Bismuth

Strung out on nothing. Automatic words like leftover radio signal from the northern hemisphere after radiological die off. Constellation of mixed messages, the medium in any case, entropic levelling out, misleading two dimensional mytho-metaphorical characteristic. There's a three dimensional manifold which expands indefinitely that makes these pegs they stuck in the ground pull in crazy ways and drag the fabrics til they rip. .

Should should should not sleep but sickness makes sleeping the only reasonable thing.

Should I save the world or be myself, my true defeatist self? cause not everybody gets a trophy, not when you get out of pre-school, I've come that far at least. It's only right and good and vile and beautiful that some of us succeed brilliantly and most of us fail and a few of us do more than fail, but fail abysmally, not giving up on bids for greatness in middle age like most decent mediocrities, but sticking with the selfish program and clinging to the gift-less ego grift. So at least there's the fact that I'm playing my part in the vile beauty ecology, being a preposition from which to be surveyed by heroes aeons in the future in a galaxy light-millennia distant, for a microsecond of fame.

Bronze Age can close, we got our antimony holdings cashed in time for the Mesozoic recast. Loneliness with the best quality people so close at hand. Platinum jewelry. Wasted plastic handset. For all the melancholia in Poland, it's still better than the chemical prepositions of the drug-drain. . Strung out on nothing is better than strung out on the evil powder planes with their vicious sharp edges and satirical state boundaries. Immoral porpoises.

Cuties

First you infantilize them. Then you sexualize them. That's why it's so gross, when you're forced to think about it. Girls. No, it's women now. And sometimes, ladies, that's sometimes acceptable. Ladies. And why not? It's not like I was ever comfortable with girls, the word or the beings. I liked to think up names for my imaginary daughter, that's all. Could never even draw them, in line art or descriptive prose. Maybe once or twice in poetry but it still seems gross to me, strained through a filthy shopvac filter, crusted with lust and loneliness, my own gastrointestinal version that my words conform to.

It's women and the goddess now, praying for matriarchy and the white race to be placidly dissipated in soft pumpkin genetic homogeny. Lord make me an instrument of thy peace. Yes, I can get behind that arcane sounding and humble request, even if I want to purge the thys and thous and arts and haths from my prayers because of the false feeling that language gives me, the way I feel pretentious when I parrot that dialect instead of speaking the way people of this age speak, whatever the lingual guilt by association. But yeah, Howard be thy name, so, your will be done, or rather, help me be useful to others, see, I'm praying to be a better person, so I can contribute to the good, not for a bunch of stuff for me - save for meaning and purpose and the purest bliss of virtue, iow, circumventing the material goods that briefly feed and then stymie happiness and hooking up directly to the overarching good feeling of being in harmony with my fellow humans and maybe nature, thus, a more efficient selfishness.

I think I have a good heart, it's in the right place, but clogged with the sticky tar this sickly society runs on. It would be a fitting end for my world if my heart failed. But my blood pressure's so low. More likely, I'll find a balance between euthanasia and euphoria and push the plunger on that when the time comes.

Contribute to the good, what a nice idea, how nice of me for coming up with it, I'm so proud of myself. A shame though that it all goes out the window the instant I'm called upon to act on it, the thousand little ways I'm tested each day at work, the opportunities I could take to practice this principle, like I used to practice piano. I struggled mightily with that form of practice too, and eventually gave up. And I had passion for the piano. Maybe I have passion for being good and making the world better, it may be trending that way, anyway. But more likely, it's a random walk, like this blog. Which is not to say there isn't sense in the pre-apocalyptic Melbourne drunk's tuesday night stagger trending toward the ditch, and statistically likely to end up there.

prelude to epileptic fit

silly idiot, jumping at the imagined sound of a text message - the romantic context is like an eerie jamais-vu

there will be a cafe, where early deaths are encouraged - maybe i'll live to see it, haha - by then, i'll be a prime candidate, if not now

the repetitions of my job are increasingly insanely absurd - the "thank you"s, the "i don't think there's much in there," comments, the nano-scale smalltalk, the roteness, the gaps in between where i contrive things to do, or not do - but it's far better than a lot of other jobs i've had - i feel sorrier for the people that work behind the counter of the tim horton's where i go for my coffee and lunch breaks, than i do for myself - i absorb their hostility to me with acceptance and understanding

lines creep under my eyes - a perpetual sleep mask, anvils on the lids, iron chains on the limbs - but i still feel young and stupid - is this what anti-depressants and caffeine are doing for me? why am i still on this shit? maybe cause although it sounds like such a good idea, to get baseline pure in brain chemistry, i got a sneaking feeling i'd still be feeling whatever it is i'm feeling, whether on or off meds -  and i'm scared to go completely off the meds, what if i begin to go on hysterical crying jags? i have a feeling that could happen - maybe it should happen, maybe it's part of some long-term process i haven't dredged up the nerve to begin yet - so, i guess that means get off the meds, cause at least some side effects would be eliminated from the equation, and i wouldn't feel obliged to gag down vile coffee that i hate 59 times out of 60, or swallow pills, so many pills, i've learned to swallow pills, but it hasn't gotten much easier, i just tolerate that disgusting routine

I haven't wanted to admit that I'm purposeless. But I'm coming to the point of needing to do that, and asking the necessary question of where do I go from here, and admitting that digital information isn't enough. I can't really be happy in a cave of my own making. Maybe I could in another reality where I wasn't sitting idle, by being in that cave, during a high speed collision course with global catastrophe.

I haven't wanted to admit that I'm purposeless and discontent with the cabin fever because I liked the idea that i perversely appreciated the loneliness and isolation and delirium of it all, and I could "get away" with it, and that would be a fuck you to the society I scorn and still scorn. But in truth, it's not enough for me. It's taking a toll. I'm not right with myself, haven't been in a long time.

But I wanted to pretend that I stomached the sickness and held it in, and described it and that was a grungy artform with its own acquired aesthetic. Thus, the reluctance to admit outright how spiritually, morally, and purposefully bankrupt I am, and the implications of that, and the change it requires. Even as I'm writing a daily deluge of prose that screams emptiness and aimlessness. But intrinsic to that was a kind of anesthetic from the ache of the emptiness through wallowing in it, indulging it to poetic extremes and then being afforded the luxury of standing back and beholding My Emptiness from the vantage of a carnival freakshow spectator or the sophist who derives her sense of individuality through regarding a snuff video from an oddly artistic angle. And besides, I would sometimes arrogantly extend this emptiness to the world, and say that everyone must necessarily be hollow, whether they knew it or not.

I can see more and more how drugs and that way of life took a toll, especially the uppers, and how even years later, I'm dealing with the radioactive waste from that time, the stunted growth, and the frayed wiring.

It's a good thing I'm in the program of AA, I can't do any good unless I stay sober first and it works beautifully as a metaphor for the macro scale problems we face collectively. My sobriety will synergize with my participation in creating a better future and my participation in that will strengthen my sobriety.

So, I've suddenly become a political blogger? No, I have about zero faith in political solutions. Who to vote for? Is there a "sustainability party"? The Green Party I guess, maybe I should have a closer look at their platform. But the phrase green has been around too long, I now associate it with little bandaids like bicycle paths, and the local organic grocery co-op, not the kind of radical shifts that are now urgently needed. Maybe they should change their name to the Sustainability Party. Or maybe people like me have got to become more comfortable with a certain language.

