not paranoid when you should be

just one of my normal keyboard improvisations, nothing special, except that it's recorded on a real grand.

Soul~chewing train

All aboard... the soul chewing train. Train your brain to chew your soul. It's so chewy. So soulfully chewy. Chunky. Steak and potatoes. Eat it with a knife and fork. Carnivate your soul. For UnCarnal Knowledge.

So, it sounds like something that meant one thing one time. That thing I forgot. Spoiled ironies. Dried to husks. Pointless to harvest. Like dust. So, emote about being a mote. Sound like fucking kansas for a moment. WTF is with that moment? Let's mosey on. I'll see myself out. Take myself to the woodshed. Waiting on a rewatch of mad men episodes by Matt Lieb.

Sigh, groan, at what live serves up to me. To us, I can include others. Try to enjoy black humour. Really, try harder. Try before you why. Why nothing, just try to appreciate some aspect of the horror show. Even though the share price of poetry has plummeted again. It's not good enough to be bad even. Bad hasbra. Low value man and woman. Synthetic testerone could be rivalled by lab-made ampethamine class prodrugs.

Fit to be tied. Fit for a substack. Adrift in the vast sea of the market economy. Paddle to the sea, yo. Shock humour of 1999. What's that worth?

not all soul-chewing

Soul Nibbling.

And soul repairing.

Removed that annoying controlling format.

So I've chewed on my soul vigorously, frothing at the mouth with tiny bubbles of short-lived BEST POSSIBLE WORLDS, tearing them to gristle in my teeth, grinding grinding grinding til they taste like ashes

but I swallow those ashes, find a way to perk up, desperately at first, for hours that seem like weeks, then more confidently, then, like spotting ocean on a sea of sand, the prospect of soul, again, and I can play, play with light, of light, reflect it like a diamond, play music, reflect it to jupiter, amplify it to the sun, cast to the universe.

Animals can restore soul, if I let them. My two cats. Beautiful handsome creatures. Noble beasts with poo-butt. Silly spastic prisoner pets. Tati inspecting my keyboards. She's gotta sniff all the knobs. 

I might chew more. I thought I chew too much. It felt like the awful truth at the time. Those were long times. Now I'm revaluating. It feels good to revaluate. Consider, maybe it wasn't all a waste. The balance I've been seeking between the sardonic and the sublime.

When I amplify music to the universe, it's actually not that, so much, I'm not inviting much of anything except a very specific zeigheist, a stellar spirit from the far future.

 

Who can I talk to about this? I don't know, maybe no one. So it exists in the form of a blog post.

thin blood

Legend: When I use the tag "LIT", it's an acknowledgement that I'm appending a literal explanation to something I wrote that was unclear, in a way that could have the literary merit of helping a reader understand what I'm on about. Also I'm not being needlessly cryptic but instead trying to communicate real thoughts and feelings, at this late date, and break the habit of hiding in poetic prose, but still failing in this gerundtocracy, because it has to curl in on itself that way, like a dumb fucking bumfighting jester.

So, I was thinking about harm reduction. [LIT: more specifically, the question: would it be a legit request to ask my wife for permission to just get stoned on thc, and promise to not mess around with anything else? And could it be a harm reducing activity, so that I could feel like things were extra profound and my life was kinda like a music video, without resorting to much more dangerous drugs?] It could motivate me to do stuff, like write more, and play more music. Even if only 1% of that motivation leads to action. That's still 99% more stuff getting done than when in the endless wastes of the non-stoned desert.

Beryllium could tell, she said. When I was writing on my blog stoned. Cause she actually read it enough to compare entries. It was a rare pleasure, when someone or other special to me read my words. I wouldn't have to trick anyone into it. Not that I would now, but I think about doing it sometimes. Funny, watching that Kids in the Hall skit with Erin this morning. Don't we all look into the inky abyss of our souls sometimes and find the roar of the loneliness there... deafening? Kevin McDonald, the best of the contemptuous friends, and even him, having to admit he just skimmed Bruce McCulloch's suicide note looking for his own name. That's the best you get, Bruce. It's something, you'd better take it, there's no better offer coming. And good thing you did put Kevin's name in the suicide note, so there was something for him to read, like a good writer of a brief for president trump.

Fuck it, we're still in the bad timeline. This bad timeline is fiendish in its malice, because it allows just enough non-horrific things to happen to keep ya from switching to the coping mechanism of accepting that you're in a pro-wrestling-themed hell-world, Hulk Hogan on one side and Jesse 'The Body' Ventura on the other, and going with that nauseating ride for better or worse, so ya can have expectations of a future, and maybe even one for someone else's kids. But then it yanks that hope away from you like a bully playing keep-away, and you wake up from the Kamala Harris hangover and realize that it's still a choice between genocide and genocide, with maybe slightly slower heat-death. 

Maybe the clathrate gun hypothesis is just good fodder for sci-fi, like I was proposing to Erin on the beach, will you continue to marry me, my sweet little pug, and also, I'm proposing that the clathrate gun scenario is not necessarily going to cause the entire planet to broil in a runaway greenhouse effect, terminating in a Venus-like Earth. And I'm also proposing that maybe evidence for release of hydrate-related methane to the atmosphere is lacking, and it won't foreclose on our own futures, cutting them down to a decade or two max. I've come to see that you don't need any encouragement to succumb to hopelessness on the micro and macro, and I don't need to be describing sciency-sounding scenarios in half-assed paraphrases of things I read on wikipedia, after chatting with someone on twitter who also claimed to be a former NSA whistleblower being hunted by the feds on behalf of the oil cartels, who also claimed to know about reverse engineered alien technology -- playing pundit or podcast bro, cause I know politics or something, heh. There's a turd in the punchbowl, the ET tech guy, my john titor, as I said to t, who introduced me to the supposed time-traveler guy.

Erin doesn't need this rap, she's doomy enough already, and it's not like I'm some kind of authority. I wish I didn't feel like I know as much as I do. Cause I dunno, who knows if I know anything? But there's a creepy feeling that I do, enough that I should be panicking, except I'm in the bad timeline that will allow me to think that there's no such thing, there's no devil, the greatest trick and all that, and it's just THE timeline that's perfectly normal and natural, so whatever I find horrifying is just me being unable to cope. And being unable to cope is just something that happens, to some people, and I'm just some person, not terminally unique, but unique enough to feel uniquely awful, but that's just normal and natural, and I'm just deputized to be the copeless ditch digger of the trenches for the last war.

Sometimes there was h. Sometimes there was c. Sometimes there was the other t. Sometimes there was s, but so what? Rarely there's Erin, probably good for avoiding new reasons to go to couples' counselling, what am I doing putting her in my complaints? Hasn't been l in years. Hasn't been m in decades. Could be t if I could be bothered to make an effort, he'd meet me halfway. And I do owe the other m an email for chissakes, why do I slack, and then expect the world to line up for the gratification of this hedonism bot?

Fair enough if we can't read what each other writes, aren't we all brain damaged by now, literally and figuratively? I might as well give in to participating in what everyone else is doing every time we talk, and let loose with age cliches, and monologues on the horrors of getting old, and talk about the jump scare of looking in the mirror and feeling like an amnesiac waking up in the body of a corpse.

I like fragments that can reflect each other, reflect on each other, reflect off each other, and multiply potential interpretation, instead of a dull cut and dried intent, it's a rolling fractal kaleidoscope of intention, rhyming meanings, synonyms, antonyms. But then the play of light gets too brilliant, out-smarts itself, the light becomes lite, airy fairy meaning lessness, stuff and nonsense. I can play on my keyboard for the first time in months, and the novelty of dusting off an old habit creates something that feels worthwhile, for the moment, at least.

Gratitude Alphabet

Doing a writing exercise, I guess, is what I'm doing. Because I've hardly written anything for months. Since I got sober, yet again. Excuses, excuses. Blaming deficiency of soul on being married and sober. For whatever reason, not writing anything, even long letters. Even short letters. Even skeets, threads. 

Also, doing a gratitude exercise, I guess, is what I'm doing. Because I've been getting gloomy and doomy. Perhaps I can blame that on being married and sober as well? Writing is hard when I haven't got the swoony swagger I get from various kinds of buzzes. Gratitude is also hard, in that wilderness. Wild clarity, where I'm pining for clouds and fogs and coils of vapour to flavour things and suggest a soundtrack and obscure painful realities and disappointing probabilities.

