solitaire

when i stop playing the three card monty game of online "dating" and come back to the angry rants of worldly observers, i feel better - politics is more honest, the cynicism earned, it's presented transparently... it's not snapchat filter bullshit and lol fucking w ppl - disappointed idealists comfort me, pick up my hope in humanity

watching myself get the dopamine hits from the notification sounds, the stupid involuntary heart racing for false positives, disgusting, why am i letting this happen, why did i re-start the experiment?

finally time to just read the ian welsh article about how we're just biding time, the twenty or so years we have left before we're past the event horizon of ecological collapse - but if that's the case, i want to make use of that time - but playing a rigged game isn't good use

the only thing keeping me going is that i'm in sight of the point at which i'm long past being able to say i gave it a good honest try, and can finally move on to the stage of recognizing it as a pointless waste of temporal emotional and creative investment

capital flight, share the wealth with self, share the love with none

forced

Whiskey and cigars. Don't inhale, get the fix gradual, indirect, cause it's about the look. I think Norman Mailer shot a deer there once. Home away from home. The Royal bar and grill, open mic night. Been working in a wood shop. That's technically correct, I was cleaning the woodshop. Covered in sawdust. Do a quick rough brush-off, leaving most of the dust still stuck to the jeans and shirt. Keep the clothes on, don't wash anything, keep the coat of sweat, let the pheromones do their job. There's a boldfront coming in. I'm on the front line, fronting like the confidence man. I'm gonna win their trust cause I smell like sawdust and I work with my calloused carpenter hands. I'm an honest man. I'm gonna con them, the ones that need to be conned, the ones that need a fantasy, they'll want me if they think I'm someone else, I can create that person. I can get what I want - and what I want is not so much to ask really. Just inhale that sawdust. I put the image of calloused hands in their mind, doesn't matter if that's true or not. It doesn't take that many coats of illusion, just a few, and the will to put them on. Now I'm a user, using what I'm supposed to be using, a selection from half the population.

If the online dating proves a total failure, as it's looking increasingly likely to be, after somehow talking myself into genuine positivity and the will to press on, persevere, work the algorithms, play the numbers game to the ninety-ninth decimal, gamify it for myself, max/min my character stats, be a completist, try everything, exhaust options in a hunting for crack-rock crumbs on the floor kind of way, make it a data-mining exercise, project passion dispassionately, mechanically deploy a set of variations on my presentation in a carefully curated profile, then even resort to paying for the premium account that's almost surely a scam, but what if, what if it's not, what if there's a one percent chance it works, finally, in exasperation, restart all accounts with a fake pic but the same words, to calculate the delta between honest imagery and swipe-bait... after all that playing the confidence game against myself and still nothing to show for it.... that's when I turn the con outward, look outward, externalize, use. It just so happened I got covered in sawdust today, I'll use that. Then I'll use artistic extremism, perform abortions on stage, excise a hundred concept albums in a frenzy of self-immolation, smash guitars and stay sober, force, force it. Force it. Force IT.

inertia addict

Impeach the motherfucker. Is it worth physically fighting over, fist-fighting, then street-fighting, then civil war? There's all this rage, it's gone too far, how much more can we take? Even if we could take it, should we? Fuck no, it's gotta stop, we've gotta stop it, get militant. There's some configuration of force they call "our side" cause it's never a protracted people's war exactly, there's a vanguard whether it's the left or the right, the really really motivated 3% and the 20% who can be converted into partisan killers, and force their will on the malleable non-ideological folk in the crossfire. But maybe we can step back from the brink, still work within the system, follow the rule of law. "Our side" will be sorry if we're successful in bringing down their television president, they say. They'll rise up, get violent. More violent, that is.

Now is it worth the crescent by cul-de-sac suburban slaughter, the unimaginable guerrilla warfare in big-box retail parks? Now that it's actually happening, the inconceivable, the defensive line behind Staples and Old Navy, to hold back the advancing red-hats from the Costco perimeter, can we remember what it's about? It's some emotion. We're fighting because we're fighting, it has its own momentum. It's solidified into an attempted genocide on the other. It's not like they're two races - well one of them is a race, the bloodless cyborg imperium, genetically predisposed for world domination - and then all the other races on the other side. If there's ever been a case for a race to be wiped out, it's those blue-eyed devils - if we were gonna wipe out a race, which we're not, some of those white walkers are our allies, and some of them are just so deluded they think their psychopath rulers are concerned about their cannon fodder. Only in the sense that a gun owner is concerned about his ammunition. If poor blacks can't be the property of rich whites, poor whites will suffice.