I have the feeling that whoever ends up in charge of the apparatus of any state, no matter what their intentions, will succumb to moneyed interests and endemic corruption. So the system needs to change. Maybe electoral reform will be enough. The major parties have to go away. They've failed. They're hopeless. The democrats republicans liberals conservatives labour tories maybe even ndp. All the aspiring power brokers have got to fuck off or be fucking shoved out of the way. There will have to be some violence, I'm pretty sure. I just hope it won't have to be too much.

i played "panicky idiot no. 2" in The Poseidon Adventure

how did i get so distracted again today? how did i forget that

THERE'S NO FUCKING FUTURE, THERE'S NO FUCKING VISION

wake up! to what? nevermind, you don't wanna know... go back to sleep

it's really hitting home to me how aimless we are - "this is what it's like in the moment before a civilization departs for the stars", mckenna said the mushroom said - that's a nice idea, and there was a space program, that seemed promising, but it's petering out as we speak, no longer a way out, cause there's not enough time

nuclear's clean enough for me, i'll say, but it takes ten years to build a nuclear plant - it takes massive interdependent energy and resource expenditure to build hydro-electric, solar and wind plants - everything is made possible by cheap oil - it's not a fucking "engineering problem" - it's a little goddamn deeper than that

now there's proven reserves to keep oil cheap for maybe another 40, 50 years, so it can be burned fast enough to keep this car we're in barreling toward the edge of the cliff - all that burning's gonna exacerbate global warming, of course - when it gets dire enough, they're gonna burn all the coal, cause we'll sacrifice air quality to keep the lights and heat on, because it's the fucking LIGHTS and HEAT!

and the people who matter, you'd think, well they're educated, the CEOS and the politicians, so if they're carrying on like it's business as usual, then it demonstrates that the crisis can't be real - but they can't admit that's it's real, can they? cause then it just accelerates the process, wall street crashes, the house of cards falls down - wall street, jesus, cheap oil and a cardhouse economy, does everything depend on wall street? civilization is too big to fail, they say

i'm not trying to score points, i'd love to be proven wrong - i don't want apocalypse - i know, some go-getters, a lot of them, think: worst case scenario, they'll be just fine, cause they got their cabin in the woods to go to, or they took that survival skills course, or whatever - maybe, i'll take any scrap of optimism i can get, and maybe they will be fine, i don't know - and good for them - can i be one of the ones that die off then, without your judgement to boot, about how i'm weak and cowardly? but can you let me tie off before i die off? we gotta let more people into the hospice, make a whole cultural niche into God's waiting room - or the Void's foyer, it's hard to fit a belief in god into the same small universe as a drug-induced exit from the coming shitstorm

maybe i'm hoodwinked, but the things i read seem a lot more credible to me than the crap that's bandied about on mainstream broadcasts, and it scares me in a deep way, cause it feels real, it's feeling more real all the time, even though this is the up and down dipsy wipsy dawning awareness phase, and there's still ample opportunities to forecast an eternal meaningless flux with no trend, nothing to see here folks, go back to bed

i know older people care about their kids - but they can't allow themselves to think this crisis is real, most of them, can they? they have to believe it'll be worked out somehow - it's so easy to latch onto this or that, especially if you have a subscription to discover magazine - there's always hype - and this is hype too - look at me, i'm letting the internet turn me into chicken little - it's facile to just spam links at people that appear to confirm what i suspect... and what do i know anyway? i need to listen more, to all sides - and i'm willing to, i think, i hope, but i got major trust issues with the sources that say it's business as usual, or they'll figure something out, or oh! the one about how it's just that big oil is clamping down on the free energy machine - i can't believe it's all so easy and simple as the evil oil companies are running everything and once their power is broken everything will be fine - sure they're evil, but they're also only symptoms of a sick society

i'm scared that after a crash, it's gonna be religious fanatics that take over, or military strongmen - i'm scared i could even adapt to that paradigm, and follow the leader - i could adapt to changing times, to some extent, but i don't wanna have to learn to be a subsistence farmer - how ironic that i was in a relationship with the person i was in a relationship with for that time, not that long ago, feels like yesterday really, so strange

i think, just maybe, i can handle a steep decline in technology - but what i can't handle, won't handle, is the decline in culture that i hope won't have to come with that - yes, this culture is ill, and not in the way the kids use that term today, and yes, this culture is morally bankrupt and hollow in so many ways, and so much about it would be better gone, but what if all of it went? what if what life i have left thirty years from now is in dutifully joining the pogrom and casting piles of hardcover books and CDs and hard drives into the righteous bonfire to renounce the wicked ways of the evil old ones? i'd happily renounce lots of it, but not all of it, i'm of this age, i'm not as much of a misfit as i might like to think i am, my passions in life are very closely correlated with modern things, modern music, modern ways of expressing and communicating - yeah, i used to go for walks in the woods lots - maybe i could learn to like that more, again - but i just don't see the beautiful bountiful sacred splendiferous majesty of Nature being something i'm gonna retrofit on myself as a raison d'etre halfway through my life - well, i'm sure whatever happens, some of our stupid slang terms will survive, and certain brands of humour will survive, the humour will be blacker than ever, and it will hurt more too, and i'll appreciate that, it will be a buffer, even if ironic distance will be impossible to maintain

i could see the need to become religious after the crash - like i see the function of some concept of a higher power, and how essential it is to living life on life's terms, and i see why my program for addicts is a "spiritual" program, and i can analogize that a spiritual outlook that also embraces the world, and other people, could synergize wonderfully with the epic project of moving from this clusterfuck of a world to something sustainable, and how there could be grand purpose in that, a kind of purpose that would seem so fresh and new to us people in this age, a purpose we've never known, or realized could exist, a kind of purpose that maybe people felt not that long ago, when we canadians liked american presidents, and thought kennedy was king shit for some reason, a purpose that could fill any gaps in consumer product acquisition, and then some... so yeah, the sense of spirit that comes with the moving away from materialism, that could be great, but the way it would go down, i think, would be an over-correction, to religious extremity, where we'd have to "admit" to the jesus-freaks and allah-freaks, that, yeah, okay, you were right, we were infidels and that whole modernity thing was nothing but a depraved lunge to nowhere, and you can go back to telling us what to do, like you used to

this isn't a very dignified or helpful way of talking about this, is it? well, maybe when more people start to appraise the situation honestly, it can give way to more constructive and proactive approaches - things feel bleak to me right now because it's such an unspoken, taboo subject - when it's out in the open, maybe there'll seem to be more options than simple stupid lamenting - cause i'm getting real fucking sick of that

