforting blanket, an ancient and spontaneous blanket that need not be invented from on high. The enduring appeal of chivalry tales is nothing more than this. Once one is free there is no blanket no protective arms but only one's own cold embrace forevermore.
There's also the fact that if social hierarchy is opposed, (Whatever that hierarchy may be in time and place) then personal hierarchy must also be scrutinized. Husband over wife, parent over child, the small grace notes of agency control and assurance of mattering that a common person has in daily life. The old chair that isn't actually any better than the couch reserved strictly for grandpa.
Finally the fact that those who hold the levers of power may be very smart but are not Wiser by cosmic orders of magnitude than you or I is obviously frightening. Those who control nuclear bombs or millions of livelihoods are just creatures with fetishes phobias drug habits etc. The motive for denying this fact is easy to grasp. Think of the wild demands for submission and acquiescence that followed 9/11. One always sees the same knee-jerk towards kneeling among threatened people anywhere. If the magical thought that power knows how to handle crisis better because it is power is untrue, and of course it is; well.... It is the ultimate impossibility of control that gets people. The absence of any means to be safe. The lack of any means to know you are doing the right and true exclusive to your own kind, the absence of any inherent reward for doing good, or to save you from having a coronary and blacking out forever while straining to lift a box.
I do not think the ultimate human conflict is between the classes or otherwise external. The struggle is internal. It is the primal fight between the longing for autonomy on the one hand and longing to believe that Everything Will Be Alright If I Get With The Program on the other. The solution to this conflict is not to offer an opposing program, as the Marxists do. The solution is Fuck Every Program.
Monday, May 23, 2016
The Sight of Human Groups Drawing Energy From Each Other is Sickening.
I took the tab eighteen hours ago. I have slept, woke, groomed, eaten, errened. Everything is still just a little more more. An extra gravity to all I sense that may last the weekend entire for all I know. It's good acid. This morning I used instant coffee to create an espressoesque effect by simply filling my cup halfway with rocks before pouring the hot water in. I did it for the YES. There may be some day drinking in order. Perhaps I'll go watch baseball first but the thing is that baseball doesn't matter.
I biked home at four AM. Still quite high. At the 14th and D stop sign a cop pulled up next to me and said hello. I said "well hey there". Drug street eyes I picked up in Chicago and other places. Expect everything. Let all around you be aware that you see them and saw them coming before.
The cop said that I had no helmet and my bike no lights. I would have to take my bike off the street at this time of night. I replied that this was fine and I would simply walk it home. I felt the understanding that if I complied on this he would not inquire or examine me further. "Alright man. Sorry to bother you" said the cop.
I can affect alertness pretty well like I said. But the truth is that the cop may have saved me from getting myself hurt by going all Night Animal on a lightless bike and my feel for the ground belief me very unsure. I could have gotten sideswipe killed or found myself in Beatrice at dawn. I would say the meeting went exactly as one between a citizen of a free state and an officer who sees a hazard should go. I course I knew immediately even in my state that I would have been in the drunk tank until sundown if I wasn't white. That does put a damper on things. Still I accept his leniency in good conscience. The privileged treatment I received is not the problem as such. The faqct that it's a privilege when it should be the norm for all is the problem. I cannot magically give my Butler Cop powers to a poor minority by denying them to myself after all. This is both a critical fact and a dodge. I am aware that over five hundred years some variation of it has been said innumerable times in regards to a million Herrenvolk comforts.
I biked home at four AM. Still quite high. At the 14th and D stop sign a cop pulled up next to me and said hello. I said "well hey there". Drug street eyes I picked up in Chicago and other places. Expect everything. Let all around you be aware that you see them and saw them coming before.
The cop said that I had no helmet and my bike no lights. I would have to take my bike off the street at this time of night. I replied that this was fine and I would simply walk it home. I felt the understanding that if I complied on this he would not inquire or examine me further. "Alright man. Sorry to bother you" said the cop.
I can affect alertness pretty well like I said. But the truth is that the cop may have saved me from getting myself hurt by going all Night Animal on a lightless bike and my feel for the ground belief me very unsure. I could have gotten sideswipe killed or found myself in Beatrice at dawn. I would say the meeting went exactly as one between a citizen of a free state and an officer who sees a hazard should go. I course I knew immediately even in my state that I would have been in the drunk tank until sundown if I wasn't white. That does put a damper on things. Still I accept his leniency in good conscience. The privileged treatment I received is not the problem as such. The faqct that it's a privilege when it should be the norm for all is the problem. I cannot magically give my Butler Cop powers to a poor minority by denying them to myself after all. This is both a critical fact and a dodge. I am aware that over five hundred years some variation of it has been said innumerable times in regards to a million Herrenvolk comforts.