So we've been fighting for a while, cause we've been fighting for a while. Once the fight started, the inciting events faded. It's not about something that seems so small as impeachment, now that politics is on hold, it's a death struggle. Right now we're just fighting to survive til the spring, when the fuel shortage won't matter as much. But then we'll have fresh spring rage. It burns on and on like a tire fire. It's been so long, it seems, but five years is a coffee break next to those ancient feuds still spilling blood in the middle east and europe, so we'd better settle in. This isn't like one of those wars that meant nothing, like the great war, or pretty much every war since, besides ww2, it's personal. The gamer bros gloat on twitter when the power comes back on. They post a go-pro helmet-vid of somebody's kill streak. Kill streaks are real now, they don't refer to xbox games, but dead humans that stay bleeding on the parking lot instead of vanishing to lower the polygon count for faster frames. The transition from xbox to real life slaughter left the lingo intact.

This is about those people that fucked us over decade after decade with their rural votes being worth more than our city votes because of a two hundred year old hostage negotiation, those people who started the culture war that turned into the shooting war. And to be fair, we did incite violence - there was a breaking point, we did fight back, finally, we put their god-appointed leader in prison, it had to be done.

Now here we are, in the bombed out ruins of the target megastore, haha, you gotta love the dirt-cheap irony, splitting up a can of chunky soup nine ways, the last of our salvage run cut short by the drone attack. We're blaming them for this, they're blaming us for this. The perpetual hostage blame game. Is it worth it? Probably not, for us or them or anyone. But... why should we have backed down? They should have, finally, at long last, had some decency. But they didn't, we kind of knew that would happen. Will it be worth it? Probably not, too much has been lost, if we can some day sign a peace treaty, we can start producing something other than explosives, and bring the economy back to maybe a thousandth of what it was. Maybe we'll have learned a lesson of some kind. Like, never back down in the first place, so that you don't get into the position where standing firm for the moral and/or pragmatic reasons starts the kind of war never seen before, a 21st century bio-toxic dirty-bomb wired into every system that sets back world civilization itself a millennia or two.

deadass

Banging out text til I get what I want or something vaguely approximating, mating rituals a proxy for anything fertile, just ritualized dancing in private messages, save the posting for later mania. Well here we are mania, it's been a while and I missed you but I also remember all of a sudden how scary you are. But this time there are no drugs, no dangerous ones anyway, so it's different. Banging out texts, banging out bids for mating rituals approximating satisfaction, all on a credit card before the house of cards falls. Say anything and everything because economy is for tailors not writers, or whatever the fuck I'm supposed to be, bang out all text, until someone somehow validates my attempt, go out with a bang, finally. Hellyeah.

born and raised beth

I had my chance, goddamn knew it too, as it happened. So obvious on the piano bench, couldn't be any more it than this. One of those times where people ask if I give lessons. I always shut it down quick, nah, can't teach. For shit. Could've done without that second bit. Shut it down, don't tease it out. Christ, could at least attempt to pretend to teach, in theory, get some conversation going with her, born and raised here, me too, haven't I ever met you before? Didn't think so, she was maybe a half gen ahead, perfect, just shy of those evil associations. Couldn't think of the thing to say to get to the next sentence. Don't look directly at the thing you want that's so scary since you want it so much. So much to lose. So diffuse tension by resigning to losing. As it happened, there seemed so much in common, the kind of girl I should be talking to. But, it's still so nervy, still running deep, no smoothing over with analgesics anymore, quick fix is disconnect, empty agenda leaving meditative busywork and transcription of pale dream fragments, hollow relief at least there is no longer anything on the hook, the dancing dangling edge that I can't even find within me to define with words that sound too soft and sweet. Fuck that pussy shit. Instead, improvise later, channel what I should have said, ornate inaction, feeling reverberation, Born and Raised Beth

vestigal

(JOHN picks up a trinket 6.)