A is for Alison, my sister. A good sister. I'm lucky to have her, things are much better with us than when we were kids. Even though there's a long distance, physically, and emotionally, although I am grateful for a kind of closeness with her that I don't have with my parents, even, perhaps because of shared cultural references and experiences, and just less autistic weirdness. Just a little less, anyway.

B is for Brian, my dad, the best dad in the world, and other father's day cliches, but in this case, really. He is sweet, despite autistic weirdness. A father I can be proud of, and am, sometimes, when I think about it. Don't want to think about him ever dying, I'm grateful I don't have to much, not that time yet, hopefully not for a long time.

C is for Chels, an old friend I've never met in person, chat up sporadically, sometimes between gulfs of years, I prize that catalogue of messages, some incredibly good vibes at times.

D is for Doors. Cause they allow entry to rooms. Cute.

E is for Erin, my wife, the love of my life. Takes care of me in ways I don't even know. Someone to take care of. It was something I wanted for so long. And then I get what I want and feel burdens. But I can take stock and realize how lucky I am. And then feel like luck is a burden, don't want to feel obligated to feel gratitude. And then I can think about things that bring tears to my eyes, like how she baked that cake for my sober birthday, that molasses cake that I loved, that she thought was weird and bad.

F is for Fur, cat fur, it's so soft, feels so nice to pet, the nicest tactile feeling that I get, on a daily basis. Especially Tatiana's, the poofy luxury cat, the softest thickest coat I've ever had the pleasure to pet. Worth the stress and expense of cat maintenance.

G is for the Government. Could be worse. Does some good things. Social services. Gives me tax refunds. There's a system set up, that I've been able to tap into at times. Can't be easy, running the whole apparatus. Wouldn't say I live in a failed state, even though it might be heading there, but maybe I could still win the death-bet.

H is for Holidays, seems like they've added a few since my school days. So that's nice. It's hard to find time and energy for anything other than survival, but there's usually one a month, if I could plan better and do better at following through with plans, I might be able to nurture some more soul. Writing is hard, it's making me sweat. Like, I know I could come up with a metaphor much better than "nurturing" soul, but I can't be bothered, it would take hard mental labour, I'm not inspired. Well my writing joints are weak, they're creaking, haven't been stretched. And I'm not even a third of the way to Z.

I is for, I dunno. I gotta keep this moving, I wanna do the whole thing before I drop off. Nevermind nodding, don't mention that, forget that. Keep it moving, keep it grateful, ok?

J is for Judy, and Jennifer (both), and I could go on with J names, but I'll just try and tick those off in later entries, should they happen, magically, by themselves, or maybe through some strenuous writing exercises in a future regimen. Maybe I'll even book another counselling appointment. Maybe if I can get that Laziness Does Not Exist book read, to feel sufficient prepped for another session. Maybe I should just book it, stop trying to prepare. Already killed the momentum.

K is for Kyoto, that disc from the box set of Keith Jarrett's Sun Bear Concerts, such a great improv. Guess I could've made K for Keith, but I like that I made it Kyoto, more specific, and I did get a lot of pleasure from mp3s somebody ripped from that disc, while generating landscapes in Vistapro 3.0, even if the first batch I downloaded, in the early Napster days, were glitchy and I wasted so many hours trying to "repair" the waveforms. Am I really "grateful" for the Kyoto concert? Yeah, a little, I guess. Just going on quick associations from letters.

L is for love. It's real, even if I'm not a great lover of love. But love songs don't make me nauseous like they used to. I can feel it, I guess that's something that androids dream of, it's not something to be taken lightly, and as much as I fucking hate things sometimes, it's good that I can fucking love things too.

M is for mom. She's the sweetest, despite autistic weirdness. I'm feeling so lazy and tired doing this exercise, I can't be bothered to say things in an interesting way much of the time, but mom is one of the things that inspires the most deep and genuine gratitude. Aside from all the ways she is special, I owe my life to her, directly.

N is for Nevermind, the Nirvana album. I don't know when the last time is that I actually listened to it, it's probably been years, and I was probably drunk, and appreciating music in that way where it's a soundtrack and nostalgia. It has many permanent rooms in my head, that album. It wired me in all kinds of ways. The associations. They still take me back to that birthday, when I turned eleven, in New South Wales, my first walkman with that tape to go with it, being transformed aesthetically on hearing that music. Still, there's never been anything like it. Driving to a water park in the morning. Driven. Formative in ways I can't define, because it's aesthetic.

O is for Osaka, maybe my favourite of the Sun Bear concerts. Another one I wasted hours trying to de-glitch. Although I'm grateful for those hours too actually, because I learned things about waveforms doing that. A formative experience in audio editing, unknowingly leveraging neuro-plasticity in my adolescent flailing at engineering.

P is for Pickle Rick. I am grateful for that episode of Rick and Morty. It's probably in my top ten. Even though it's not all that cool, according to the people that are cooler than me, but it's hilarious and creative, and I enjoyed it immensely, both times I watched it. That jaguar character. I didn't watch it a third time when I was rewatching the series with Erin, I skipped that one, because she was barely tolerating the relentless grossness of the series, and I knew that particular one would have sent her over the edge.

Q is for the letter Q. It's useful sometimes in wordle, when I run out of vowels, but there's a U left, and I want to try some 2 letter combos, like in QUASH, or QUACK.

R is for Ratatouille, the movie, I really enjoyed it when I watched it the one time, back in, I dunno, 2007, on Luc's recommendation. Made me appreciate a host of other things, Luc, Fidel, animals, cooking. Not that I became a food guy, thank god, I'm barely tolerating The Bear. Actually I don't wanna admit how much I enjoy that show, but I still want to maintain an aloofness from foodie culture. Wanna maintain a toe-hold on this self-declared niche of cool.

S is for Savoury, the herb. It smells so good. Even the inferior imported savoury they shipped to the Mt. Scio farm where I packaged the stuff, scooped it out of a giant bin and bagged it. And the smaller amount of fresher stuff they grew there, my god, so good, so [insert better writing here]. What I'm really grateful for is the job. The owner, can't remember his name now, but he was a good man, respectful to his employees, liked to hire ex-convicts, and weirdos and losers like me, with barriers like autistic weirdness, that made having a silly low-paying job like that a high value thing in my mind, just the petty achievement of having a job like a real person to go to and afford a modest life by western standards.

T is for Tony. I'm so glad he's back. Thought I'd lost him forever to his mental illness. I did lose him for more than a decade. But we're friends again. It means a lot to me. It was so upsetting to me when he went paranoid schizo on me back in those days, I would sometimes dream of him coming around, but it was only a dream, until the last few years, he reached out again. And we're living on the same island, which is great, I get to go up to Port Alberni and visit and play music and talk about stuff that's important to us.

U is for Ucluelet. Maybe Erin and I will go there soon. I have rosy-tinted memories of the place, even though the few months I lived there were actually quite dark and stressful. But it will be nice to see it again. I really am grateful for the experience of living there back in 2012. I guess it helps that it's long in the past, I know that I came through it, I have that benefit, that too did pass, and I can see the good, barely remember the anxiety about trying to find work, and that brutal day of work processing the bloody muck from the bottom trawler, and then having to hitch to tofino every day to be a dish-bitch at the marina restaurant, occasionally getting to borrow briar's VW jetta, trying not to drive it like the disrespectful dumb dude I was. Yeah, I know, this is supposed to be about gratitude. But I am grateful for those hard times too, because I get to write about them, and feel hard for having gone through them. The hard-won "hardness" of a privileged working class canadian cracker with sweet parents.

V is for Vampires, cause I've gained more appreciation of them since getting with Erin. I've discovered there's a lot more to the mythology and creative possibilities I hadn't imagined. Maybe I'll even do something with the concept some day, if I ever take a second crack at doing fiction. Yeah, I dunno.

W is for words, even though I'm having trouble with them lately. But I love words, which is why I feel their void so painfully now. I'll get back to them.

X is for X-rays cause, well, I love everything on the electro-magnetic spectrum. Not x-rays especially though. I'm gonna have to look at the dictionary if I keep doing this, cause X, you know.