Everything is a Lie and This is Fine
That guy about town who is eternally wearing an anti (magic word illegal) immigration shirt. I've seen him about campus chatting up 20-year old women, Latinas and Mid-Eastern women as well as blonds in Elkhorn letter jackets. He makes homework jokes or speaks to them of how lonely he is. This piece has nothing to do with this man really. It's just That Fucking Guy is all I mean to say about him right? Perhaps he would feel less lost and alone if he lived in a culturally uniform village of <1000 but he does not. It happens that many of these prairie villages are old "white ethnic" enclaves where English didn't prevail until the radio age; and this of course has become a fact that we are supposed to pretend to not remember, like the time that aunt whoever straight up murdered a guy back in 62. Illegal.
On my Mother's Day call home I was informed that my parents priest is getting booted up to the cathedral in Grand Island. His name is Father Jim and he seems OK. I've interacted with him for maybe ten minutes in as many years, and first impression had might as well be no impression I realize, but he seems OK. He owns a bowler hat like I own and it would give Mom a vicarious thrill if one of her priests made bishop one day so alright. He hails from Polish folk in the Ord/Burwell/Loup City area so he might be a distant relative of mine; or has descendants from the same old-country town who read the same flamboyantly fraudulent railroad flyers as my own.
Willa Cather was a hardcore Bouge and obsessively racist even by the standards of her age. I would still have sex with most of her characters. I am a patriot.
I happened to be flipping through the Catholic newsletter for the Lincoln Diocese the other day. It was Mother's Day/Marion themed and May Crowning was given mention. If you didn't go to Catholic school May Crowning is a thing where all the kids gather to sing stupid nursery derivatives of Ave Maria and then one of the upper grade girls puts a crown of roses on a Mary statue. Katie Sedlacek got the honor from my class. I think she may have still been a virgin upon our graduation though I didn't pay all that much attention to such things. I think she's still alive.
The newsletters content was pernicious to be sure though generally mild. There was a stab at "militant secularism" though what this is was left unexplained. Sleeping in on Sunday with a gun under your pillow or some such. There were no direct mentions of abortion believe it or not though it was heavily implied that motherhood was a universal ideal if not quite mandatory and there was a great deal written about the "sacrifice" of motherhood. An insinuation that motherhood was good precisely because it was Sacrifice. Mater Dolorosa. Tammy Wynett was as WASP as steamed beets but her songs have the same martyrdom fetish.
The day before my 6th grade May Crowning my stepdad made some crack about all virgins "these days" being either four years old or virgins, and was then saddened by my non Heyo reply. I really have no desire to discuss sex with the man who is doing my mom and he never seems to grasp how this could be. He has had no kind of social brohood beyond family for decades now, and more than that he seems obsessively fixed with the idea of One True Singular and Universal manhood, with a Singular lust among all men being a vital point of connection of all men. The absurdly perpetual sexual harassment in "Mad Men", set in a time when my dad would have been high school to college age; the obviously deliberate rituality of it all. Maybe it's loneliness more than all else that explains why one could actually want universal mandates, dogmas; some critical aspect of self to be determined by higher authority. At any rate I have sensed from a young age that sex talk among men does have an affected Shriner's back-slap about it. The idea of all men being wired to be horndogs and all women being wired to be coy might be declared "common sense" but come off it. There are seven and a half billion of us and this is common sense proof that women enjoy sex well enough too now isn't it?
If men are wired to pursue and women to dodge; then it is nature's decree that men and men alone are the ones who Make relationships; which plays into the larger idea of men and men alone being the ultimate authors of the world. This I suppose is how all of the Heyo bullshit serves our vanity.
I saw my stepdad and sister about a month ago when she needed to see a medical specialist in Omaha. I drove their car as both have come to see Omaha traffic as impossible chaos; though Wendy had lived there for many years. I also had free reign to choose where we had dinner which heartened me greatly. On previous family dinners in Omaha we'd stand in line for forty five minutes at the Crossroads Olive Garden, my suggestions to try a smaller place in Benson or Dundee dismissed as a poor student's modesty. Standing in line was simply what one did when they went to a special restaurant like Olive Garden. On this day last month I wondered inbound on Dodge more or less planless until it occurred to me to try the Bohemian Cafe. At 13th and Dodge we passed a black man my dad assumed was derelict because; well he was jaywalking, and shame on him I suppose, but mainly because he was black and waiting for public transit at the bus stop.
We came to the Bohemian Cafe to find that it was closed on Tuesdays. Your guess is as good as mine as to why. If Tuesdays had some religious or other special value in Czech culture I would have known but no it's just fucking Tuesday. So I decided to take them to one of the small cafe's on south 24th. South O was close and the food unfailingly reliable except not quite. After parking we chose a place at random that had milk shakes as the featured desert but no milk shakes. My torta was rather dry. we had to fetch our own silverware. Even the salsa was weak. My stepdad would later refer to the place as "disgusting" though bad as it was it wasn't that. The sound of Spanish on TV led him to see dirt that wasn't there frankly. He said he would have preferred Outback and this reminded me of the time I was ten and my uncle shittalked me for coming to the Lincoln Outback in a tanktop and sandals instead of dressing up for Outback. Fuck all that. I'm a grown man who lives in 'the east' and yall are gonna be eating out of food trucks on my say so forever more.