(JOHN puts down a trinket 6.)

Head Games

the leukocytes are bright tonight

i saw the leukocytes again
it's been a few weeks since i saw them
i always love it when i see them
i love my leukocytes
especially when they become visible, animate
the way they move
darting, curving in directions
as inscrutable as insects
but i figure i could figure them out
someone has, some neuroscientist
like the etymologist figured out that figuration of an insect's flight
someone named them so i could rhapsodize

but mostly i feel a loving bond
with my body
the usually hated body
cause if these bright streaks inside me
are on the team, it can't be such a failure
and they seem so personal
little people in a hurry, ecstatic
don't know their agenda
outside blood regulation
which is important but there's something
beyond that, like my cleaning this drama room
is not the sum of my life, there's more than the parts
don't know what the more equals with these leukocytes
but in a sense, they're mine, intimate partners
in the macrocosm imagined to be me

i love my leukocytes
they usually show themselves
for half a minute
after i've put myself through a moment of
extreme physical exertion
but it was only a minor exertion just now
so i can't find the causation
just a vague correlation
there's no 430 nanometer wavelength of sky blue anywhere
is it the wall of mirrors, or is that just the
obvious symbolism i would use in a rhapsody?
cause I'm working in the drama room maybe?
i'm curious and yet i don't quite want to know why
and sever the bond

Citadel

Valedictorian

just works

"I reckon the sun's made of coal," he said, the prospector who lost his claim, on his short walk to the gallows. Poor man, no fight left, nothing for it but to muse on nature itself in the last few minutes of his life. It must be coal, like all that coal he found, had a claim on for a while, so much coal it would burn for six thousand years, give or take a couple centuries. It makes my chest ache, so painfully adorable to hear him, but I'm not condescending, I'm admiring. It's not a bad theory, there's some basis for it. He did better than I'd do, probably, in his place and time, with my questionable curiosity. 

Modern technology cured my curiosity problem, it was problematic to want to know so many things, I can instead just take for granted that whatever works works. Just works, like google said their email just works, except they have to change it every year, and I have to dig around in the flags menu for hidden options to change it back to what "just worked" for me forever.

gotta bump

and not care, like old times - not like old times in the bad way, just in the way that i gotta unreasonably make room for new stuff, or just blankness, don't wanna be seeing the already over-exposed recent posts, so

yeah.

Digital self-mutilation as Catharsis

Ignored at the meeting by the monstrous chad because of the easily missed frequency of my voice, when I tried to be friendly and join the conversation. Just wanted to say that "drag" could mean male dressing as female, but also the other way, since you were asking - but I'm not heard. The words get lost cause my voice won't cut, even when straining against paranoid modesty to boost the signal. But also, be casual cause it doesn't sound friendly forced. I can see the genes in that, my mom's smile a constructed wall of teeth. I think she fakes it to make it, but she does make something. I'm not even upset at being ignored so much as looking like a pathetic loser who tried and failed to be part of the gang - then retreated instead of asserting himself. So I'm not noticed, but also seen to be a fool? Logic would say I'm either seen or not seen, but there's no logic in this.

Now neurosis can be bootstrapped to a murder spree because the internet. That's why I used that word "chad" to signal I've just become familiar with incel culture, thanks to a video of an outsider with some ins, exploring and critiquing the newest sickest net craze.

I try to make up for my shameful loss of face they may or may not have noticed, by reading our meeting's preamble aggressively: Clear yet colloquial, leaning into severed gerunds, routing edges with power tools. Still the wrong frequency. Can only do so much because of that bone-structure dictating a chain of consequences from childhood, sledge-hammer impact awareness of being the smallest guy in every group of peers, to internalization of physical stature, to stillborn confidence that never had a chance to vitalize a personality. The guy who reminds me of the people I counter-hated in high school is sharing, so, here's some body language for you people who are good at that sort of thing: I'm swiping this text into my phone to distract myself from your rapacious voice.