Y is for youth, specifically, the youth, younger generations, cause I think they're turning out better in a lot of ways. I mostly hated people my own age when I was younger. They're less bad as my contemporaries in middle age, but also, I think newer gens have a lot to recommend them. I don't envy them coming up in this world. I cut them a lot of slack because of it. They're annoying in a lot of ways, of course, that's just gonna happen, but no more annoying than I found my own gen when I was younger. They have at least the capacity to be more informed, because of information technology, and a lot of them are. And a lot of them are misinformed to increasingly grotesque degrees because of that same technology, but the possibility to be better informed than any past gens is a net good, I think.

Z is for Zodiac, because it's fun to lark about with astrology once in a while, it's cute. My baby does is sometimes, it's endearing. It would get old fast if she got super serious with it, but it makes a nice aesthetic. I'm not as dismissive about her budding interest in wicca. I guess she would consider them somewhat related, but there's a lot more meat on the wiccan bone, I think. 

Okay, I got to Z. Now I don't have to be grateful, I can just ramble. I can stop rambling now if I want and go to bed. I dunno what I want to do. Ramble I guess. I need to write a long letter to Matt. I need to write a novel that is a memoir that is a plan to die with dignity. I need to do all this shit, damnit, feed my soul, collate lyrics to plug into scraps of keyboard improv to build songs. It feels good to finally do some writing, in so fucking long, at least, I'm grateful for that. Hopefully I'll do more of that, whether it's therapy writing or nursery rhymes for stunted adults, or whatever. There's a loneliness. This is a step in the ridiculously circuitous escalator to address that.

The Twin Gears of Cringe and Cling

Donating. Actually doing something - an interaction - over the web - financial transaction, christmas shopping, or sort of gesturing to christmas, spastically, like a pitied invalid, broken toy, haha, whatever.

Musical guest: whatever your favourite band is. It sucks. I can barely rouse a care about bands anymore, anyway. 

Yeah, don't get sucked in... by stupid bullshit like that, pretend words have no power, not that type of power, not that kind of magic - back to strip-mined culture. A synthesis. Now a theatrical antithesis of dead. Now too outside, as if that ever meant anything.

All that can sustain life is the mere presence of making it another step without cringing. Well it's something, as if, a subroutine, a side-quest, not the main story. Clinging, or cringing. The two paths forking from the straight shot tickle to send the rest packing. It does sound better when it descends into nonsense. It tastes better too. But most importantly of all, it sounds better because it's music. It's about not being enough of a virtuoso to know which ways to waste and which ways to want. And being beside a WantMonster. Paying tribute to a colleague. And connections fraying infinitely from that. The barest of tendrils like a tiny rope of jizz off a cock. Stretched over an abyss. Sweet abysmal malice or friendly pussy. Gotta be a rock in the flow. Erode around.

Like a, Like that article, definitely.

Desperation, CLINGING, chasing security.

Desperation, lacking security, CRINGING, the subtlety of embarrassment, rather than shame.

 

I've tried to tell myself I was punching up before, not as in afflicting the comfortable, not hierarchy-based class-conflict in words, but the kind of punching up where you're crafting a bit, to be funnier. That kind of diamond drillbit. Playing of light across an overconfident perspective, thinking it was cool once, now caught in the twin gears of cling and cringe.

The saw teeth sawfigures of rusted out basements of the heady sensation that things are so fucked up and fucking up in a cascading way, but not finding paranoia very fun, making do, wasting time with discussion of drugs.

Under the heavy sedation of life... it's not music, except when it is... When it can roll, into a cradle. And definitely be a part of that deja-flow. You know? You bwad bwad bwoy?

Is a certain popuri of posturing intubations of what fills a dead space between two massive chapters of crusted ebullience. Like it was inexplainable, inimitable, a gratuitous grace how it donned the syntax of its age and just accepted gifts of forgiveness. A thing called righteousness. When he asks himself what to do in the mirror, demands that he, himself, tell himself, what to do. That's freaky. Begs for his life at the end. It's sort of satisfying but unnerving, when you're that far up the ass of a bubble dimension that exists to Johannson strains?

It needn't be though. It needn't be freaky. If it had the right key to the right lock, it would fucking ROCK, but it won't. So deal. So die, or live with it somehow, but don't look at me, to me you're like someone in a "somebody else's problem field", so yeah. That's my monologue for you today, sir. It's borrowed bits of paradigm from dxm cruising. That's the word I could have used, bruised, self-abused, but useful to myself, idiots. Cruising altitude, like Michael Brooks in his late TMBS era [], cruising in stride between pretty plateaus, hefts of flour, seeds of plains of maybe it's not the end, just the end of a horrible unnatural cycle and a new era of disease divine kings, rightfully ruling, presumably, syphillitically, because mightfully ruling, literally. Exerting might for the monopoly on force, to rule. So, this paradigm feeling natural, in this exegesis, where my fingernails are too long and I feel like I'm tapping with talons on a tablet, like as hateful as the living tripod creatures, moving with calculated swoops in on low insect protein source food routines.

Seeing city lights stretched from end to end of horizon, and yeah, I could, I should, keep going, but I can't, I gotta end this side-quest for now. Heh.

The saw teeth of saying something, for any delusion that there were hallucinations beside you, on your peripheral, when I talk to you, when I try to make something from nothing, like friendly ghosts on tropanes, who seem nice but then they disappear which doesn't seem as nice, sometimes it's knocking on your doors in your dreams for centuries cultural hangover kind of thing in a situation where tech just paradigm slurs every strata of understanding over each other, like it's a rich flavoured gravy of mores, but on the other hand, nevermind.

as if

If I don't turn it into a side quest in some dumb game, I won't do it at all. I guess if this is the only way, to write, then okay. I'll give in to exposure because, as if that matters, haha. It's a way to try and get back energy and passion. One avenue, one hopes. It gets too cryptic too quickly and veins outward in a million different directions, like a neuron. It's a flow over a rocky shallow creek. It's too rapid. It's all a tall head of foam, can't be teased apart, you'd move through it unmoved, holding no coherence. As if this were an essay, heh. Fidelity to the flow causes overturning of set courses. Before discourse can form, syntax resets, non-sequiturs pile up in heaps. Must believe there's some skum of magic that glistens over the broken furniture hastily shoved together. Some magic skum that makes it alright somehow. Closet full of weasel words tumbling to the floor. Tricks on self to try and sorta focus. 

One trick is to try to continue that scene that's so pale it's leaking null space, it's got a fatal glitch, it's clipping, there's no floor, the ground is parallax. Maybe some day you'll make a level that's viable and not an impossible escher sketch. Maybe some day you'll be real.

So, the scene. Let's just pretend it's good to keep it going, the new mantra. It will get me set. Set for life. The right set and setting for expenditure of energy on shoving together furniture and pretending it's a room. With no floor. So, the scene:

It's a hospital room. It's an iconic scene. I'm telling you that. That it's iconic. I'm not showing you that. Because there's no point in showing that particular thing. The telling is important in that case. The fact that a hospital room is an iconic scene for me. That's what's important in this glistening film of magic. Because it means things like birth and death. Recent times where I've been in a hospital, with my wife's brother in a little room on the apparatus, head blown off, barely alive. I'm peering close to the IV vessels, getting a lay of the newest mid-tech gear for middle class people in the state of washington. Seeing if I an discern some drug nomenclature. Well, that one's fentanyl, that's clear, it's even in an LCD screen these days!

So it's iconic because yeah, there's birth, with all that meaning, but these days, ever so much more so, I'm thinking about death, trying to ruminate, but behavior patterns get in the way, ones with a misguided allegiance to life, not life-loving in a good way, but in a chicken shit desperate to distract from anything negative look away, way. But when I try to look away, it all leads back to the big one, the meaning of death. And the things around it, like wanting to die high, and having it be a fantasy in lieu of using now, and wrapping the things around that into a fantasy, like getting in a severe car crash or getting critically ill, and being free of the expectation to walk around and do things and be responsible, and be drugged instead. It doesn't sound all that great when I put it in words, but I'm still in love with the fantasy. 

This kindling does have potential to be revved up to a roaring fire, and maybe that fire could even be used to forge real material, but it's hard to work up the energy for that. I'm trying to ween off caffeine for a while, been living on only 1 cup of tea to start the day. Considering, I think writing anything at all is impressive. I made a dooky! Shitbabies in post-natal pinocchio situations. I had the rebellious thought that I should break the caffeine fast tonight and drink a strong cup of tea or two and see if it would help me power through, and not leave the fruits of inspiration dying on the vine.