On my Mother's Day call home I was informed that my parents priest is getting booted up to the cathedral in Grand Island. His name is Father Jim and he seems OK. I've interacted with him for maybe ten minutes in as many years, and first impression had might as well be no impression I realize, but he seems OK. He owns a bowler hat like I own and it would give Mom a vicarious thrill if one of her priests made bishop one day so alright. He hails from Polish folk in the Ord/Burwell/Loup City area so he might be a distant relative of mine; or has descendants from the same old-country town who read the same flamboyantly fraudulent railroad flyers as my own.
Willa Cather was a hardcore Bouge and obsessively racist even by the standards of her age. I would still have sex with most of her characters. I am a patriot.
I happened to be flipping through the Catholic newsletter for the Lincoln Diocese the other day. It was Mother's Day/Marion themed and May Crowning was given mention. If you didn't go to Catholic school May Crowning is a thing where all the kids gather to sing stupid nursery derivatives of Ave Maria and then one of the upper grade girls puts a crown of roses on a Mary statue. Katie Sedlacek got the honor from my class. I think she may have still been a virgin upon our graduation though I didn't pay all that much attention to such things. I think she's still alive.
The newsletters content was pernicious to be sure though generally mild. There was a stab at "militant secularism" though what this is was left unexplained. Sleeping in on Sunday with a gun under your pillow or some such. There were no direct mentions of abortion believe it or not though it was heavily implied that motherhood was a universal ideal if not quite mandatory and there was a great deal written about the "sacrifice" of motherhood. An insinuation that motherhood was good precisely because it was Sacrifice. Mater Dolorosa. Tammy Wynett was as WASP as steamed beets but her songs have the same martyrdom fetish.
The day before my 6th grade May Crowning my stepdad made some crack about all virgins "these days" being either four years old or virgins, and was then saddened by my non Heyo reply. I really have no desire to discuss sex with the man who is doing my mom and he never seems to grasp how this could be. He has had no kind of social brohood beyond family for decades now, and more than that he seems obsessively fixed with the idea of One True Singular and Universal manhood, with a Singular lust among all men being a vital point of connection of all men. The absurdly perpetual sexual harassment in "Mad Men", set in a time when my dad would have been high school to college age; the obviously deliberate rituality of it all. Maybe it's loneliness more than all else that explains why one could actually want universal mandates, dogmas; some critical aspect of self to be determined by higher authority. At any rate I have sensed from a young age that sex talk among men does have an affected Shriner's back-slap about it. The idea of all men being wired to be horndogs and all women being wired to be coy might be declared "common sense" but come off it. There are seven and a half billion of us and this is common sense proof that women enjoy sex well enough too now isn't it?
If men are wired to pursue and women to dodge; then it is nature's decree that men and men alone are the ones who Make relationships; which plays into the larger idea of men and men alone being the ultimate authors of the world. This I suppose is how all of the Heyo bullshit serves our vanity.
I saw my stepdad and sister about a month ago when she needed to see a medical specialist in Omaha. I drove their car as both have come to see Omaha traffic as impossible chaos; though Wendy had lived there for many years. I also had free reign to choose where we had dinner which heartened me greatly. On previous family dinners in Omaha we'd stand in line for forty five minutes at the Crossroads Olive Garden, my suggestions to try a smaller place in Benson or Dundee dismissed as a poor student's modesty. Standing in line was simply what one did when they went to a special restaurant like Olive Garden. On this day last month I wondered inbound on Dodge more or less planless until it occurred to me to try the Bohemian Cafe. At 13th and Dodge we passed a black man my dad assumed was derelict because; well he was jaywalking, and shame on him I suppose, but mainly because he was black and waiting for public transit at the bus stop.
We came to the Bohemian Cafe to find that it was closed on Tuesdays. Your guess is as good as mine as to why. If Tuesdays had some religious or other special value in Czech culture I would have known but no it's just fucking Tuesday. So I decided to take them to one of the small cafe's on south 24th. South O was close and the food unfailingly reliable except not quite. After parking we chose a place at random that had milk shakes as the featured desert but no milk shakes. My torta was rather dry. we had to fetch our own silverware. Even the salsa was weak. My stepdad would later refer to the place as "disgusting" though bad as it was it wasn't that. The sound of Spanish on TV led him to see dirt that wasn't there frankly. He said he would have preferred Outback and this reminded me of the time I was ten and my uncle shittalked me for coming to the Lincoln Outback in a tanktop and sandals instead of dressing up for Outback. Fuck all that. I'm a grown man who lives in 'the east' and yall are gonna be eating out of food trucks on my say so forever more.