...so far, so good, so what? so yeah, i'm quoting a megadeth album, but it makes sense - yeah, you older people, you remember the '70s, and how it was supposed to be ending just around the corner then too - but this isn't zorp is coming, this is a really bad set of curves - i'm sure if i browsed through enough ted talks i'd find some plucky technocrat to tell me why it's really fine though - and i'm always down on myself, like i'm not informed, and can't work things out, but, well, if that's so, then what gives me confidence in my feeling that things are fucked? good question - i don't have a good answer - but i'm a little freaked out, sometimes a lot freaked out, and omni-nauseous - maybe this anxiety is why my stomach is fucked

i'm sick of waiting around, i want to see a plan, i want to see people in power answering fucking questions about what the fuck they're planning on doing about this shit... they need to be asked directly - i can't draft no plan, i didn't go to engineering school, i can't handle the math - all i can do is evaluate information in my layman way

not that i matter, and not that i can change anything - if anybody matters, and if anybody can change anything, it's people with degrees in the sciences, or even in political science and law and that bullshit which i'd say should be secondary, let's put smart people in charge, if anyone's gonna be, but people who know things, and can solve problems, and sure, even people who brag about being in mensa, cause i suspect i wouldn't do all that great on an IQ test, but sure, mensa people, you can solve this shit - if you need any ditches dug towards the end of solving the energy crisis, well, put me to work, give me something to do

i can write about it, but even my writing is just scavenging off the real writers, they just put ideas in my head, about this peak oil business, and they'll put it in much better poetic prose when the time for that comes - but i have my own voice to add, i guess

maybe i could hit someone with a pie though, like one of the koch brothers, or rupert murdoch, or gregory boyce - not that i'd do any kind of cliched activism, but it might be necessary, fairly soon, for people who care, to actually get out and do things that reverse policy courses beyond voting, which doesn't work because the major parties won't allow electoral reform, certainly not on this continent - so, what will have to happen, before we resort to violence, is getting in people's faces, hounding politicians, making their lives hell short of shooting them - and that will involve being cliche, and stupid chants and slogans and signs that make me cringe, and so many uncool things that are the only things that work - coolness is a luxury we can't afford for much longer, i don't think - i still enjoy the daily show though - but eventually, the ironic distance is just gonna be a stubborn damnfool paralysis - i might have to ally with the real activists, who actually do things, that i congratulate myself for being ironically detached from, who make me uncomfortable with their naked ideology, but if i care, i'm going to have to make common cause with many types of people

i remember i used to care about things when i had that first wave of social consciousness, before i was twenty - then i got massively distracted - by all sorts of minor cultural items, and especially by drugs - what a pathetic tangent, ten years of fucking around and not acknowledging the reality of things, except in a distanced, detached way, where the horror is pretty, from the narcotized bubble - see when you're anesthetized on recreational drugs, the shithole you live in doesn't seem so bad, it's downright comfortable, and people think you're such a whoa... such a hardcase, such a hardened edgy fuck for living in that nightmare, but you're nothing of the kind, you're just anesthetized, burning coke, baking soda, fuel, and brain cells...

i'll go back to suppressing my concern fairly soon, maybe i'll even seem an idiot to myself when it all comes out in the wash - but i didn't want to suppress this particular urge to express just now, even if it is transient, because maybe the bleakness of how i feel most of the time needs to be vented via the vehicle of the potential oil crash

blogging

Disasters are no fun for the innocent. Everyone will suffer, even people who could theoretically be insulated by money for a while. It won’t matter who caused what or who’s to blame - it’ll be murky trying to figure it out, and brutally violent, and when that sort of stuff happens the wrong people take the hit, and then there are reprisals. I’ll bet Antoinette was the best of a bad lot, but she got the guillotine anyway, that’s just how things work.

I don’t even know who I’d go to, to say I told you so. I didn’t tell anyone anything anyway, was too afraid of being made out to be a fool, which I might well have been. And I could’ve been one of the nay-sayers anyway, it’s not like I get some sort of ram’s blood passover from the angel of death by virtue of being worried about the right thing at the right time.

Who’s to say the culprits will ever be correctly identified? Who’s to say the architects of policy and lobbyists for fossil fuels will not blend in perfectly with whatever body politic of the new paradigm emerges, self-satisfied at least that catastrophe was someone else’s fault, or just all of our faults, humans, eh? What a crazy biological experiment. Too bad, it just didn’t work. Pass the torch to the noble cockroach, a marvel of organic design.

These newfie townee Husky and Suncor employees - they’re nice people, most of them, I imagine. I played in a Pink Floyd tribute with one of their like, the drilling engineer for Schlumberger who became our new bass player in 2010, who told me once while driving me to practice in his big oil truck, he just wanted to make a million. They’re smart, geologists and engineers, fun to converse with, some of them good to jam with. But why the hell am I cleaning the offices of fossil fuel firms? What I really should be doing is dumping oil over their floors, that’s what I’m kind of wanting to do, more and more, but there’s the mitigating factor that I’m part of the problem.

"Given what’s at stake", as they say, maybe an enemy really will have to be found, ie, the fossil fuel firms, even at the cost of good people getting tarred with the bad brush along with the few real evil fucks, if anyone’s really evil. Well, maybe no one’s really evil, but at times it’s necessary for certain people to take the fall for evil things that happen to us people.

Not that there’s much innocence to be found, around here anyway. And, why would I bother with any bet hedging, and cautious skepticism of computer models of climates? It’s human intellect that created this condition in the first place, for better or worse, but it did find efficient ways of redistributing massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. That’s beyond weaseling out of. I trust all kinds of devices and technology derived from Maxwell’s equations and Newtonian physics - but I won’t trust the cutting edge of climate science, because, maybe it’s wrong? I don’t understand the statistical modeling that predicts a catastrophic warming of the planet, so, therefore, the jury’s still out, but neither do I understand the statistical modeling that enables every synthetic thing that makes life worth living, to me. But the jury isn’t out on that for me, is it? I’ll accept that stuff, thank you very much, cause it’s convenient.

I don’t want to be cursed with living in interesting times. I want my tech-tweaked times loaded with digital information, an info-stream I take for granted, consume mindlessly, but not interesting in the way that an extra-terrestrial voyeur might hope for. But I don’t think I’m gonna get a choice in this. The voyeurs are going to be entertained at our expense.

I’m starting to feel a kind of gratitude I didn’t expect for my spiritual program that I’m struggling to follow to the best of my ability. It was designed to help addicts recover and live sober, but it may be the best hope I have of coming to terms with the predicament of a petroleum-addicted society at large, in something other than a cowardly, suicidal, get your kicks before the shithouse goes up in flames, way. I’m a long way from being spiritual and really living a spiritual program, but a seed was planted, maybe sprouting microgreens, and if I could bring that to fruition, or something close, it’s the only thing that could carry me through a potential transition to scarcity.

If it’s true that wild wild stuff is coming down, it could at least hold the light up to the shadow, the overshadow that clouds everything I should be enjoying, what creates lack of purpose, the feeling of being lost. Maybe it could provide meaning and purpose again, an obvious blatant kind, not something one has to look for in a frenzied search for meaning here, purpose there, dilettante itinerary to secure vocation in a market economy driving a spiritually bankrupt culture. It may sound like I’m moralizing, but I love the bankrupt culture, the trashiness of it, and I love standing outside of it, feeling smug and superior in delusions of separateness, poking at it with a stick, writing about it, that vantage - I love that like a drug destroys the liver and burns out the brain. I do love it, but it’s a way of death.

The ever-present existential nausea of the approaching end of this way of life... Imagine if that was gone? The pain of facing up to that will be so steep I can’t even contemplate, but how about the side benefit of having that reckoning over with, at least the facing over with, and having the paradigm change. That could be an amazing side benefit.

And if it’s true that wild wild stuff is coming down, maybe it doesn’t necessitate so much violence as I fear. I mean, surely whatever happens, there’ll be heroism and co-operation, maybe unprecedented levels. That’s one way the economy can still grow beyond the extraction curves of material: the economy of valor. Scarcity and hardship I could take, maybe, if it didn’t mean pervasive violence, and everyone set against each other. But shit, if Hobbes was right about human nature, and I’m not sure he wasn’t, maybe we’ll have to hope the Loch Ness monster will be discovered in the nick of time, to save us from the war of all against all - or maybe it’ll just devour the spoils.