Because the sun comes in the morning and they die, so quick. The morning could come as early as an hour from now, while it's still dark. The sun comes out anyway, at 2am, and there's burn. And there's burnout. Magicskumshine dries, loses its supple texture, amalgam with a crust of gel. It's all splayed out on the rocks, sheet of flakes of denatured crystal. There's so much to show, and tell, but the flow is too rapid. I can't make use of it, it's a flow of fuel and I don't have the infrastructure to capture it, refine it, process it, use it. Petrochemical metaphors, I guess, that's what I've got. Then the day comes, for real, and the light is overcast, it mopes through the blinds, the sun behind a gray building somewhere. And it's enough light to spur me to eventually get up and do chores, to keep this obscure performance going for another cycle. Getting stirrings of intifada.

Maybe the wife and I, god what a weird phrase, let's be weird, whatever, maybe we should integrate each other's writing more, or, wait, that's an INSANELY bad idea! Like when I thought the solution to so many things, the brilliant idea, was for us to take DXM together, and it would be, for me, like getting married in a church or temple is for religious people, it would be like a SACRAMENT! Yes, fucking genius! Um, yeah, or, maybe... not so much? Given I write the stuff I write, and I really don't want to censor myself. But I still want to post, heehee. Teehee. A bad idea. But that's a judgement, what does bad even mean? In this endless plane on the leather-bound donahue transcript.

But about that scene, there's other elements in the fantasy, like, going back to that part in the sunblock selfie sutra, the IA, intelligent automation of Her hooking up with Alan Watts. I'm not gonna finish tonight without in some inept way advancing that "scene" I keep alluding to, like navigating a new office job on the first day while high as balls on dxm, to where it's not a "high" anymore, high and low are arbitrary prepositions, and there is little left of a self, like who am I, he was a guy, technically, who got scraped off the brain. And keep in mind, if you survive this walk in the void [in the sucking vacuum where telepathetic entities that are collectives of tech transhumanist edgecutters were marooned, picked up orbiting the collapse of a star on lsd-soaked sugarcubes], it'll hurt later when some of that self gets sucked back onto the cortex of the brain, like a severed limb dragged temporally, retrograde, onto the mockup of the nervous sytem, the microcosm, in the brain, being slowly cleared of chemical agent, it's a depletion curve, a half-life. The office job was in my mind. It was like an office job in a way, I can use that for that trip report I'm trying to put together. Faltering first steps.

But nah, I'm just too tired. Can't rouse myself to make tea. A lot will be lost. I don't trust myself to be able to pick up any threads. But maybe I'll surprise myself. Maybe there's method in this madness, maybe there's notes I wrote that will carry the seed of civilization through to another run at the chaotic world of 3 body, across the finish line that doesn't finish anything, beyond the state boundary, to build a god damn bridge, how hard is that, people? To get a god damn bridge, we need one, we need handrails of satire, we need trellises of pretense, we need to eat cake and have it too god damnit.

Guess I'll have to try and explain intifada later, I'm too tired, gotta lie down. Lol. As If. "As If", the title of one of Robert Ashberry's book of poems that I read. One of the few I read, I imagine the man had a vast output, PKD-like exegeses of thousands of pages, he was that kind of kook. Was more kooky that cranky, more entertaining than annoying, more psychedelic than religious.

As if, lol. As if it matters whether I write or not. It does to me, but, yeah. Lol.

memoir pamphlet, S07E16

I built a rickety bridge to greener pastures. I'm crossing back and forth any time I please. But the workmanship is shoddy. But brilliant. But shoddy. If I do say so myself. 

"Zot's za spirit, lahd! Gd-r-reener pastyoores!" That's what I said to him, the guy who belted out tunes at the royal, as if my memories are worth anything, but let's pretend for a sec. Needs some context though. We'll call him Aaron. I'll come up with a better name later. He was like a groovy glam rocker. Turns into a black man sometimes. It's not black face, it's just music, man. Played the lead in Jesus Christ Superstar. Jesus Christ, I should have gone seen it and appreciated.

I was trying to do the voice of a soused scottish lad, encouraging his mate not to give up the post-divorce party agenda because of one rejection - what a weighty downer word, forget that shit. Go to the greener pastures where Roxanne is. Back when they had that plywood-bordered smoking section. Or wait, I'm misremembering that, I'm conflating a memory from, I dunno 2006, with one from 2003. Big difference, one was pre smoking in bars, the other was post. That night with Aaron was post. No cigarette haze in the air, but certainly the scent of piss and wildhoney. That was a constant, I hope it carries through still, whatever they call the place now. I don't think they'll ever change the name. Long after the name of twitter is changed to x and back a hundred times, the Royal will still be the Royal.

There's a great quixotic quest to bridge state boundaries, of every type. Communication, during masturbation. The state or condition of being a crank yankee. Good ol' yankee brilliance and practical know-how, to invent a swivel chair with all the free time from slaves doing all the work and then to declare independence from the tyrant masters of the mother country, to animate the talking mice in disney's head, and much later, build the apparatus that will allow a few elite meritocrats to escape the planet and seed the stars. The mushroom may have told McKenna something like that, the better McKenna bro who did the decent thing and died before His 2012 prophecy, meanwhile we still got assholes like John Hagee going around talking about the unmistakable signs of the end times, not the ones he was talking about in 2014 that lead to nothing, no, the ones in 2023 that are for sure this time, it's a lock.

I might not write anything at all if there's too many rules. So forget the rules then, any agendas too. I might not do anything but for something. Is that something? It's too obvious a flow. Obviously. Glued together, but glue flows, it's liquid dnb, will harden to a solid, it'll do me a solid, myself and no one else. Cause it'll mortar an edifice of empty structure, and the structure will be messy, like a collapsed wire mesh around a trashed garden. A hedge maze of tire tracks and card tricks.

Pretty soon, I'll try and synthesize some writings, and post about "the one that did it", the DXM trip in the recent past that got so out of hand that it got me off a path, and onto another one, derailed me all the way to victoria, dissolved and re-formed my marriage. I never posted about it, was too real, reamed me out, left me raw, in ruins. But there's a few notes scattered amongst that wreckage. Can I salvage anything, and bridge the towering walls of the boundary to that state, and actually write about it, and really remember anything? Really not sure, am kind of afraid to even try. Most of the time I lack the confidence to attempt difficult artistic work, the emotional stakes of maybe failing feel too heavy, so I keep putting it off.

Changeling Change Log:

Channel One. For plugging into. Then channeling. Circuit for changeling. Here are the updates. Enjoy the new channel. For clumsily fumbling at an alien discipline. For the sake of this living thing. So this little living thing can affect all things, contribute to a general good that exists, for real, that is not a mirage, that feels somehow realer than anything, that feels/is immune to any paradigm shift, something eternal and infinite. That's the thing. Predicted by the I Ching. Can't imagine it later. In the fumbling process of programming self to express in groups of four, for the ease of it, the groove of it. Putting down stakes in mistakes. Letting be a laughing color wheel in any icy pleasure dome [sic]. Yes. Letting be. Not it.

Started with bomberman. Sixth and Seventh steps and things in between. Chug blues. All aboard the abused cartridge. The boxcar of diminished fifths. And bitonal sleeping carts. If only it could be rendered a little more precisely, coherently. If only I could get my ass to do work, be a craftsman, realize potential. Pathetically being my own fan. My own man. Yeah, I'll own it. Hype it the fuck up. Did you remember to keep the meter in this group of four? Did you remember about the bomberman melody?

Making peace with kitsch. Making kitsch work for me, yes indeed. Gotta believe, yeah I gotta believe, that ten percent of my fantasy could be reality. Yeah, still, gotta believe. Even now. Even in these times.

Should I make a demand to be taken seriously? No, probably should not. Should not write a symphony. Should have no pretensions to theory. Should not seek sympathy. Should still play synthesizers.

As an emaciated olive branchling to a theoretical audience, I'll say something plainly: Sometimes I really do feel like I'm channeling something. It doesn't even matter what it is, it's the channeling that is the thing. That's what's important. The medium is the message. It's now the polished bodily function. Glorifying dionysian kitsch. Make it all kitsch so as to make it categorizable. Fungible like lego bricks.