Monday, May 16, 2016
Weird Scenes InSiiDe The GoldMinnne
I once saw a reality show on apocalypse "preppers" at Hell House and had to leave within minutes from the crushing depression. A Houston area banker had bought a farm house out in rural Texas somewhere. It had ten years worth of canned food bottled water etc. He gave his wife & daughters a rifle each and had them run perimeter drills for how to shoot down the unwashed hordes that would surely come for their canned food. He had assistance from local sheriff's deputies; and the fact that men with the authority to arrest or employ lethal force as they saw fit thought it perfectly right and proper to aid a Respectable Businessman on his Armageddon drill is a less than ideal thing. His daughters spoke of how they admired their father for making them "strong". Soon they will go out into a patriarchal world with no mental defense against cults of "Great Strong Men". And my God but how this man must trip on himself. He has skills that happen to be valued by the culture that he was birth-lotteried into, fine. But there is no singular success and he is not some genetic Tarzan who would always triumph in all environments. What must this man's relationship to the world be, to say nothing of his politics, if he truly believes that the vast bulk of humankind are fiends controlled only by harsh law who'd go Mad Max on the Clean Respectable Elites at the first opportunity?
My guess is that he doesn't really believe it. No one of healthy adult mind can unaffectedly "believe" such rot. He just likes to win is all. I'm sure we've all had the kid in our childhood circles who'd change the rules of our make-believe games on the fly in whatever way they needed to so that they would always win.
Of course if you happen to survive the apocalypse then running off to live along on Tang and Chef Boyardee forever is the worst thing you could do. Our loss would after all be very much the gain of cougars grizzlies wolves etc. Newly feral cattle would be as hapless to their attacks as the bison were to our predation. Carnivores would absolutely soar in number. Post-America would be like the African Savannah with different breeds of bio-tank virtually tripping over each other and still getting fat. And if it's just them and you out there Superman well you do only two arms at a time to fire one rifle at a time now don't you? For every bear you put a bead on in front of you there will be eight leopards and eighty coyotes sneaking up from behind. Think about it.
Then again if we set the apocalypse survival rate at 1% that would leave a few more than twenty thousand people in greater KC. In a community of that size one will find multiple doctors, dentists, electricians, engineers, teachers (even a few professors) computer techs, musicians, war veterans or police to provide defense against mallard worshiping biker gangs as need be etc. Material living standards could be quickly restored to at least a 1920's level with a bit of teamwork. If you're one who considers any hint of communalism to be immoral in itself than fine. This supposedly tough attitude is in fact a luxury afforded by unusually comfortable historic circumstance. If shit leads to shit then there are no rugged individualists in a foxhole. Even those who choose suicide at the sight of their world murdered will want someone to hold them while they do it. And capitalism as such will necessarily be a dead letter for at least awhile. There would simply be too vast a surplus of dead people's shit for private property to mean much. Never mind whether or not it should; that supposedly vital question is no more.
It would be fascinating to be a sole survivor who sees what becomes of these Plains without us. My guess is that a remnant of the feral cattle would ultimately survive the feast. Revert to a Eurasian Aurochs from while breeding with the bison; becoming once again a creature tough enough to be an alpha herbivore, so that in time this environment would again be effectively owned by bovines. And as for those folk who were shuffled off to West River Dakota, or somewhere else as far from where we intended to build our cities as possible; Lakota, Crow, Cheyenne etc. I suppose that they would fucking ay well have the country back alright. Provided they could survive the fallout from Denver Billings Rapid & Bismark then yeah they'd have it back; with all the Buffaurochs they can eat through bicycle hunt, and the odd pair of blue eyes from rancher descendants who turned to them for refuge and society. Ghost Dance as mechavirus.
Fuck anyone who exaggerates themselves to be heroic. The human species is Heroism in the flesh. We take what happens to be in front of us knowing that we are going to die and we fucking live with it. This is what we will always do and there will be no end except yours and my own.
My guess is that he doesn't really believe it. No one of healthy adult mind can unaffectedly "believe" such rot. He just likes to win is all. I'm sure we've all had the kid in our childhood circles who'd change the rules of our make-believe games on the fly in whatever way they needed to so that they would always win.
Of course if you happen to survive the apocalypse then running off to live along on Tang and Chef Boyardee forever is the worst thing you could do. Our loss would after all be very much the gain of cougars grizzlies wolves etc. Newly feral cattle would be as hapless to their attacks as the bison were to our predation. Carnivores would absolutely soar in number. Post-America would be like the African Savannah with different breeds of bio-tank virtually tripping over each other and still getting fat. And if it's just them and you out there Superman well you do only two arms at a time to fire one rifle at a time now don't you? For every bear you put a bead on in front of you there will be eight leopards and eighty coyotes sneaking up from behind. Think about it.
Then again if we set the apocalypse survival rate at 1% that would leave a few more than twenty thousand people in greater KC. In a community of that size one will find multiple doctors, dentists, electricians, engineers, teachers (even a few professors) computer techs, musicians, war veterans or police to provide defense against mallard worshiping biker gangs as need be etc. Material living standards could be quickly restored to at least a 1920's level with a bit of teamwork. If you're one who considers any hint of communalism to be immoral in itself than fine. This supposedly tough attitude is in fact a luxury afforded by unusually comfortable historic circumstance. If shit leads to shit then there are no rugged individualists in a foxhole. Even those who choose suicide at the sight of their world murdered will want someone to hold them while they do it. And capitalism as such will necessarily be a dead letter for at least awhile. There would simply be too vast a surplus of dead people's shit for private property to mean much. Never mind whether or not it should; that supposedly vital question is no more.