And sure, I hope for the good in women and men to come to the fore, maybe we should throw out all the men and elect ourselves into matriarchal dictatorship. But given that what marginal progress there’s been toward a civilized society (ie, not mustard gassing each other in our wars anymore) hinges on improved standards of living, I’m scared what will happen when the curve peaks and begins to fall back down, obeying the physical laws we thought didn’t apply to the eternal game-changer of technology and the information age. And I really think standard of living has almost everything to do with how life is valued. When life is shitty, it’s so much easier to kill and die.

And I know there are those who would say, but value doesn’t need to be all tied up with these things you think are so important, the consumerist bullshit. Sure, that’s true, there’ll be benefits to getting back to nature, but it’s the transition I’m thinking about. It could be brutal, surely will be chaotic - and in an epigenetic time frame, it might be just what the doctor ordered, an enema for the human race, but I’m a person, not a race, not a culture, and on my time scale, it’s just a downward trend, cause like a lot of people, I’m a late stage hardcore addict to this infrastructure, I know how toxic it is, but I’m so on the junk, it’s the only thing I know, it’s flowing through my veins, and I can’t imagine a life outside of it I’d want to live.

I mean, I’d love to scale things back, I’d back the first motherfucker with power who vowed to begin the scaleback, I’d brace myself for austerity hoping it was at least being done in carefully-planned stages. But I don’t see no scaleback option being proposed, the dilemma is steadily driven to the point of all or nothing. Will the plummeting stocks bring down with their values human life? I’d hope not, but it’s plausible to me that they could, even though they should bring up the value of human life, as we’d theoretically unplug from all isolating distracting devices and break free of all kinds of synthetic shackles. But I suspect we’d suddenly remember, in genetic memory, in the way four year old kids have night terrors of being eaten by tigers, that, oh yeah, there are quite a lot of biological shackles too, that we forgot about centuries ago, and now, well, this isn’t natureland, this isn’t a retreat, this is a merciless baseline. Well, I’m sure it ain’t that bad really, maybe not for you, but for me, well, I don’t think I’m up to spending the latter half of my life trying to be nature-boy. I’ve lived long enough to know that’s not what I’m cut out for, even if my life depends on it. Maybe post-apocalyptic-wasteland-man would suit me slightly better, barricaded in a rathole of an urban block with a personal stash of salvage - I could sort of see that.

And this is all so so so easy to type into a computer from a climate-controlled interior.

Maybe next post I’ll go back to trivial bullshit, I sure hope so. I sure hope I’ll stop freaking myself out over potential end-games, like I stopped so many times before, and got back to soft and comfortable things, even in the guise of edgy badassed bullshit - but really soft and easy.

There’s gotta be something wrong with this hard/soft dichotomy that pervades how I think about everything. Maybe it all reduces to psychology, ultimately, there’s a nice soft thought, that nothing is real, there are only thoughts, points of view, neurologies that have progressed to this point, and a tableau of fearful and pleasant and sad and angry and hungry and soothing and shameful experiences before the age of three, before I even formed fucking memories (!) have dictated everything I think and feel about everything, in such a subtle way that I thought it was all free will, and I accepted this idea culture gives me, that it’s a self that I should identify with and own, and all that.

And no, I’m not gonna bring a child into the world, I’m getting more definite about that by the day, as much as I appreciate and love my parents for bringing me into being, and for being themselves, and as much as I appreciate that I’ve had playmates to play with in this life, and as much as we’re gonna need some fresh blood, some, mind you, to dismantle the now-asphyxiating biomass prosthesis... For all that, I think the best legacy I can leave is a negative legacy of opening some space, for people who are already here, to stretch out a bit, in future years.

And how convenient, in the end, for me, being so passive - aggressive in words, maybe, but passive in deeds, and lazy and tired. But I really think it’s right for me to not contribute to what’s happening with this cancer we’re becoming - rather I’ll do what I’ve suited myself to and brew another batch of poison words. Call me chemo.

oh right... climate change

there's that - sometimes i forget

but whatever happens, whether it's + 1.5 celcius in the next 50 years, whether it's + 2.0 celcius in the next 40 years, whether it's + 4.0 celcius by 2100... it's gonna happen regardless of what we do, they're saying now... what we do now will only matter another 50 years from now, what's coming down the pike in the next several fracking decades is the hangover from what was done in the latter half of the 20th century - so we have to care about our descendants of half a century later, in order to get off our asses and oops, our imaginations have shriveled up like prunes, so how can 50 years later figure into anything? when four years of school is too much to contemplate?

okay, i'm projecting, i have no claims on your imagination - i'm not bringing a child into the world and i can't believe i ever even thought it would be a good thing to do if i could psyche myself up to it, cause i owed my parents a grandchild, cause it's something substantial i could give to them that i've failed to equal in how i've lived my solitary and self-seeking life - but you could perhaps be able to think fifty years down the road, and you could perhaps be bringing a child into the world - and i don't judge anyone, how can i? not yet, anyway, i still feel like we're all friends on this planet, and it wouldn't be very friendly to bring politics and religion into the same discussions as the warm ways of those hobbyists of family building projects

so, some will take bleak weather forecasts as an invitation to attempt a forward escape if it's possible, push the pedal to the floor! the only way out is through, rape the crust even faster, we need to keep the barrels moving, to the four corners of the earth, we need to keep the lights on while our brainiacs are working on solutions, we need to keep the thermostat at a comfortable level, who can think when it's a hundred and three? they're building the ark for outer space, what about this place?

how can this have sounded like hysteria before? maybe cause it was hysteria all along, like so many other apocalyptic hysterias have swayed so many, it just has a real convincing ring just now

it's getting to the point where i really really would like to be convinced that it's a vast left-wing conspiracy of junk scientists chasing grant money

and here i am, day in, day out, being all, "what's my purpose?" what do i study? and then i'm reminded, there's this thing, about how there's these trends, resource depletion, carbon emissions, population growth - so i guess there's purpose there, in fucking DOING something about that, but - who to trust?

if i really believed this was gonna happen, would i let my writing a blog post about it be the end of it? or what about those blog posts that are so scary, that give me a writerly hysteria, would they be retiring to their bedrooms after their blog posts? no, for fuck's sake, that's not what people who really believe these things do - none of these people really believe these things, otherwise, their actions would bear it out - there would be revolutionary activity - even internal revolutionary activity, it wouldn't even have to be an extroverted fuck shit up, organize people, blow up pipelines type thing, even a more modest live by example, get off the grid type of action would ring authentic - and there are a very small pool of people who do that - the vast majority of the alarmist writers are blogging comfortably and not being any kind of example

in reality, we're all waiting for some critical mass of thick-headed blow-dried authority figures to get on board with what sort of dilemma we're actually in, and then we can be convinced that it's real, and we actually do have to get up and do something about it... until then, if it's not on the television or the radio, it's not real - cause they're our standard, the people with the news reporter voices and symmetrical faces and beige vocal inflections and heads no more or less thick than the median of humanity - if they think it's real, then at that precise moment, everybody does, and then things happen

and the scientists, well they're a power greater than myself for sure, and the number i've heard quoted is 15000 to 24, that sounds like a consensus - but they're not acting like they really believe it either - because they're not stupid, they're scientists - they know, like, i think, most of us suspect, it might be a little crazy to act as if a model of a complicated system is the god's honest truth, even if the independent readings seem to be narrowing to inescapable logical conclusions - even if that's the case, we gotta be at least partially underwater, before we start proceeding under the assumption that we'll all be underwater, or in the desert, or inside a plague of locusts, cause we can't uproot our lives and go to defcon 5 based on computer models