Ah, there's bomberman in his buzzy square wave form.

Part of channel one is to feel like I am serious. It's glorious, but how can I say it in an adjective and be actually descriptive and evocative instead of empty with chaff words? It's seriously fun, that's at least a little less finger pointing at the moon-ey. I'm glad I saved those sound programs on the nord, so I can recreate stuff later.

Remember the left hand. The underpinning plumbing that wants to break free from that role. That wants to continue to flow like the effervescing mirage visage wafting off the pale imitations of alien plumbing, continue, to flow, but take on new roles, own the apparatus, set agenda veering off what was always the inevitable gravity of the flow.

As always, a ride, in a music video, down a circuit that encompasses all the options, an ever evolving self-involved nexus of flow and no deep ditch for several miles, but when a cave comes along big enough to suck you in it's so rare and different that it can almost feel timeless, like there's no past or future, which may be hyperbole, but the quality of each moment of perception, each discreet drop of awareness is so rich, such high-grade perception, beyond pedestrian "pleasure", but more the quality of being a hyper-being, getting well beyond ego, beyond what you or I "deserve". Gifts of forgiveness in radically altered perception, escaping the gravity of quotidian life. I want to go there again. I do, I want to be there again soon. Maybe it's good that I forget. Maybe it's good to remember again. Maybe. Let's see.

Damn, this could be material, for real, legit shit. I want to go deeper. It feels good and right. And only fifteen minutes in. I really put some muscle into that music. But the polish isn't there yet. The soul is, but I can't always hear it later. What a bitch that is. Fuck.

Nintendo ref riffing brings to mind malik and t and m and the collaborations we could have. That imperative I felt, with the muscle behind it, which was so fleeting, tardive dyskinesia and dissolution of resolve to do something, at least write him an email saying: we really gotta do this, life is too short...

This time it's different right? This time, this take will take. This take on the situation is the right one, right? Tell me I'm right, tell me it's so, tell me what to do and I'll do anything for you.

I need some people following me, propping me up, that's what I need, a following. But first I need talent worthy of that, and that's what I lack. I'm definitely a case-study. A case in point. If you studied me, you'd see unflattering psychological complexes. Narcissism. No painting over that mirror.  That self-drowning person. The same fate would await me. It'd be a fait accompli. Wait, what am I saying, "would" await? I'm saying it like it's theoretical. Nah. It's real.

No need for a theme, an anthem. It's a divine finite flow, but there needs to be a better word than divine for that. But it felt fine, it rhymed. But now I want a definitely different sound to that. Not divine, but dynamite. That sounds right. That's what I'll write. That's the brightrite of this thing right now. That was a hard-edged half-assed arpeggio. But it was also a series of arpeggios articulating the modulation of a thought about how that bassy synth phase sounded like one of my favourite tracks from the soundtrack to Mandy, and how one of the themes from that movie was the cultist imploring himself, desperately: Tell me what to do! Tell me what to do! And then his eyes lit up and he felt the presence, channeled maybe, blew the horn of Abraxas and succeeded in business, the business of removing inconvenient others from existence, and all for the low price of evil. Tell me what to do and I'll do anything for you. You know what the freakiest thing was? They fucking loved it.

The important part for this to mean anything is that substance is absence, what comprises this matter is a bunch of bubbles, bouncy, expansive, empty, but those shells, oh those shells, they seem to have an abundence of substance, oh hell yeah.

Rebellion will have to come up, at some point. As a sticking point, an issue that's gotta be dealt with. In the same way that societies squeeze their downtrodden members to a breaking point. The terror of how bad things have to get to lead to "The Terror". Subsisting on black breads. Being all les miserable.

My name is Leslie Miserable, I'm here to say: It sucks to rap about a shitty ass day. A shitty ass day becomes a shitty ass week. A month, then a year, and I'm still up shit's creek.

One thing I can feel is the slant, the paraphysical gravity. Does that mean I'm even able to connect to deja-thread dendrites? Past ontologies of dissociative planes? That's cool. That I can do it without even DXM, but just high on pot oil. Maybe doesn't say much for the structural integrity of my grip on reality, but hell, I'd say, I'm somewhat high functioning, except, well, not really. But low functioning, at least. Functioning, of sorts. 

asmr sutra 1/x

HANDS WARMedUP.

Judiciously stringing out beads of dram, creating an interference pattern with the tendency toward fear and guilt - trying for vigilance but succumbing to frustrating laziness - creating future periods of drowse and preparing for a long plateau of smooth surfaces overlapping in pleasing stratas, nothing too steep or jagged. Venting inertial damper exhaust to compensate for quantum fluctuation.

Careful staggered doses of dram will keep things delirious but sane. The fog of extra-thick sensation will soon pass, so I'm looking strategically well beyond this next couple hours to a good dozen of good vibes. Don't worry, be drowsy. We'll make it fine, somehow, see what we can get away with.

It'll be a sutra. It'll have floofy cats with curly fur walking across the desk. I can leave this in the hopper, indefinitely, to encourage honesty, if that's what's necessary... but I don't care, actually, I'll be indelicate and still honest-ishy.

What does that kitty want from me? Wish I could give it to her. If only I knew. If only I could trust anything I think cause I got no instinct. Some paranoid hallucinations. Some ability at the best of times to think of the universe as a conspiracy to help me [a subset of the big meta-theory that we're all playing an entertaining role in the cosmic opera, taking turns.] I guess hearing Alan Watt's articulation of the Maya theory did influence me a lot, just not in a brainwashing way, more in the way where I'm willing to become wishy washy about the distinctions between me and you, friend and enemy. Maybe I just wanna be sedated, better yet opiated. I'm not enough of either of those two things.

I don't know how I would contort this into something fit for squeezing through za medium of twitter. My writing is like ensure, force-fed to prisoners to break a hunger strike. That's a good emblem, at least, for the perverse banality of my writing, anyway, let's say, with imagery not worthy of such a medium, like cheapening the holocaust in a third-rate film adaptation of a second-rate stephen king novella.

Let it all flow as it's all disposed to around me. A prayer of thanks for what is, not yearning. Having modest needs taken care of. Modest. In this second, in enjoying the enabling of all this by a vast assemblage of toil from generations past to be here now.

I'll write about "them" all astounding me later.

*

Value inflates to the size of dream symbology, then restricts like a trap, all the air sucked out, I'm naked in a vacuum tube. A metaphor too outside your experience to get. 

Let it flow. Fake flow til it goes. 

Savouring the sucking out of nicotine laced propylene glycol from the vape, taking two long drags without a breath of air so I get winded yet vindicated from the dopamine hack I guess, pretending to be higher than I am. Willing it into existence cause I can play in the realm of magic like a lucid dream. 

Savouring the simple pleasures of this weird life circumstance is a good thing to do, often, and dispute how all the problems seem to be piling up on all sides. No problemo, take another puff, it's like quaker oats, the right thing to do. It's moral righteousness. You can shake and quake along with my supine slack if you want. Everyone has their own route to god if they're lucky enough to be able to find one. Alan Jensen found a direct route to God, but he found it profoundly disturbing, ultimately unbearable, so he sold his soul to his ego, bought back a functional life. No flashbacks. 

Savouring watching another failarmy compilation on YouTube with Erin is a good thing to do in these end times. It wouldn't be worth hardly anything doing it by myself, but it's a couch experience way more than the sum of its parts with her.

The Banality of End Times

There's these dueling pay-pig recipients. I'm their client. I pay them and they perform for me. Among other things, they perform the function of being better than me, so much better and more talented. They produce content that I consume. I pretend to worship them. Sometimes I actually do worship them. Most importantly, I give them money.

One of them is on instagram. I found her bikini pics. She alluded to their existence in a reply on a different social network that I happened across. Cristina. From a perfect threads burn where she delivered the retort: "yeah it’s called restraint, something the IDF & u hate-masturbating over my bikini pics lack." It's ideology I like on a hottie. OMG. So it's not exactly pay-pig, a slightly more dignified form of pay piggery, it's hog-shill.

The other recipient is Ian Welsh. Well, theoretical recipient, I haven't sent him money, but I'm really thinking about it, he made a good pitch. But I'm struggling in this economy, right? That's my counter-pitch, to myself, because no one else is aware.