It would be fascinating to be a sole survivor who sees what becomes of these Plains without us. My guess is that a remnant of the feral cattle would ultimately survive the feast. Revert to a Eurasian Aurochs from while breeding with the bison; becoming once again a creature tough enough to be an alpha herbivore, so that in time this environment would again be effectively owned by bovines. And as for those folk who were shuffled off to West River Dakota, or somewhere else as far from where we intended to build our cities as possible; Lakota, Crow, Cheyenne etc. I suppose that they would fucking ay well have the country back alright. Provided they could survive the fallout from Denver Billings Rapid & Bismark then yeah they'd have it back; with all the Buffaurochs they can eat through bicycle hunt, and the odd pair of blue eyes from rancher descendants who turned to them for refuge and society. Ghost Dance as mechavirus.
Fuck anyone who exaggerates themselves to be heroic. The human species is Heroism in the flesh. We take what happens to be in front of us knowing that we are going to die and we fucking live with it. This is what we will always do and there will be no end except yours and my own.
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Women Are Men Factories
I'm told that Kyle represented Lincoln a bit poorly in Chicago. That's unfortunate and acid does happen. I am guilty of unfortunate things myself most every day. With the possible exception of Paul we are all a thoroughly rotten group of men truth be told. If we are remembered at all it will be as rock-livered amoral death obsessed bumpkin beats and that's fine. The world needs vicarious flavor and will have it either through somebody else's scumminess or somebody else's war. Iggy Pop was scum. Hemingway was scum. Camus was scum. Prince was a Jehovah's Witness fucks sake. He'd knock on random doors as they do. People would be like "ahh shit Prince what's up?" and then "oh." Shakespeare is sex jokes murder and absolutely nothing else at all and that's fine. Even indeed "Great" in its own way. Still he is placed on a higher plane than degraded modern art because of motherfuckers using literature as an excuse to instill cults of ancestor worship. Not his fault I realize. He liked older women and smoking nutmeg and of course that's not scummy at all. It's value neutral at worst.
And let us not forget the women while we're at it. The only reason Frida Kahlo got married was for the very purpose of betraying and feeling betrayed. It wasn't an open marriage but a tacit agreement to cheat because feeling horrid is invigorating and that's kind of scummy. Having an affair with Trotsky and then getting into Stalin worship on her death bed was really scummy. Still it's just a bit harder to think of scumbag women artists on the fly. Men have more room to socially if not bodily get away with being scum and isn't that hilarious? Let's skip half-assing it and join Westboro Baptist. It'd take care of the drug problem and isn't "fuck everyone who isn't us" how we all do anyhow?
In North Platte there was a woman named Vicki Soto who lived downstairs from a man who had a place but liked to drink along the river with the hitchhikers and freight riders all the same. One day he stabbed Vicki in her pregnant belly cut her legs off and toted his bike down to the river with a sack of legs. He was caught by the Walmart parking lot cameras. "Missing Legs Found" was the top headline in the NP Telegraph two days later. The day after that the Telegraph interviewed an FBI man to impress us with his forensic expertise. He applied his technical know-how towards solving the case by watching video until a man with a sack of legs rolled through. Given the material pointlessness and obvious sexual nature of the murder this seems to have been a case of a serial killer being born. Except he wasn't smart enough to get away with the first one. He rode about with half of his own murder victim in public. There's a myth that serial killers are smarter than the average person but no. The ones who are able to amass dozens of victims over decades before being caught, who are simply good enough at murder to command nationwide attention, are quite logically mentally sharp. But there is no actual correlation between intelligence and evil. That I suppose was my point in telling you all about this; though if someone who is both smart and evil gains a bit of power than it sucks to be anyone else to be sure.
Dear Mom:
There is no biologically transcendent Motherhood. There is no culturally transcendent Motherhood. There is no ethically transcendent Motherhood. Of course I know when your birthday is; November 2nd, and I'll be sure to get you something doubly nice then. And it is sweet that you put flowers on Grandma's grave for "Mother's Day" and all but; well you know how I know that Mother's Day is bullshit Mom? Because it's on Sunday. Nobody gets an extra day off. That's always a dead giveaway. People go out to lunch with their moms or some other generic activity because there are no actual Mother's Day customs. I don't think it's a consumerist conspiracy as such, at least not primarily so. I would guess that some busybody saw the birth or marriage rate go down a half percent in 19-0-whatever and dreamed it up from there.