this really is an unprecedented dilemna in human history - being allowed a glimpse into what may be waiting, in terms of ecological destiny - but not given any divine instruction as to how to deal with it, what extremes are even necessary... having to ad-hoc it, and arguing among ourselves what we should bother to do

obama, for example, the "leader of the free world", so i guess he's my president too, being a free person, i think, although i never voted for him, nor would i have... he must have access to some pretty good scientists, some people outside the climatologist consensus, who are assuring him that this climate model thing, it's something he can put on the backburner, it's not that big a deal

why would it be, for him and his administration? it's a ride, for them, isn't it? hold on, another four more years, wheeee... and then it's over, and you go on speaking panels and lecture circuits, and you reflect back on those crazy days... those were some crazy times man... being leaders of the free world, being architects of policy... we were just doing the best we could in this muddled mixed up world - we can't always know what the best course of action to take is, sometimes you've just gotta make a decision - you can't know what it's like, in the spotlight, the pressure - every decision affects every other facet of every fucking thing - and in the end, you're alone with it - and your kodak family and your millions of dollars, and estates - doesn't sound all that lonely actually - but i bet it will be, in the fallout shelter

well, power and science don't overlap as much as we might think, or perversely like... the power elites make the rules for the wise men and the fools...

sometimes i'm ashamed of what i write, when i write in that opt-out suicidal vein - but it's a real emotion that is a reaction to trends i see, from this miraculously mundane vantage of quietly falling snow and flowing electrical energy and a full fridge of cheap food and cheap rent

MAYBE... there's more to this idea than i ever allow myself to allow... that me and people like me, not like my ex-gf, she's more evolved, are completely overshadowed with guilt and malaise over what's happening, invisibly, how the suffering on the other side of the world just isn't real ENOUGH in headlines and internet articles and even youtube videos, and how we're plainly LOOTING the FUTURE, there's no word for this unprecedented crime, it demands stronger morality and intellect than this age is producing to be able to deal with what's going on

so although i could count my blessings til i pass out, about how really, things aren't that bad, my life is pretty good, it's a wonderous age, a toothache isn't prelude to a fatal sinus infection but a simple dental extraction, i have more computing power in my pocket than the world had in the 70s for next to nothing, and besides that, i got family, and friends, i know i'm loved

there's this shadow over things

i didn't build this world - i played a riff on it - why do i think i gotta twist myself into a pretzel fussing over the maintenance of it? well, cause the builders are long dead - their heirs can fuss over the maintenance - but i can't hold them accountable, just cause of bloodlines - my great grandmother to the 33rd power was renee decartes' publisher, possibly, so i got those incriminating nature-crushing lines in me too, the dreaded dioxyribonucleic knot

looting the future, looting the fucking future... i might be wrong about a lot of things, i might be wrong that i don't know anything or that i can't make a decision - but i'm pretty sure that looting the future is something we're doing, and there's not some magic mitigating factor that will somehow make everything alright - i dunno if there's any such thing as a moral sense, but i got a gut feeling that there has to be some payment for this bender - maybe it's because i'm a drug addict in wobbly recovery, so i would see it like that, i would OVER moralize it, as opposed to someone who maybe managed to temper their forays into intoxicating substances, who wouldn't necessarily have this same GUT FEELING that life and human destiny is a black and white morality play, maybe even a greek tragedy with dramatic irony at precise appropos moments - but see i don't see no deus ex machina getting us out of this jam, so greek tragedy is not the right reference - maybe catholicism is, cause to me it's gotta equalize with some bloody s&m suffering and nails through hands, just let the philipino reenactor do it, not me, do it to julia, DO IT TO JULIA!

maybe you can never really cure catholicism, maybe i'm gonna be shackled by cathol's law to my grave - still, it doesn't have to be black and white even within the sphere of morality - and the fact that it's a gut feeling disturbs me, cause colbert would tell me i'm on the right track with that manner of gnosis

i don't know the intricacies of climate science, i could be hoodwinked by echo chambers, and confirmation bias because i was predisposed to believe large corporations and institutions are morally blind to such an extent that they would prioritize profits and mandates over collective survival - and yes, i really could be making too much of the peak oil hype, and it's quite possible i've read too much about nuclear war and about how there's still all these nukes around, it's not like that threat ever went away... and i remember, my mom, who's opinion and outlook i respect, who i feel has some wisdom, who i'd put some degree of faith in, at least over my own neurotic fancies, a person to look up to, by contrast with my over-damaged and atrophied self - i remember how we got to talking about the future, and oil, and i let spill to her my concerns about how nobody who matters has a fucking plan for what we're gonna do when that shit runs out, and she said, in more than just words, oh, they've been saying that's gonna happen since the 70s, and she was talking about more than just peak oil, and i absorbed some of that worldly skepticism of doomcryers, not because of any statistical, numerical, or analytic deconstruction of the many many arguments i come across that we're all fucked, but in the genuine-ness of her gentle rejoinder - she really wasn't all that worried, not in any unduly way anyway, neither apathetic in a suspect way that would suggest some willfully ignorant and self-serving agenda, like having an income that depended upon not understanding the trends of resource extraction, birthrate, environmental toxification, drought increase, and correlation of armed conflicts to water shortages

i remember a day in 2001 when art didn't matter - it really didn't, and irony was dead, and i felt solidarity with a neighbor country, not in a touchy feely way, but in a grim and necessary way, and everyone in town was giving blood as a gesture - i haven't felt much emotional connection to history, not even in 31 years, which is a good chunk of time to have lived through - but i've spent it disconnected, selfish, navel-gazing, drunk, delirius, staring at screens... how do you like that, exgf? i meant that sincerely though, not just self-deprecatingly - at times i can see what sort of person i am, from outside, and admit how sick it is

but for a few weeks in 2001, i was shaken out of myself for a while, and i remember that emotion - it was white people in suits dying in mass, i guess, to be crude, and how pathetic that on some deep level i identify with those people, like i group, against my will, with the beige tv accent-lacking medians who seem so full of shit, but have good jobs and money and charisma and influence and must be righter and realer than me - even if we're on opposite ends of a vast economic gulf, at lease we call it vast in the northern half of this content, although all of us, rich and poor in these parts, must look like assholes to the people in the oppressed and starving parts of the world

over here, even the 97th percentile, the ones that suddenly found themselves with shanty towns for company in the middle of homeless season when the occupy movement was hanging on longer than anywhere else in the world here in st. john's, even those pitiful people who were squeegee-ing windshields back in the '90s, have a vested interest in keeping the cell phones in shop windows - even a lot of the poor people around here have cell phones, not the really poor ones who are panhandling, they're quite miserable, thank you very much, you can see it in their faces, and you can fucking well imagine without having to look, but a lot of my fellows in the low tax bracket, we still have phones that we might hold on to at the expense of the chinese, and certainly energy for all this debauched power consumption that we'd hold on to at the expense of the arabs or arab-looking desert people

new york seemed close enough to hit home, my feeling of being a part of history was just being alive and watching tv when some terrorists shot their wad with a spectacular display of suicidal mayhem - i remember how that inspired many atheists to affirm their atheism - when you look at the holocaust and the art and literature that came out of that though, scoring points for the void after a nasty bit of vengeance like 9-11 seems cheap - but life is cheap - irony is cheap - atheism is cheap - religion is cheap - everything is cheap

like i said not that long ago, the greatest miracle... is how mundane everything seems - it's amazing that anything could ever seem mundane, with all the history that fed into this moment, all the chaotic causality streams - but it does, i'm constantly being swept back into tired, half-lidded, sore mediocrity and delusions of mundanity

