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?

magic skum

What's going on this week in the memescape? Man, the things we could write parodies of that no one's even thought to rise to the challenge of creating. Like sub-genres of sub-genres of podcasts.

I'm pretty high, that vape pen packs a punch. THC still goes a long way in this head of mine.

I was thinking about talking about a metaphorical mistress. Drugs again. My achilles' heal. Also my poetry and soul. Or is that going too far? Is that a cancellable offense? Getting offended is going on offense. A necessary correction, then over-correction, pendulum swings like an axe and there can be nothing else arrogance.

For lack of people to communicate meaningfully with, I'll ramble here. I mean there's some, not to be an ingrate. Ingratitude is the dubious luxury of normal men, I guess, and maybe politics, like anger, is also a dubious luxury. There's some I communicate meaningfully with on occasion, just not as many as the glutinous part of me wants.

I gotta have some vices, there's harm-reduction in vices is my newest vibey justification for it, and it's hard to fill the void of how alcohol enhances my personality, so I have to settle for no booze ever, and stay away from all the drugs booze hypnotizes me into saying are ok, so anything that feels too good, benzos, uppers and stims, and if I'm being brutally honest, opiates too, with maybe the pathetic allowed exception of a sub-high-school-drop-out-basement-chemist-quality coldwater extraction of codeine from tylenol 1s now that I don't know where to get the better aspirin ones that I can theoretically filter the caffeine out of, if you call fifty percent filtering, lol. I gotta maybe do some self-crit and come to grips with how much I love run on sentences, and then decide on how self-indulgent I wanna be, in a lot of senses.

Politics, anger... they can be nasty vices too, but maybe I can compartmentalize the gratitude I need for a modicum of spiritual conditioning to stay somewhat sober, and keep that separate from the righteous indignation to ingratiate myself to emaciated space-babies. Ok, it's getting silly. I get something brilliant almost crystalized and then it dusts into pretty powder when I try to bring it back, the bane of my existence. It's like that scene in Altered States, where at the end of the trip in mexico he sees his lover slowly fade into a sphinx that itself fades into atmospheric haze in the howling wind of long plateau time. The hysterical laughter in the run-up to the pale blue sphinx coda reminded me of salvia trips I've had, and the spirit of erosion and geological time projected on a human's mindspan.

It's good the weed still has some magic for me, there's reasons yet to live, like T was telling me, about his reasons to live, begging the question, how fake is this potent suicidal ideation performance?

Remaining grateful and humble enough in my interface with aspects of society I need to stay alive while still getting to rage and be poetic, that's a neat trick, could I pull it off? Could I have my cake and eat it too? Not eat my cake and have it too, which is how Ted Kazinsky's brother knew his brother was the guy that held possible bombing victims hostage to make the new york times publish his manifesto, which is the high water mark of globally published manifestos by bombers, we'll not see its like again.

So, I'm getting back into the d now. People always think d means dick but for me it means lady dextromethorphan. Sometimes I get been-there done-that vibes, but sometimes there's real magic. Now, am I disgracing the name of magic by calling it that, like what the hell do I mean by magic? Would I mortally offend some wiccans or satanists? Satanists are the wisest cause they picked the coolest aesthetic, at least for white people, or the white trash anyway, which I am in some ways, no matter how not-racist I try to be, but I still love the metal. Maybe there's more side-eye now, but I can still bang while side-eyeing. Damn, this sounds like some fusion of boomer confusion and millennial lingual barnacles that attached to me over the past two decades, based.

What I call magic might be synthetic skum which is worthless, not even organic scum which has the dignity of carbon-based compounds in its scummy matrix, but silicon-based digital scum that you could barely call a lifeform, even on the nano-scale. My magic skum is dextromethorphan and THC based, and I might throw even more substances into the mix, I'm already going a bit rogue from conventional d wisdom by taking 4th-plateau doses while continuing my normal regimen of sertraline. Not supposed to mix with SSRIs but really, it only seems scary on paranoid peaks of THC. Some deeply sick part of me is even thinking about bringing the remaining acid tabs into the mix. A self-sabotaging god-cell incepts into me, metacognitively, the idea that it's ok, it's good to make those tabs count because who knows when the next acid would be within my grasp, as if it's not a once or twice a decade thing, all even my most radical adventurous self could be talked into by the rest of mes. So, the voice says to me, gather them together and make them count, cause after all these years, who knows if they're even potent anymore, which they probably fucking are, but I have brilliant ways of kidding myself. So, like in that song I wrote, Going, when I sang "since you forgot what it was like - you must endure the end again", but that was only a moment of hell, surrounded by, well, a little shell of heaven, maybe angstroms thick, with this ether of floaty alien salvia-flavour other null-space around, that's the foreplay I get off on with deep DXM holes, and it's so dissociating from the physical, so much better than the nothing-burger that is sensory deprivation tanks [or maybe I'm just not sensitive enough to sensory deprivation tanks, haha, to trip like John Lilly], so dissociating from the physical that I can get in bad places, but overall, the anesthetic engine is powerful enough to blunt emotion or flatten it entirely, make it irrelevant, which does wonders for the wandering of my mind, exploring aspects of selves, but I'm still nowhere near the artistry of tripping, such a hamfisted flailer-about in that realm, what I take back is so below the potential and threshold of anything share-worthy much less artistry.