My birth father's name is Greg. He's a but Irish I heard. My mother raised me alone in a claptrap rental house with out any aid from him while cooking beef at the truck stop. I know all of Greg that I'll ever care to. My eyes come from him I'm told. My godmother Mikalia is his sister. Mikalia farms with her husband just over the lip of the Platte valley near the corn/cattle frontier. She also once made boxing helmets in a factory not there anymore though this is no Springsteen tale she's doing fine. I remember how she would breastfeed... well my cousin as it happens. I forget his name. Later his parents would dress him up in cowboy hat and boots to go to school or store in for real. Mikalia's features hint at southern Europe maybe. Dark hair, dark eyes, skin not really dark to anyone beyond Iceland and maybe just tanned. The woman farms. Once as a kid I was watching a football game and made some crack about Notre Dame's black leprechaun mascot. "there are such a thing as the Black Irish you know" my mother said to that. This is so. Descendants of migrants from Spain who are "black" enough to not be flayed by an April sun. Another clue perhaps.
My mother and stepdad are having their vows blessed at St. Pats Church on their thirtieth anniversary in July. The reasons why they care to do so have been alien to me for some time now. She has asked me to stand witness. They had had a courthouse wedding. Maybe for financial reasons, or maybe the fact I existed enough to attend my mother's wedding bothered the church. Though I know that even they aren't so priggish as that. They did baptize me instead of hurling me in a furnace after all. I can only hope that my Mom married a stepdad who I mainly despise to please herself, not because she thought that I needed him there. She would have never have helped make the conventional family a sour thing in my mind intentionally. Her relationships are her being entire, frighteningly entire. Anyhow she's still on a pack a day at fifty eight. the next one of her frequent colds could be more of a cold at any time. If she wants me suited up "standing witness" in that fucking candletomb then yes of course I'll go.
And let us not forget the women while we're at it. The only reason Frida Kahlo got married was for the very purpose of betraying and feeling betrayed. It wasn't an open marriage but a tacit agreement to cheat because feeling horrid is invigorating and that's kind of scummy. Having an affair with Trotsky and then getting into Stalin worship on her death bed was really scummy. Still it's just a bit harder to think of scumbag women artists on the fly. Men have more room to socially if not bodily get away with being scum and isn't that hilarious? Let's skip half-assing it and join Westboro Baptist. It'd take care of the drug problem and isn't "fuck everyone who isn't us" how we all do anyhow?
In North Platte there was a woman named Vicki Soto who lived downstairs from a man who had a place but liked to drink along the river with the hitchhikers and freight riders all the same. One day he stabbed Vicki in her pregnant belly cut her legs off and toted his bike down to the river with a sack of legs. He was caught by the Walmart parking lot cameras. "Missing Legs Found" was the top headline in the NP Telegraph two days later. The day after that the Telegraph interviewed an FBI man to impress us with his forensic expertise. He applied his technical know-how towards solving the case by watching video until a man with a sack of legs rolled through. Given the material pointlessness and obvious sexual nature of the murder this seems to have been a case of a serial killer being born. Except he wasn't smart enough to get away with the first one. He rode about with half of his own murder victim in public. There's a myth that serial killers are smarter than the average person but no. The ones who are able to amass dozens of victims over decades before being caught, who are simply good enough at murder to command nationwide attention, are quite logically mentally sharp. But there is no actual correlation between intelligence and evil. That I suppose was my point in telling you all about this; though if someone who is both smart and evil gains a bit of power than it sucks to be anyone else to be sure.
Dear Mom:
There is no biologically transcendent Motherhood. There is no culturally transcendent Motherhood. There is no ethically transcendent Motherhood. Of course I know when your birthday is; November 2nd, and I'll be sure to get you something doubly nice then. And it is sweet that you put flowers on Grandma's grave for "Mother's Day" and all but; well you know how I know that Mother's Day is bullshit Mom? Because it's on Sunday. Nobody gets an extra day off. That's always a dead giveaway. People go out to lunch with their moms or some other generic activity because there are no actual Mother's Day customs. I don't think it's a consumerist conspiracy as such, at least not primarily so. I would guess that some busybody saw the birth or marriage rate go down a half percent in 19-0-whatever and dreamed it up from there.
My birth father's name is Greg. He's a but Irish I heard. My mother raised me alone in a claptrap rental house with out any aid from him while cooking beef at the truck stop. I know all of Greg that I'll ever care to. My eyes come from him I'm told. My godmother Mikalia is his sister. Mikalia farms with her husband just over the lip of the Platte valley near the corn/cattle frontier. She also once made boxing helmets in a factory not there anymore though this is no Springsteen tale she's doing fine. I remember how she would breastfeed... well my cousin as it happens. I forget his name. Later his parents would dress him up in cowboy hat and boots to go to school or store in for real. Mikalia's features hint at southern Europe maybe. Dark hair, dark eyes, skin not really dark to anyone beyond Iceland and maybe just tanned. The woman farms. Once as a kid I was watching a football game and made some crack about Notre Dame's black leprechaun mascot. "there are such a thing as the Black Irish you know" my mother said to that. This is so. Descendants of migrants from Spain who are "black" enough to not be flayed by an April sun. Another clue perhaps.