how does this seem, to older folks, i wonder? this is my prime, supposedly, i'm supposed to get us all out of this mess, my generation... no, there's still too much momentum from previous generations, we expect our canadian dream too, or a scaled down version of it since the unions got busted, but there's vastly improved and cheaper information technology - we're hooked on this cheap paradigm just like the preceding people, we should have solidarity with our elders and boomer parents and snotty former punks now middle aged sell-outs, cause we're just another round of hooked, on unrealistic expectations - but why unrealistic? we've met the quota so far, haven't we? however many billion barrels a day? they're batting those figures back and forth on the 9th floor of the husky energy offices every morning when i come in to clean the boardrooms, it's another day of work, another issue with the helicopters and the rigs, ho hum, it's just husky, they're just husky, they don't run the whole show, they're just dealing with their bottom line, doing their jobs, hoping to make their own little million, millionaire inflation, the word has lost all meaning

so, now my people, (shudder), those people that graduated high school around the same time as me anyway, most of them are entering into this world - i'm just on the peripheral, cleaning things while they fulfill useful functions for corporations that keep oil flowing, i didn't apply myself in ways that would gain me entry into the socially lubricated mechanics of things the market actually values above minimum wage plus or minus fifty cents - but some of those people i'm contemporary with are getting in there now and the idea of keep it going is still plausible, it's a persistent lullaby on the radiodrone

yeah, there've been some great people, ghandi, martin luther king - we can all agree on them, right? and there could be more yet... but despite that... racism, religious zealotry, all these things - i can see how they become options, and not just insane inhuman unspeakable inconceivables - sadly, the worst of human responses are still human, as human as the best, and i could see anyone getting swept up in them - right now the differences between people are annoying, funny, fodder for disapproval... but buffered by luxury - those different people who think different than the way i think, and pray to their different gods and think the things i like are "sick" - but we can co-exist, we're civilized... but what happens when civilization falls apart? then it's civil war

i don't like this apocalypse fixation - and lord knows, there was hiroshima, there was cuba, there was this and that, and we got through it, even though there are always people saying the end is nigh - zorp is coming

but there's fractal waves of fire, images of the future, in things, in revelations - maybe mckenna had the date wrong, but he had the right idea - people, myself most of all, sink into a heavy gravy of custom, they get on autopilot, forget where they are - fall asleep - it's a tired metaphor made by so many others, but i'm forced to write my beholding of the truth of it

that revelations stuff, does it come out of nothing? when people get crazed enough to write something like that that actually endures across millenia? i'm not convinced it's an accident, not right now anyway - the miracle of mundanity... look at where the fuck i am right now - this is science fiction - the banality of evil and angelic overdose - this is insane

well, we may be in for a mass die-off before the century's out, but i wrote a good long blog post tonight, so, really, everything's fine isn't it? i feel fine, anyway, mostly - perhaps there's a shadow in the peripherals, but i can ignore it - i mean, i should get to bed, i gotta get up at 6 and be at work at 7, to earn my paycheques to pay my rent so i can have a fridge to fill with food to continue this cycle of eating and shitting and watching videos, not television, but they're television videos, the internet gives me the option to make my life less schlocky and obnoxious but i still narcotize myself with screens - it's something this decade allows and i'm going with the flow

tired bout of late nite typing

world's getting small



my only use for the medium is... i'm not sure, actually



plenty of solitude, but i'm not doing enough with it



i know, i'll re-arrange furniture



the problem is... life itself



also, how i've come to accept

all the wrong things

and remained unwilling to accept
what could give me serenity
and by extension others, maybe


ghandi the solicitor

jonathan deon the cleaner, mastercard holder, behold, beyond beer holding, r&h holding

remembering things from the past, some of it not too distant

but it's only right and fair and true that i should be solo right now
but it's taking more of a toll than i've been inclined to admit

each evening i seem to be left with less



maybe it's these pills
i've got to get off the zoloft and trazadone and caffeine
well, certainly the zoloft and caffeine, if anything, the downers will be the last to go
only the coldest toes
but exerting that much control makes me tired to even think about

there's some comfort in this monochrome solo stability
got a new sock, new life
but the world's getting small

filigree

the grandest miracle of all... is how mundane everything seems... prostifunkstication, prestidigitation, californication, better red than dead --- the cup of life's got a hole in it ,,, if you listen closely, on a still twilight under a waxing gibbous moon, you can hear the douglas firs, moaning on my behalf, about that tequila i spilled in 2005 ___ oh, what a waste === i'll never get that agave back +++ i donated it to the groundwater of the salmo river ranch

it was the plain truth that in and around blinking things being bought by 'tards of varying stripes and bars there was a "brutal" time being had by this girl we were camping with - i found it cathartic to hear her say that, it was brutal, i'm sure, for her, and i would be there soon myself

and now i'm here, a different vantage, survived another seven years and it's almost time for Terence and the Mayans' end of the world calendrical concresence, the blueberry in the bagel, and i'm pretty sure nothing in particular’s gonna happen - thy kingdom come? thy will be done? i dunno, i still got shit i wanna do, i got projects, and i think it'll take me longer than til december 21st to get a good start on them - i got retirement years, god willing, i paid payroll tax for a fucking pension, and the 1% still think i'm a slacker who only wants hand-outs, and i think a good 40 or 50% of these people are in partial sympathy with that sentiment

in any case, it's an oddly familiar feeling of dank strangeness triggering verbosity on a flat landscape rendered in minimalist acrylic hue so frowned upon by the art establishment, oddly familiar, after so long in a squirming coil of failed missions to alpha centauri, oddly familiar to feel the possibility of a continuum spanning days, maybe weeks, where there isn't a big drama about whether i'm gonna do the life-and-death, win-lose-or-draw sobriety intoxication drama with the stately blue book in all its heft looming like a retrograde monolith - it's besides the point, it's just living in a gloomy muck of my own sick thoughts, but welcoming depression as an old friend, taking the dizzying step of admitting i'm in a rut, even if it sounds like i think that all the time, when really i don't

it's just crazy vantage, networked by vonage, chalk full of binders, more chalk than calcium, more chalk than vitamins, chalk it up to a temporary filigree, skydiving past the end-zone, gravity-assisted weightless showboat minstrel jive, plummet, thud, filigree for a wanna-be husky petroleum geologist detective hobo

homeopathological

identically indirect words of love - was it coincidental that the phrase 'you are loved' showed up on both ends of our indian summer birthday seasonette? that was a weird thing about that, how love was always expressed as a thing that can not be said directly, only hinted at in lingual lawyers tricks - but that was still something - there's documents to prove it, heart-rending cards, the hand-made kind, ache-inducing stuff i can't bring myself to look at so i keep it in drawers

Doctor Danger

What if I just changed my facebook name? Oh, what in heavens would the ramifications be? I'm Doctor Danger, I've got a PhD in throwing caution to said heavens, why would I even ask?