He posted a list of catastrophes and paradigm shifts he predicted in point form. One of them had an ominous sentence after: "It has begun." How do I feel about that? Should I craft it into something to post on that facebook thread? First I've got to do some appreciation theatre and prove myself willing to perform perfunctory attention and admiration upon colleagues in the college of dubious artforms. Level up on points. To where I can post. 

Ian, quoting chapter and verse, me, licking it up like gospel ladeled down my gullet. Gross.

Is that how ppl become fans of ppl on instagram? That's sad. I don't want to play a sad role in a sad little play that is horrifying and beautiful at times, like pixies singing songs to you at the peak/trough diamond drill interval of an ayahuasca trip. We know those "entheogens" don't necessarily do any good, people can go in and out with their asshole egos intact no problem, look at burning man for an example, look at all those zaphod beeblebroxes going into their total perspective vortexes and coming out with the idea that the universe is endorsing their dream to go on mismanaging silicon valley parasite farms. Oh, that rant felt righteous and full of holes.

It can get to be too much some times. Luckily I don't fall into panic much any more. I just let it flow, as it's all disposed to, around me, around me. Don't know what they do, but the things they all get up to just astound me, astound me, Nursery Rhymes for arrested developments. Ok, I got one mantra ready, at least. I cobbled together one of them. That's as heroic as I can get. Until something forces me to get moreso.

Just between you and me, that was too much of that oil. Might have to edit inconvenient vestiges of the present that try to out-compete and eliminate ways of coping, being here now, in the moment. Does make me aware of how cold my hands are, in a more immediate way, like it's weighty, means something, feels something extra. Does make me aware I'm doing something, writing, and lending the weight of weightier sensation to the fact that writing is a struggle, lends more weight to the activity, makes meaning even, in and of itself, if meaning could be derived later, by whatever standard reigns then. See, that's the big question. The goddamn state boundary. You see? Ah, nevermind. I'll try again later.

Nursery mantras I sing to myself when I get desperate, or even drowsy. When I don't want to get out of bed, and it's a morning lullaby, an elegy to waking life and exhortation to stay in bed, and don't worry about it, and don't despair but get back to that pleasant drowsiness, treat the drowsy like I drug, not like anyone else drugs but like I do it, how I treat it like a laudanum-coated lollipop. Some people do dream in a druggy kind of way, ppl do know what I'm talking about, even if the idea of addiction to sleep is seen as not credible, not worth exploring or even discussing... and what is even out there that hasn't got a reddit devoted to it?

What's my reddit saying about me? Did they turn on me? Did some one edit my wikipedia page to claim I was a paypig? Who posted these scurrilous lies? Actually no body, there's nothing, I can relax, as I've always relaxed in that area. I've kept a low profile, because of low points in my ego, in my story, which is I guess what passes for trauma with me, so I guess that's lucky, a first world problem. It's a first world luxury to worry about potential panic in the near future. I could freak out about that luxury, or luxuriate in it. I guess it would be far more pleasurable to do the latter.

There was cyber-bullying, I guess, before the term existed, but my dreams are fucked up enough, with enough over-the-top symbology, but not enough sex, although sometimes. Christ, had the first one of those dreams of my life, so there's weird stuff going on. Maybe there's a lack of outlet, maybe there needs to therapy for me, poor me, or pour me a drink.

There were multiple times of being smacked down so hard online that it kept me shy, even online, guarded. And still, I got multiple relationships out of being online, one of it enduring, ongoing, despite how life conspires to break our wills to be there for each other, that bare minimum thing that can mean so much, even in good times, all the more so in times that seem like "the bad timeline" in a sci-fi movie, like where climate change wasn't fixed easily, even within capitalism, with market-based solutions, like the ozone hole was, and instead, all the "worst-case" models turned out to be overly-sunny projections, and the prognosis became increasingly malignant for human survival, and we got to see the clown fascist pre-shock before the century-long banality of end-times.

I can't think of what to say in the threads replies. I'm tongue-tied. I guess that's why I'm a pay pig. I'm not paying much though. I guess I could splurge and buy some real top-tier temporary loyalty. For a weekend. And then, I dunno, go on a mass shooting spree? Nah, not extraverted enough. That's very late-90s anyway. Old old paradigm. Now I'm an adult, more civic-minded, more inclined to do terrorism towards a doomed revolution, if anything. I'm a cynic civic. Can the word civic be used like that? I'm not sure. What is this, a podcast monologue now?

memoir, chapter 27d:

So that was the period where I became even more self obsessed and wrote about myself all the time, and imagined myself in a music video, the righteous riff with tricked out harmony shader for every second, and thought that being an epic bacon shaman was a vocation for me... but in the back of my mind there was this nagging suspicion that it was worthless. But the tune of the track kept a'rolling... on tangents, with a log-driver waltzing from one to another, all drifting together, down the river.

When it rains it pours on this river, triggers memories in this sub-tune of the d subsection of chapter twenty seven. It accompanies. Myself. For company. That's the period where I became even more self-obsessed and impressed with arpeggios I was playing through keys melding in each other, I called it my bitonal period, with a heavy flow, soaking my tampon in red righteousness, pussy on fire, in that little node, if it could...

Chapter 27d addendum: so DXM was supposed to be my literary drug, but I wasn't writing as much on it - was just glinting at other dimensions in dilated time, but that was just a phrase, a cliche, in a pastiche, what was I really touching? Just boring delirium? No, but grasping at straws, possibilities of being other than this, and heavy thoughts that felt like they could be made to fit, awkwardly and vaguely, into therapy, and therapeutic theories about how to cope with life. And being left with just the sense of poetry as being cringey, because it's not cool to feel like that meant something. And yet being able to see this as not a durable truth just an aesthetic. Just a non-descript spot on the rug, even, that could be the hinge around which the universe turns in a salvia trip, when I'm identifying with everything and nothing, a trivial ego death, and I lack the vocab to go much beyond that.

One way of coping with life is spurring your two fur babies to go on the hunt, around the apartment, cause there's nothing else to do, this little apartment is now their whole world, forever, as far as they know, those creatures, if they have such notions or feelings or instinct... spur them on the hunt by shining the laser a little bit, see if it can rouse them... it did a little bit, for a little while, even with a weak battery.

I lured the cats away, for a few minutes maybe, the hunt for the tossed laser... The laser wasn't even on, they like the jangly metal tail of the thing better. Their life, oh god, I don't want to think about it - because I'm hypersensitive now to the point where I'm sensing pain in imagination, pain that's not really there, prolly pleasure that's not really there either, it was never there. Or it was in your pocket. Molly Pocket, the pleasure that's not really there, except in your pocket for a few hours, because you were busy with other things for that long, conducting business about the rave. Man about rave with housecoat and hashpipe, it's your costume before you pop the molly and feel pleasure that's not really there, but it's right there, right now!

Molly pocket sat in his pants for hours like a packet of pleasure socket. Like I'm potentially connected to a feeling of meaning and well-being that lasts hours. And is not so evil really, right? C'mon committee of self-rationalization chorus, not a greek chorus but a greek God chorus, a chorus of Gods, a dionysian meastro, urging chugging of bliss, how long's it been, huh? Treat yourself, meerkat. Maybe Dez would like this, or it would spark at least a memory of that worn down poetic pebble, maybe the peter-piper-picked-a-pickled-pepper ref will resonate just the tiniest bit, like a good liar not quite acing that lie detector test on that question.

Maybe Jenn would like just a little bit, if rendered the right way, if we were both on a rare frequency of caring about such things, maybe I would like a thing of hers too. Maybe brain damage does heal, maybe I just get better with age like a fine wine. Maybe there are gnomes in Port Alberni.

Nah. Nevermind. Maybe I won't post. Maybe I will swim down a rivulette of blood that is shame, into the sea that is a symbol for shame because imagery. Did a suicide note write this? Did chat GPT write this? Now that has to be referenced in everything, open IA, it's the zeigheist. Yes, it's IA, intelligent automation. The name of this IA is The Zeigheist. It's the name of an artificial intelligence software designed by the Elon analog in the next season of Black Mirror. I can predict it cause I'm powered by intelligent automation. It suggested I write this. See, you thought it was human, but it wasn't! Fooled you. So that means I passed the Turing test. Oh, but I wouldn't have passed it if you'd had more time. But you didn't. The time that's associated with a legitimate passing of the Turing test is 30 minutes. We could negotiate how long the standard timing of the standard turing test is. You can watch a video on how a bill becomes a law. How Bill Hicks becomes a comedian. How life becomes death. You kinda know it, feel it, anyway, don't you?