My mother and stepdad are having their vows blessed at St. Pats Church on their thirtieth anniversary in July. The reasons why they care to do so have been alien to me for some time now. She has asked me to stand witness. They had had a courthouse wedding. Maybe for financial reasons, or maybe the fact I existed enough to attend my mother's wedding bothered the church. Though I know that even they aren't so priggish as that. They did baptize me instead of hurling me in a furnace after all. I can only hope that my Mom married a stepdad who I mainly despise to please herself, not because she thought that I needed him there. She would have never have helped make the conventional family a sour thing in my mind intentionally. Her relationships are her being entire, frighteningly entire. Anyhow she's still on a pack a day at fifty eight. the next one of her frequent colds could be more of a cold at any time. If she wants me suited up "standing witness" in that fucking candletomb then yes of course I'll go.
Sunday, May 1, 2016
Resurection Night
It wasn't until the mid-00's that the gameplay for Goldeneye was "supposed" to be based on stealth. I'm not very good at Goldeneye per se. I've always played with cheat codes that made me invisible and put a laser machine gun in each hand. I can stand in the same place murdering infinate computer enemies for five hours and not be the least bit bored, and sometimes I still do manage to get killed when I ignore armed enemies in favor of pistol-whipping civilians to death. Not the skull but the ribs, one at a time, slow. Yet if there were no people to kill; if you were the only person to exist on planet Goldeneye,, it would still be the best game ever made in any medium for so long as it has office chairs that fucking explode man, or as long as you can still commit mega-suicide by laying a hundred proximity mines in the same room and than shooting one.
I once told my girlfriend that I wouldn't spend a cent on Christmas lights if I were a billionaire an she got generally mad. I'm okay with house lights. If someone wants to put up some Blue Oyster Cult lasers around their house all year long that would be cool but Christmas lights; meh. It is not Christmas as such that I object to but Christmasismo. Not even that Fox News War on Christmas shit either, that's fish in a barrel. Too obviously a case of white people pissing on "our" culture to bother noting. I mean the loudness of it all. Fuck special Christmas episodes of Two Broke Girls is what I mean. I mean fuck anyone who insists on turning off Curtis Mayfield for that pompous pseudo-Old English caroling shit because of the calendar date. "We Three Kings" is a nice gothic jam but fuck all the rest. I could say fuck bowl games but it's fuck big time sports more generally like and anyhow it's kind of amusing to to watch two 500 teams with no defense for colleges that probably aren't real have it out in Bakersfield or something. Most of all fuck god for sure and fuck it being all cold with winter just beginning.
Kyle has the right of it. Fourth Of July. When I had my van mom would wire wire me $200 to go to Missouri for cherry bombs and other forbidden-here bombs. i would generally have lunch in KC buy the fire at one of the shops along the Kansas line in the bottoms than cross back to Nebraska at
Brownville because the river smell in summer is all spiritual like. It was chill. Sometimes my cousin would come home for the Fourth from Sacramento and he would stop in Wyoming for much the same thing. In Wyoming you see there is simply nothing at all forbidden to white men. There is not a single character in the Mad Max universe that could survive twenty seconds of Wyoming. Its birth rate can only be guessed at because while abortion is socially anathema bearing a child to no greater end but to serve it to the father on Easter brunch is routine and need not be reported. As recently as forty years ago Jeffrey City WY was a mining town of over a thousand but is near abandoned now. Because one June winter day back in 78 the grizzly that they all prayed to demanded blood forever.
My family collectively spend over $1000 on fireworks for real. That's how white rural we are. The show generally takes over an hour with the job of launching typically that of the younger generation of grown men same as war. Phosphorous burns are acutely painful for several hours after injury even if you nurse them right. It's fucking worth it man. Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom. The experience of being Uncle Josh MC of Fire is one of those that can't be told of. You either feel the liquid of endorphin flowing from your mind to your meat or you don't.
Hemingway's widow passed off his suicide as an accident so he could have a Catholic funeral. Why she felt the need to do this I've no clue. Nor do I know why his choice to sunroof himself and not forty years of writing 'have as much sex with as many as you can kill as many wam bodies as you can and fuck god" is what would have made a church funeral off-limits.
The level of hangover that isn't really painful but entails a slow heavy feeling on the nerves between your brain and sense organs. You can relieve this with coffee but that brings on the blood pressure headache. RIP me. Biscuits & gravy with an egg stack on top mild hot sauce. Hash browns left a touch soft cooked in the sausage grease. An always drunk brain would give my writing more of that flighty controlled chaos style that I've always liked but than again I can write more if I live longer. When I'm sixty and aware that my life is 4/5ths over or so it's going to be weird as hell to buy groceries or drink Mountain Dew or lick a stamp or vote for the candidate I think will help bring the better future. I know it's cliche but I am communicating with the reality of 2300AD right now and there will be no 2300AD. It's not being dead as such that I fear because of course nothing is neutral. I did not exist for ten billion years before 1982 and it was fine. That scene in 2001 where HAL can consciously feel the nothing coming on, that's what I fear. Knowing that in five minutes they'll be people in the room crying or otherwise doing things while on the other side of the world someone will be seeing opposite-sex genitals or eating feta cheese for the first time except no they won't. I want fucking stimulus to make me feel good or bad forever. I suppose we all do. Never mind my body let it rot except no. Have me stuffed and put me on stage next to major heads of state giving major speeches, making wry comments of your choosing through text like the Yellow Kid. One had might as well believe in Christ as that singularity shit I realize. It isn't happening man. Or if it does it will be reserved for no one but Henry Kissinger so he can Lovecraft torture-god Latin America forever. Or I've always gotten a purgatorial feel from Kubrick and I think he'd do just fine for a god. An eternity of walking down illuminated corridors with sporadic breaks of tense euphemistic dialogue while somebody holds down the same two synthesizer notes for eight minutes at a time. It would be something.