What if that theory was true, that I heard proposed, supposedly by Dr. Timothy Leary, via the movie Waking Life, that in the moments leading to death, the perception of time elongates, to somehow meet eternal life halfway in a spaghetti singularity of consciousness? well, that'd be bad news for the ones who died by self inflicted gunshots to the head, or uhm well, for any old gunshots to the head, or torso, or in fact, any kind of death in which the immanent failure of the body's vital organs triggers a flood of pain signals through the central nervous system, excepting those of us who've been shown by the angel of death how a tender shave with the scythe, so close and creamy, can feel so good out of body in a null-space netherworld flotilla of right neighborly supRA-ledge omni thought buddies, a whole nother level above supER, and we're laughing at the sunking who fell from godhood, landed in kaliflorida, suffused with a felt presence of immediate experience that's so convenient for a dilated death-dive, not defying anything but surrendering, and it just so happens, it's a winning move, check, mate

but what neither of us know will fill the back issues of discover magazine, and all the news that's fit to print, but i'm holding out for santa claus anyway, just in case

look at how sentence case morphs, like a game of tetris, from conventions to ramshackle convents housing regularly scheduled episodes of deterioration. If I'd taken the iron pill I'd be blaming this uncomfortable gut feeling on that. Maybe the gut is plunging periscopes into a membrane of reality. Effects, affects, defects, prefects,
it all went downhill when i stepped in the same river twice, didn't i?
yes, i did, and it did all go downhill at approximately that time
at roughly the same spot in the same river, aayaand,,,
talk to yourself some more, cause this is the time to do it

...another day slipped through my fingers. dot pollution
that's okay, it's just a day

Learning to live on rocket fuel

What is happening? Despair, that is the inevitable consequence of genetic decay. We're down to a quarter life now. And I'm somehow worst of all, a trough under the heavy bottom. Our children will curse our name? Yeah, maybe. That's what I'm thinking about. And irradiation. And hot things and things that give off things that Geiger detectors detect that make everything cancerous in a few days. "Sheer exhaustion", finally, what death comes from, what a horrific phrase. . Cc. ., ., .., ..., . Z z - z y

I had to put the book down, "on the beach", it was too disturbing. And not in the way that an apocalypse dramatization normally is. In a quieter more insidious more real way, like not a sanaTIZED mass death, but rather dreary sanity intersecting that death, made somehow sharper when people are trying to milk their last months racing sports cars in dangerous and deadly rallies and there's a little humour in it, but a kind of cold British type that's delivered without a smile.

It hasn't all caught up to me yet. But actually, at least locally, the amount of stuff that has to catch up is decreasing logarithmically. And look what I've already got over! This is nothing compared to that!

sorry about the gouge in the wall

i'd like to say it won't happen again

so i will

and you'll like to hear it

but of course something like that'll happen again

cause secretly, it's a thing i stupidly like about myself

that stupid recklessness

there's method to the madness

that method being, to go mad, that involves methodical work on superfluous selfish things and things peripheral to that, a fuzzy cloud of delirium and lukewarm fever

but there's always an abyss in nullspace in a select few nanoseconds that's an ephemeral home to dreams that are almost a consolation - but mostly fever - and so much sweat - and urinary delusions - piss paranoia - hearing loss - a heavy head - loaded with blanks

what is a statesperson?

does a statesperson imperfectly implement a solution to a problem not everyone can agree upon? the infuriating and confusing thing is that within the varying degrees of practicality are all kinds of things, hideous and beautiful, and we, us common lay people have got to come to our own decision, about which one is the one we're gonna take

more refurbishing of old compositions

i've been doing a lot of this in the last few months, but haven't got around to posting any links - so, yo echo chamber, here's a bunch of old things i wrote that i've recomposed a little, and re-recorded a lot ('course all my music is now posted on my blog, cause i've just discovered the pages feature of blogger):

first and last

Damned

Synergy

Depraved Parade

insolence

dereveries

Kalimbe

Prelude in D minor

Prelude in G major

Prelude in B flat minor

Cabin Fever

"Non negotiable," it says, in large type at the bottom of the paycheque. Strange they felt it necessary to add that. I wouldn't have assumed there was a haggling process that followed, but why do they gotta rub it in? Why don't they just put "wage slave pittance", and get to the point? And oh, whoops, clumsy, they dropped it. Go on, pick it up! Atta boy.

Ghandiose death, with god on your lips. God, I am proud to be your humble servant. I'm spinning off the wheel of life, whee! Where it doesn't matter what happens to whitey, the color wheel is done. Off the wheel is God, that's my definition.

Or, God! Make this pain stop! I thought it wasn't supposed to hurt! I thought there was a special grace in case of assassination. The only reason I look so stoic and heroic is cause I can't get enough air to scream! And thank God my awareness is fading before I've had the chance to beg for life. Maybe it's just awareness that goes, not feeling. Maybe things will exist, I just won't be aware of it.

Wait a minute, that's what I thought all along! So why's it such a revelation? Special dispensation? Revelation in the veil and devaluation of awareness. Maybe I don't need to be Aware of every damned thing to enjoy it! What's revealed as I pass the threshold, from life-by-proxy to unlife-by-proxy is that what I'm not aware of is still part of me, something I'm able to feel. Sounds kinda flat though, doesn't it?

Thank God that's over. Baby shoes, never worn.

Feeling weird

Things are weird these days. That's what everyone says. Even death is weird, people feel weird with death, like what do you do? Well, you celebrate the deceased's life a bit, cause it feels good to do that. It's part of the deal, we figure that participating in that makes it safe to assume that we'll be celebrated a bit some day, when we're not around to join in. If only my wake could be like finnegan's. But it feels good, in the muddy mire of weirdness.

My sponsor lost his sponsor. To liver failure, after 25 years sober. The 2nd liver didn't take, but if it weren't for that transplant interlude that give him another year of life, and fucking vitality to boot, I never would have met him. And damn am I glad I did. But he left weirdness in his wake - that will become a spot of gum from the eighties on the concrete, fluorescent colours unnoticed from above except as a speck in the gravel grain, contributing as pixel to the mean hue.

With my last ounce of strength... I write and post a five star review of the iPhone app "7 little words", on iTunes App Store site, calling it "surprisingly fun" and questioning my instinctual pigeonholing of word games as being pathetic time idling for people with nothing better to do...

So, something, a way of reaching out to the world, in goodwill, a gesture, something to be remembered for in all hypocritical generosity, despite whatever else, he did that, he posted a review praising a word game he liked. Surprisingly liked, like it was an unexpected fig from the ancient tree.

With my last gram of strength I think about how black humour is so easy to traffic in when circumstances are only moderately trying. The divide is so deep. When the black humour is cutting inward as much as outward and you recognize the opportunity for heroic writing if nothing else, it's never less fun or funny. But it's something to do between work, word games, and digital media with dishes stacked, unwashed, stomach protest barely noticed, background noise, and the slow grinding of a better feeling taking too long but maybe at least noticeable like the sliver of a second hand on a clock.

newton the human

what did i do? not much, but what did he do? quite a lot, while younger, too - but he stood on the shoulders of giants, he said

and me, for my part... i did a little... i didn't shuffle half-heartedly through every second of my life - i wasn't stillborn and stagnant, but i hit a stalemate early, and proceeded to play drinking games with the ticking chess clock, like i had all the time in the world, for re-arranging letters in words - but i had an arc, and grew, to a point - maybe not for the better and i didn't grow forever - the last movement was a trite ritardando

but there were some funny places, wry times, when i made unique use of things that had been made available to me, after a long road paved with good intentions, maybe the road to hell, but a long one with good intentions, of female persuasion bearing the brunt of procreation and males dissuaded from suicide by the promise of yet another one of these exhaustively trashed generations, making francis cobain's pre-hab clinic graduation ceremony, taking the hit for me, so i never had to be a dad, but you had to get your diploma, and it worked out great for me, so you could service my power line when the storm knocked it down, that allowed me to type a line i thought was witty, which sadly became number three in my top ten points of life and legacy, most of them tied to technology and a rarefied cultural circumstance in a vertex of geography and history's graphical overlay (it won't interpolate cause the function's fucked)