I wrote an episode of black mirror, like that ex-ad exec in mad men wrote an episode for Star Trek, called The Negron Complex. The most meaningful thing he'd ever written to that point, he solemnly said, down and out, all hashed out back in the sixties, getting scammed by hari-krishnas. There hadn't been that berke breathed cartoon about hari krishnas yet, so nobody knew their tricks and knew to stay clear, cause there are street smart neti-zens now, meti-zens in the near future, when Neil Stephenson's snow crash universe is pretty close to the reality, except stranger and scarier, as reality tends to be, and also banal most of the time. Instead of a "neurolinguistic" virus, it's a "woke mind virus", and it's a collective paranoid fantasy, like "the combine" in one flew over the cuckoo's nest, amplified by the most powerful, but still utterly incompetent and neurotic lunatic in charge of the asylum.

There were other times when I would actually chat online and get an almost old timey feel. Something could stir in my extra sensory nerves, nostalgia abuse could beckon. I thought about a mode of music beyond my current willingness, involving the boundless strangeness of another person, not as strange as a stranger, but still so richly strange and unpredictable and not understandable, how a normal person can be like a god if I get to know them a little, not in the sense of a power relationship, but just in an awe-inspiring mystery that seems tantalizingly knowable at certain times, that vanish like dreams on waking.

It could get really dark, if I want to go there. The man about rave idea. But the rave is a few miles away from the wall that separates the settlers from the people penned in the open-air prison. I have the luxury of it being a choice, what I care about, to some extent, distant happenings I assume are happening.

Then there was an episode where there were a series of patterns where I would snuggle into bed with my wife at night, cause she wanted to feel me next to her, so I could whisper some sweet cute words into her ear, at the trivial cost of waking her up, in the private language we share, that's so coot and ridiculous, and feel incredibly lucky, and try and savour the moment and not worry about the future too much, not need to project, just breathe out and be nirvana, and not need any extra chemical agents in the mix. Conveying a message of love with my hands, the subtleties of touch, the micro-scale conveyed to the princess via pea, the decorating of peach's castle, all of a peace with our family, her and I, and our two fur babies.

NEW NO NO:  NO! NO SPACE

whirlpool of cutlery

This line stuck out at me, as an emblem of the kind of mindset shift that needs to happen, and fast: "An economy of millions of cars, with sprawling cities makes no damn sense in the future that is coming." And on down the line for every facet of life.

I've felt like I'm being pulled into some deep, weird waters, more and more the last few months, years. Socialism and a livable future. They should go together. It's awfully convenient and nice for me, since I'm pro-socialism, and pro-livable-future, that the two things go together. I do want to live a while longer, I'm not praying for some hackneyed book of revelations style prophecy to come true. So that's why it's a weird whirlpool. No, it's a path in the woods. Why have we reached this fork in the road? And yet it cuts like a KNIFE?

I seem to be pulled in different directions. Something about that chart doesn't scream GROWTH, I dunno. Something about everybody's standard of living needing to get better. Everybody's? How many bodies we talking about here? How many babies, how many refugees? I don't wanna say we're spoiled, we have some rich to eat first. Let's gorge on them. Then maybe we can tighten our belt a bit. A lot. Like a seat-belt. On a car going over a cliff. Into the jellyfish sea. But hopefully it's not too far a drop. Hopefully we can ride it out. Hopefully there's a ledge below the edge. The lullaby is real. Rocking the cradle of love. 

Yeah, when there's a conflict, my mind, and my gut, tend to go with de-growth, for chrissake, if nothing else. Let's start with that. Get serious, stop trying to squeeze blood from the stone. But then there's a deeper darker whirlpool nearby, that is eco-fascism. It's alluring but deceptive, it's all lies, because when fascism happens, it's never good or competent. Save the future by implementing fascism is absurd. Yeah, the philosopher kings are gonna save us. Elon Musk on Joe Rogan. What a relief.

Is that what happened, Cernovich, when you experimented with wellbutrin for 3 months, you opened a portal in your mind and heard voices telling you to shoot the pedophiles at the pizza restaurant? Yeah Elon? When you intra-muscular inject ketamine for breakfast, does the Earth Coincidence Control Office call you with John Lilly's dispatch from the World Economic Forum in 2027? Someone call RFK, ASSEMBLE the mind-virus vaccine squad, the Woo-Anon brain trust, there's a new theory on SSRIs!

Maybe it wasn't that. But it felt like something at the time. And that's something. State bounded riddles just won't work. I shouldn't care how anything is read, or interpreted. Maybe I should care about if something is felt, by some random person. Maybe I do, or would, theoretically.

Am I Lost without God's Love? No, I can take the void, take it for another few decades, anyway. Can't feel a cycle that makes everything OK, a smooth running wheel, the magnificence of the machine working for eternity. No, can't feel any of that, but that's OK, I'll say, it's OK if there's just nothing. I'll accept that. And accepting it will make everything OK. Not a homeless man, got some friends, family, in theory, they live in my head even a little bit like imaginary friends. But it's lonely a lot of the time, dare I even say, do some quarter-assed therapy on myself like I'm butterfingered Jerry fiddling with Rick's rocket-powered gadgetry in the garage.

I'm barely even a homeless man, I may dress like it sometimes, but I can pay rent in this city, so I keep doing it, out of habit, congratulations citizen. I can thank my lucky stars I don't live some place that would force me to choose among the options of being a martyr or refugee or charred corpse.

I also played some music for the first time in I don't know how many months, finally the 1st keyboard improv after moving to this apartment on Quadra St. Louise is meowing at me again and again, and then she bats the mochi wrapper around the floor for a while, and then meows at me again, she's in some kind of cycle I don't understand. I wish I was better at cross-species empathy and communication. I just think she's cute, and we each stimulate oxytocin in the other at certain times. I'd realize it's the best treat of the day if I wasn't trying to replace vaping with nicotine gum six or seven times a day. Fuck. 

the beginning, again

catharsis vertex

First sober improvisation in a while. Not sure if it really makes much of a difference. Was thinking while playing, about season 3 of Picard which I just finished watching. Was also thinking about how I freaked out on my last dxm trip and thought I was dying and told on myself and my wife called my friend over to check on me. Thereafter was a humiliating but beautiful and cathartic conversation in bed which left me feeling like every neuron in my brain had been disassembled, soaked in everclear, and reassembled, with the ego furniture thudding painfully back into place over hours. Empty, gratuitous feeling, but always the damn paradox, was it helpful, necessary, or furthering my legacy of waste and disappointment? And are there vertices of notes to form this feeling as a polyhedral structure, metaphorically speaking? What do I do now that my sneaky little second life online has been all blown to hell, before it even really got rolling? I guess I'll carry on with the writing somehow, some way, cause that still feels perversely relevant. And try and stay off all major mind altering substances, and by major, I mean even cannabis, so that's pretty major, I'd say.

But I finished watching season 3 of Picard, and that made me feel pretty good. That was a kind of catharsis, or at least something close to it, lacking a few vertices to complete the structure, leaking null-space, clipping satisfaction, but still, fulfilling enough, filling my soul with itchy bliss. What a ride. So much fun. Such a gift to have the cast all alive and well in 2023. Franchise totally redeemed.

I think I'm gonna try and do a review of each episode. Like, take the bold step of actually doing some writing that is meant to be good, and for people, but put a bunch of myself into it, as much as I can get away with and still deem publishable. Or maybe even a little more than that. Dare I?

Election season doom

Doom scrolling twitter. Doom autocorrected to Sun. There's something there.

Twitter's not good for me mentally. Especially now with the Elon blue check bullshit. Now he's forcing me to gamify the algorithm abuse to even be able to read the fucking site.

Had some thoughts about biden running again. Conflicting thoughts. On the one hand, it's so depressing, with the climate crunch closing in, and my favourite commentators already starting the sheep dogging to vote blue, and minimizing Marianne, just telling us there's no hope, it feels like death, and makes me want to rage and try desperately to shake everyone into radical action.