And the "end again" was total madness and panic, I guess, but now so quickly I'm almost talking myself into it again, cause there was decent anesthetic from the twin dissociatives, ketamine and DXM, so although it smothered my emotions like a thick weighted quilt, they got so amplified by acid that when they broke free of even that level of analgesia they were a traumatizing onslaught of excruciating ecstasy, really kinda negative in an unbearable way I would say, whatever positronic spin I can put on it. The psychic shock left marks, tire treads across my brain, my neural net scarred. Ooh, that sounds badass. It sounds, uh, based, or something, let's say, let's move on to that, let's adapt and adopt the words of the unlucky fucks that gotta inherit this mess, my gen's cultural language could do with colonization, why not, bring it on Z, alpha, whatever, how long does that categorization survive when all demographics get brutally cauterized by the future, turned into hardened survivalists?

Discord chat is so unsatisfying, and what was I thinking, shallowly immersing myself in such a general forum? Even a dextromethorphan forum is habituated by pretty general people, and some of them are pretty, and might even have sexy minds, but it's hard for a freak like me to break into anything like that.

I wanna explore my dreams and subconscious more though, I feel like maybe there's an artistry I can get up to practicing, like a journeyman level of dextronauting where I can integrate conscious states and bridge state boundaries kind of thing. At this point I'm sure I'm turning myself into some kind of crank. Schizophrenia would be a good excuse, too bad I don't have that, or thank god, honestly, I know it's ridiculous to even jokingly wish for that. Well it was just a figure of speech of course, don't take anything too seriously, I tell myself.

Sometime I'll have to tell you about, a lot of things, my reaction to my friend T telling me on the phone about his recent experiment with what may very well have been legit DMT, and what else was there? A bunch of shit, they've faded into the fog, I think I'll grab them back at some point. One of them was my idea about how my wife went to Spain, that was her trip, and I love that she did that. I love her, and she's into that kind of thing, it's an enriching experience for her, and I happily enjoy her talking about it enthusiastically, and I love how she always has so much to say. Sometimes it's annoying, but far more of the time it just puts a big smile on my face listening to her go on, it's a beautiful thing, suits me so well, how she fits my personality like that, like I don't have to feel any pressure to be a talker, and how I fit in to that bubbling brook like a happy lil tree just hanging beside bobbing to the vibe. So it's well worth the occasional collisions where I'm not getting my own words out there when they randomly erupt, so hard to initiate at will, so compulsive and selfishly insistent they are when they emerge.

And I honestly wasn't all that into going to Spain. I mean I get it, Alhambra and all that, but it's not for me. So I didn't go, much like how I honestly never felt the need to procreate, and what a damn blessing that is, I think. Not like I'm hating on anyone else for rocking out with their cock out and floating their boat and flying their freak flag families. But I'm keeping this little secret carefully clutched deep to my druggie heart, so keep it on the DL, and it's not infidelity, not in the usual sense of that word, on either of our parts, it's just: it's the return of the d - not tenacious d - not sunny d - no, it's the dextromethorphan. This is my trip, and, yeah, it's not good to lie, but how about a little white trash lie about how my form of travelling is so inward and stigmatized and misunderstood, yeah, that's good, co-opt victim language, that's a great justification, I can get almost all of myself almost all the way on board with that some of the time. My form of travelling is important to me, and goddamnit, it is sort of a real religious or spiritual pursuit, the closest thing I have to that, certainly much more impressive magic skum than the aa cult, although ridiculously I'm trying to keep a foot in that too, at the same time, ripping the seam of my pants wide open as I stand atop nietzsche's rope above the abyss, braying a neigh of nihilism, like I'm spitting lines from 2004 when I wrote that poem Fairy Tale, like I didn't know how uncool slam was yet, and even that open-stage legend Clay was cringe in retrospect. Fairy Tale doesn't totally not hold up in some ways, which is something I can't say for maybe .001% of anything I wrote before, uh... just this moment, yes, this is the only point at which I achieved perfect zen - no scratch that, THIS is the moment - wait, no, CNTL-Z - CNTL-Z CNTL-Z!!! I mean, CNTL-SHIFT-Z! Wait, that didn't work. I mean, CNTL-Y! Wait, I mean, what operating system is this? Is this a mac? What is that weird curvy symbol? What, is it function, is this the function motorway? CNTL-A, select all, select everything on a bagel, write a multiverse plotline because possibilities are exhausted, we need to make the point that we need to deflate and accept limits on the mortality of characters, instead of "no one ever really dies in star trek", start narrowing possibilities to socialism or barbarism - hmm, I don't know about that last shoe-horning-in, but fuck it.

Maybe I should say that although my relationship with my wife is more important and life-sustaining than I could put into words, there's also a certain disconnect I can lament, and yet accept most of the time, I mean christ, it's worth so much that ever dwelling on the disconnect feels so petty and ungrateful, but still, I can at least acknowledge it and talk about it, that's not some horrible crime, is it? 

I should talk about vaping sometime, how I am with it, the ridiculous relationship, and all that tangential things. Who wants to hear my take on vaping? Any takers? Is the world clamoring for it? By which I mean, the rump of the stub of a niche of a niche audience?