but one of them was tied to a woman. . . which i never thought was my game - but i was still human, getting my pantlegs snagged on poorly plastered-over juttings of antique pipe-maze from evolution's sub-basement boiler rooms that power this program the master mainframe's running for azathoth's avatar, he played my life like a first-person slacker - shiva watched the show for a token respawn cycle, yawned, "slipped" on the power bar, stubbed her toe and cursed at azathoth, made Him feel like a dog, a pavlovian one - and i described it like that, half-grinning, half-chagrined, having taken pride in a little thing from a big ugly thing, clinging to the outcropping, wanting to live there, being bound to self more than anything else, let alone everything else

but sometimes

i can take pride in "everything else" too, and feel a part of that

and sometimes

i can feel shame in "everything else" too, but the shame never extends to exactly everything because when the shame comes, it only exists by contrast with something that must exist somewhere, someone so good as to enable all this shit we do in our sprawling, spiritually-destitute decadence where a little newton goes a long way, yes, a moon rocket is decadent, but not in the same way as Husky Energy's office suite on the 6th floor of the Scotiabank Building on Water Street, where three computer monitors per cubicle are the average (mind you, not the median) and i scavenge USB peripherals from their trash bins, cause i'm part of the cleaning staff, i have that access, it's what i do for a living, it's where this life has led me, not the path of least resistance, i put up token resistance at times, once going so far as learning how to drive and be another self-righteous road-raging member of this motor society, which can be convenient, i'll admit, but oh, the agony of learning even basic things, in this society, and i basked in pyrrhic wins by cryptic victory laps, but when you chalk it up, i didn't resist much, and consequently, no real victory over anything

and on this office chalkboard over here are mathematical equations that relate to drilling pressure, i'm guessing, i don't understand them but they look impressive, he's not just some contemptible business drone, he's an engineer, with practical skills and brainpower profitably entwined, and i'm cleaning for an oil company, apparently i have enough left to lose to be willing to collaborate with corporations that are saving for fallout shelters for their families, cause they love their families, but not their janitors, cause their janitors don't smile - well, the dominican does and the philippinos do sometimes, but the canadian one, he's an insolent white little weasel, and i can't blame them, i wouldn't like me either, being all non-smiley, but maybe they'll take the dominican, the nice bible-reading man (who suffered enough already for our sins, you can tell by his thick accent) with them into their oil crash calamity buffer drome, and sure there'll be hordes who won't get in, the kind that never win contests, the born-losers rockin' the free world at a one-man pabst party, 'twas ever thus, the BPers would say, but they're all azathoth's figurines left out in the woods at night, right?

so when i feel the kind of shame that can extend far beyond myself, it always stops short of the idea of this one person, the good son that keeps the family together, just barely, hanging by a thread while eleven other siblings drink and bet themselves and their children to ruin, but that good son somehow pulls a christmas out of his ass every year, he saves christmas, and christmas saves the family one slice of wholesome happiness a year, and it's all because of someone like him, the only one among us sinners (incidentally correlating to the jesus function via vertices) [or the adopted daughter of the lesbian god], set against the wastes of innocent material, wand cruel dynamics, and gratuitous grace of nerve reprieve in the irony of oceanic desire, bottomless, and the irony of damaged nerves, benevolence, in the global sandbar summer of love, so shallow everywhere so bring your boat over to my bay, we'll have another sandbar party over my way, and then when we're done having that, we'll party back at your barsand

once i admired the mandible mechanics of a social insect, though i doubted it was a point of pride for that bug, as a being - but maybe it was, and if it was, then i could relate to its pride when i've thought that for all the lowness of me in this era, with opportunities undreamed of by an unbroken chain of ancestral genetic iteration stretching back through prehistoric haze, and the chasm spanning what i could do - and what i did do (sweet fuck all) with this situation... there's still some personal trivia that makes my head swell stupidly at stupid times and i get those stupid waves of nausea in feeling it, and love/hate the feeling - but it's true that i can type with speed and precision on a computer keyboard - which is a neat trick, i don't see anything outside my species pulling that off - and there are even some in my species who covet that ability - and oh how cute it is when anyone, ever, looks up to me for anything, awhahahaww

and i can read, too, how 'bout that? and i can talk, and walk - this nerve clump in my skull cage (the most densely ramified matter in the universe, some say) is some sophisticated shit, man - and if you think i'm something, you're barely scratching the surface - just check out this guy newton for example, he's got a derived unit of measurement named after him - he got it through higher level functioning than i could ever be bothered with - not that i ever had the option to function at that level through sufficient bother - but i did have the option to at least dig how you derive a newton, and i couldn't be bothered with that either - it would have caused intolerable bother, for everyone - i would have graduated high school and gone on to a university shooting - it wouldn't be worth it - i would have killed the brainiac who would have gone on to figure out cold fusion - and all for the brains to figure out how to build a fertilizer bomb

but i'm kinda proud that newton's a human and i'm one too - i mean, we don't come from the same family or anything, but our DNA maps aren't that different - and hey, we even speak the same language, just different-era dialects - and we can both read, so we're practically blood brothers - even though we'd probably hate each other if we got together in person, and i'd probably make him ashamed to be human - and i'd still feel grudging pride that he's human, pride by osmosis, but i'd hate the way the universe works that makes these people who make me ashamed to be me...

...but it's not all about me

so it turns out that pride is inversely proportional to ego, a nice contrarian twist - so why do i get so gloomy so often, when there's bliss in ego-less immortality, so close to the taking, with just a slip of the identkey and a slip off the self?!

in those little moments of joggling, the door seems to open for a second and what i normally feel as wishful thinking, and a gyp of an afterlife, is actually the REAL DEAL, a kind of big picture peace and tranquility with bite: the bite of the first worm through the lead-lined coffin buffet - when i'm no longer the embalmed corpse in the coffin but the worm excelling at being the worm - ah, what i used to think of as enlightenment, now ringing like a brain aneurysm, an artifact of over-zealous cells i so enjoyed a decade ago - the zeal is gone, salvation is late, or way too early, so i'll continue adding projects to my daytimer, some to do today, some to do tomorrow, some to do in a month, some to do maybe soon maybe later maybe never

anchor phone improv

pinned down on self aware island. good thing I'm not part of this program, imagine the pressure if I was! lots of kids. balloons. families. been a while since I tried to absorb much for journalistic purposes. a-social, not anti-social / forget labels

relative safety at the corner table. a little moment. remembering other little moments that I don't normally think to remember. the balloons remind me of that ride I got with the natives from long beach in one of my many hitches back from the Tofino job. the baby in the back seat, facing the DVD player screen. but he wasn't watching the DVD, he was focused on his balloon, batting it around the backseat of the car, and me deputized to play with him, a natural way of amicability as partial payback for the ride. and no strain or contrivance on my part, how rare and precious that was, to just instinctually join this kind of bond, with no burden of obligation. isn't it nice when pleasantries are pleasant? why must that pleasure be so rare for me? and the parents in the front so chill, no acknowledgement needed, just driving and listening to this strange flavor of metal i'd never heard. so I played balloon with the baby, with dilligence, batting it back to his side of the car when he managed to flail it my way. and it was so clear how he found it to be the funnest funniest game in the world. so free of that ambiguity that clouds everything. it was nice. I'll take it.

now I got this phone as a shield instead of a notebook. and it's got advantages in that it doesn't look like I'm writing as a shield from social anxiety. I could just be one of those always texting assholes. then I'd be anti-social but I'd still sort of fit in, in some sad way.