I once told my girlfriend that I wouldn't spend a cent on Christmas lights if I were a billionaire an she got generally mad. I'm okay with house lights. If someone wants to put up some Blue Oyster Cult lasers around their house all year long that would be cool but Christmas lights; meh. It is not Christmas as such that I object to but Christmasismo. Not even that Fox News War on Christmas shit either, that's fish in a barrel. Too obviously a case of white people pissing on "our" culture to bother noting. I mean the loudness of it all. Fuck special Christmas episodes of Two Broke Girls is what I mean. I mean fuck anyone who insists on turning off Curtis Mayfield for that pompous pseudo-Old English caroling shit because of the calendar date. "We Three Kings" is a nice gothic jam but fuck all the rest. I could say fuck bowl games but it's fuck big time sports more generally like and anyhow it's kind of amusing to to watch two 500 teams with no defense for colleges that probably aren't real have it out in Bakersfield or something. Most of all fuck god for sure and fuck it being all cold with winter just beginning.
Kyle has the right of it. Fourth Of July. When I had my van mom would wire wire me $200 to go to Missouri for cherry bombs and other forbidden-here bombs. i would generally have lunch in KC buy the fire at one of the shops along the Kansas line in the bottoms than cross back to Nebraska at
Brownville because the river smell in summer is all spiritual like. It was chill. Sometimes my cousin would come home for the Fourth from Sacramento and he would stop in Wyoming for much the same thing. In Wyoming you see there is simply nothing at all forbidden to white men. There is not a single character in the Mad Max universe that could survive twenty seconds of Wyoming. Its birth rate can only be guessed at because while abortion is socially anathema bearing a child to no greater end but to serve it to the father on Easter brunch is routine and need not be reported. As recently as forty years ago Jeffrey City WY was a mining town of over a thousand but is near abandoned now. Because one June winter day back in 78 the grizzly that they all prayed to demanded blood forever.
My family collectively spend over $1000 on fireworks for real. That's how white rural we are. The show generally takes over an hour with the job of launching typically that of the younger generation of grown men same as war. Phosphorous burns are acutely painful for several hours after injury even if you nurse them right. It's fucking worth it man. Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom. The experience of being Uncle Josh MC of Fire is one of those that can't be told of. You either feel the liquid of endorphin flowing from your mind to your meat or you don't.
Hemingway's widow passed off his suicide as an accident so he could have a Catholic funeral. Why she felt the need to do this I've no clue. Nor do I know why his choice to sunroof himself and not forty years of writing 'have as much sex with as many as you can kill as many wam bodies as you can and fuck god" is what would have made a church funeral off-limits.
The level of hangover that isn't really painful but entails a slow heavy feeling on the nerves between your brain and sense organs. You can relieve this with coffee but that brings on the blood pressure headache. RIP me. Biscuits & gravy with an egg stack on top mild hot sauce. Hash browns left a touch soft cooked in the sausage grease. An always drunk brain would give my writing more of that flighty controlled chaos style that I've always liked but than again I can write more if I live longer. When I'm sixty and aware that my life is 4/5ths over or so it's going to be weird as hell to buy groceries or drink Mountain Dew or lick a stamp or vote for the candidate I think will help bring the better future. I know it's cliche but I am communicating with the reality of 2300AD right now and there will be no 2300AD. It's not being dead as such that I fear because of course nothing is neutral. I did not exist for ten billion years before 1982 and it was fine. That scene in 2001 where HAL can consciously feel the nothing coming on, that's what I fear. Knowing that in five minutes they'll be people in the room crying or otherwise doing things while on the other side of the world someone will be seeing opposite-sex genitals or eating feta cheese for the first time except no they won't. I want fucking stimulus to make me feel good or bad forever. I suppose we all do. Never mind my body let it rot except no. Have me stuffed and put me on stage next to major heads of state giving major speeches, making wry comments of your choosing through text like the Yellow Kid. One had might as well believe in Christ as that singularity shit I realize. It isn't happening man. Or if it does it will be reserved for no one but Henry Kissinger so he can Lovecraft torture-god Latin America forever. Or I've always gotten a purgatorial feel from Kubrick and I think he'd do just fine for a god. An eternity of walking down illuminated corridors with sporadic breaks of tense euphemistic dialogue while somebody holds down the same two synthesizer notes for eight minutes at a time. It would be something.
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