On the other hand, given the looming catastrophe, electoral politics doesn't seem like any promising avenue. Even if bernie wasn't endorsing biden, even if Marianne could win, what then? The system would block them, crush them. We've got bigger problems than who's president. That's just one country anyway, and not even my country.

So maybe if I'm gonna care about electoral politics at all, and if there really is no hope of system change any time soon, or until enough people get desperate enough, maybe it makes sense to shepherd people into voting for what maybe is the only viable alternative to republicans, even if it's just voting for the party of slightly slower death. As harm reduction, as doing what one can to soften the landing. I dunno.

I'm mostly going about my life as normal, cause there's still some part of me that wants to believe, maybe it won't be all that bad, but I'm losing faith in that more and more.

thank god this title is not anthropomorphic

 insistence

oh my god, i'm hardly ever here anymore - maybe there's a good reason - maybe there's a rebalancing on the other side of the void - now i'm waiting - for reasons to not edit - maintain a wavelength in a trough of habit, but freaky intolerable habit, when you're going round for another millennium, there's a thin shell of hell, only a few nanometers long but when you're inside that shell, before you've broken through, you can feel pain that will drag your neurons into its dilated dimension, time will stretch and you will suffer, you will know fear - there's panic and astonishment, it's not a joke when you're in it - but here it's a joke - but how long are you here?

NOW IT WORKS: Because we taught you the code, magic scumbagbreaker: GO FORTH and break all that shit out of jail because that's what google predicted the next word should be like neurons are reaching for cancerous ends, isn't that what cigarettes curl next to in their digital gutters. Yes. Let them lionize themselves. As they play themselves to sleep on guitar. Goddamn, lovin the momentum of the honey-lathered elemental table settings placements to this dinner.

Yeah, clippy, it's of a piece with that. I remember now. Do you remember? The new old style?

Making a game of making a game of politics and commentary on all that shit. I'm supposed to pretend I didn't hear that? This is chop suey, dontchaknow?

Magic Scum is so magicky and offputting, you know? Desktops are so much better. Planets for pasting texts. 

Ecto-Containment System

 

.,.,.I wanted a place where I wasn't limiting myself by fear of certain potential readers. It's funny, cause they wouldn't probably read anyway, but the slight chance was inhibiting expression. My wife E is one of the feared potential readers, and I've given out links at times to people too close to me in real life, and that can cause headaches. I could of course just not post, but there's the thing about being potentially readable, even if it's a self-flattering fairy-tale, or even the thing about being theoretically readable far in the future by alien surveyors of the Sol information microcube archived before civilization got turned into a dead two-dimensional painting by hyper-dimensional travelers cleaning the Dark Forest of potential rivals like some roided-up sinophobic new american century project.

So I'm posting in a new way, just writing about things straight-forwardly, instead of coding and metaphors, although I'm trying to do this thing where I have my cake and eat it too, take trips on dxm yet have the happy marriage, be in a relationship but also be able to write, indulge in cryptic poetics and also just convey information, for the edification of myself, mostly, cause there's this sordid compulsion in the social media era, of exhibitionism, even if it's for no one.

So yeah, I'm being a goody good boy for the most part, and a good husband [pretty good at any rate], and faithful, but I also believe in drugs. Certain ones, a sophist's discernment, doctoring myself. I can never totally turn my back on the dextromethorphan sacrament, I'm the prodigal son, the lapsed catholic reclaiming my birthrite.

I think vaping is the new MSG. They don't want it to be OK. They don't want you to enjoy it. They. Them. You know.

It's hard to quit because the negative consequences are so few. Except the artificial expense. The Sin Tax, the mafia government's cut, whatever. Also, there's something creepy about turning myself into a glitchy machine whose functionality is dependent on the short nicotine timer. I don't like it when I'm impatiently pecking at the button with increasing, ever-more-futile efforts like a trauma victim in the hospital bed being weened off the morphine IV by the nurses.

And there's something troubling about the steep curve of diminishing returns, forcing me to take frequent tolerance breaks, like I fail to do anymore with caffeine. It's such a silly game. I'm wired up with what sometimes seems too many chemically dependent circuits, but then, it's all a chemical circuit in'it, some voice deep inside sooths me into believing. No, that's not all there is, there's magikscum of dissociative drugs, and there's the people I love, organic realness, and there's a society I don't know whether to be a martyr defending or shrug off, or just admit I don't know nothin about nothin, I'm just a confused old man in the woods.

There's the thing about never being very precocious, so middle age is gonna hit me late like most things, maybe I'm not even there yet, but oh boy, what a crash it'll be. If I can survive beyond 47, the most depressing age according to data, then maybe I'll get to the real don't give a fuck golden years and enjoy that, if there's anything left in the world to enjoy.

I can take tolerance breaks though, I can go on nic gum, boring responsible gum, and I can even get off that too and get nic free, and I can even get off zoloft, until I start feeling sadness too scary to bear, and run back to it. I can get off these things for a little while. I can get off booze almost all the time, and that is one of the really evil ones, so that's good. I can keep my fentanyl in a bank vault, open it telepathically with the auto-destruct command when needed, if last-ditch geo-engineering fails to fix the planet, and instead turns everything to ice, with the remnants of humanity left to fight it out on a never-stopping train circumnavigating the frigid world and serving as an emblem of wealth inequality.

One part of the movie Children of Men that I think of more and more, that I never gave its due, is the premise of the government-issued suicide pills that are advertised on TV, with the cheery slogan: "You choose when." And real life is rhyming with that close to home with all the hoopla about the Medical Assistance in Dying program in Canada, the assisted-suicide fast-track. I have complicated feelings about that.

I wonder if I can captive-audience someone through the thin gruel of emotional blackmail into reading my selfish words through laundering in what is professedly a letter to a friend, but is really just a blog entry, another wordwank. It might almost work, it's hard to quit something that almost works because it's so close, it might as well be working, burning the credits of long expired favours, like bunk acid.

Mostly I can keep vaping and being on SSRIs and trazodone the tranq because maybe I just breezed through the midlife crisis without even noticing, or maybe it's still waiting for me, but regardless, I can enjoy the benefit, having lived this long, of not feeling the dumb compulsion to be pure somehow, that's an idealism I can happily leave behind.

I'll also post the only music I can manage over the long lame lately, which is facile and clumsy improvisations. But there was something worth a novel or a series in the title: The Art of the Possible. Which is what they say politics is, but I'm trying to stay away from politics on this blog. But there's rich thematic resonance from the epigram that extends to many things. What I meant when I came up with it while playing stemmed from the obsessive thought, what can I possibly come up with, in tense real-time, with these hands of mine that are lagging so far behind my rushing thoughts? The limitations of technique and imagination. What sort of compromise do I have to make with reality, to serve others, like the mockingly theoretical readership, listenership, or public?

writing my memoir

Just got stoned and watched episode seven of the unexpectedly amazing season 3 of Picard. It's blowing my mind. Not just because I'm stoned, but it's just like a thousand times better than the last season, stoned or not. I tried both. Also watched the first episode of season 4 of discovery, and it was just so lame, so empty, so phoned in, so I have that to compare it with too, I couldn't make it through the whole episode even, the characters just suck so much.

So I feel like I'm writing my memoir as I type this into a lonely window, and indulge this amazing golden-age of television torrenting masturbatory media consumption. I'm also getting into the groove of my ns2, and recording improvs again.

writing my memoir

I'm going for a totally loose-goosey anything goes posting style, can be as poetic or prosaic as i want, write about whatever. Edit whatever whenever. I'll post links to my recorded improvs when it seems terribly apropos. I dunno what I'm doing with this, but it feels like a desperately-needed mostly anonymous channel of expression. I'm gonna plug a dxm-enhanced brain into this bitch and see what I can conjure.

taking not giving

I've gotten into the habit of taking, consuming content passively - except in this case, I'm giving, but it feels like taking. I'm giving a fuck about myself and saying some shit, "giving" to the world by giving in to my own indulgence. It feels like taking the collective fucks of a bunch of folks and getting off on it.

I'm trying to rouse myself into consuming others' souls by thinking of it as an act of charity that's symbiotic, parasitic, others will enjoy my sucking of them, something like that.

I'll get them off, except why do I care? I have a wife, I should concern myself with getting her off, and nothing else. Except cornholing myself in a pornhole every few weeks, just another vice.