Oh God. I'm already infected with incel-ese, I'm black pilled from just watching that ContraPoints video - and it was supposed to be disinfectant. And I loved the humour that soothed her examination into such ugly psychologies of disturbing familiarity - but what's lingered for me is the incel's morbid relief in baring the hard truths of love and sex from the floor of evolution's dungeon. It can be so clarifying, if I can see it as the sociological vectors that led to my insecurities, and not as Final Truth "because it hurts the most", like hello? Epistemic masochism, duh. It can be useful if I don't take it too far, like whoever that incel terrorist shit was who was called a "supreme gentleman" by the other incel terrorist shit. If there's one thing he wasn't, it's gentle - he doesn't get to be that, even if his gentle sensibilities were so tortured by life that he abandoned them in the end to vent rage with murder. Well then, guess he wasn't gentle after all. And he doesn't get to be a man. Facing a difficult life of long lonely stretches with some stoicism is rather manly, regardless of whether you ever get the "got-laid" merit badge. Killing for self-expression isn't gentle, or manly, just gross, "like, so-gross-ah... like, wha'a freak-ah..." Now you've made their dumb comments legit, now they're deserved. Sad for you, tragic for your victims. But they are yours at least, if nothing else is, you can own the dead cause you couldn't own them alive, so let them be your legacy, your victims.

Luc was a gentle man. He did well with the ladies before I knew him, but in the divorced dad era he was often an incel - and haven't we all been there brother? Most of us? Some of us? But even then, he had his moments. This paisan, he had some balls on him, he got out there and tried, and once in a while goddamnit, he got himself some. And on those occasions he'd put his under-utilized talents to joyful employment. He wasn't cringing from the femoids, he wouldn't shroud them in black veils to spare himself the torture of their faces. Even a 2.3 was worth a double-take, many ways to appreciate. We needn't go misogynist, a gentleman can see the even worse situation of most women in the gauntlet of impossible standards. But that's why I found the video fascinating, because there is a place for an under-represented slice of the male perspective, the history written by the losers, on blogger. Society could do to hear more from incels, problem being that, of course, they get wrung through the internet coming out "men's rights" activists at best. From there is a sickening drop off. There could be something good to make of this incel awareness, but it ends up in shooting sprees and van attacks. Just wonderful.

Everybody, look at my Crossfit body, is all I can think of her, even though as usual, she's got a great recovery message. Cue self-obsession tangent: What kind of cel am I? Let's say, wristcel. No, armcel, it's all about thin arms, that's my glass ceiling. "Armcel", my contribution to the culture, my toxic agitprop, sui-fuel for those who have the steel to end themselves. [I don't, and honestly, I envy their strength - if it's a real attempt it really is strength, like a gun in the mouth, can't be easy to pull that trigger]. I'll draw a stick figure, except no, cause I can't exaggerate lack of muscle on a stick figure, it will need to be a drawing with some limb-width baseline. Then I can put my likeness in a bell curve gutter next to that reference, Microsoft Paint catharsis, to upload for upvotes for bright side is suicide.

On my best days, I can get real honest, then articulate the honesty, though I've never gotten past some barriers protecting little reserves of ego you wouldn't even suspect I'm harboring - see how honest I am? Except for the reserves. At my most hope-cel, I can think of this honesty as style, a charm that could escape hard limits of skull to orbit sex appeal. And the stubborn faith that I have no faith in salvation through Crossfit persists - yeah it doesn't fit me, and I kinda like that I'm not into it, I got standards for myself, like it's not a good look to be looking to be good-looking. And always the shame of that, knowing how comforting it is to dismiss what I won't bother trying to obtain when it seems like a fucking fool's errand, and I'm not quixotic enough. Hey, that's my style, so fine, I'll own whatever void rushes in.

for the profit of robots

the machine rolls on
for d-grade oil
the puffins roll up
for the clubbing of seals
the ski-doos roll out
for homogeneous commerce
every culture must die
the best stuff's inside
but i stopped looking
though monument valley did kill a few hours...
dreams keep the rest alive
for a life
sleep when you're alive

Flying East

Finally, I've done all the work, got myself in the air, now given over to professionals, above the smoke plains, the new normal. Can relax and actually meditate, think about this new normal, how I help insulate the ceiling with extra bigass carbon layers. But at least I'm not trying to block solutions to the heat-trap atmosphere problem. It's a pathetic defense that I'm addicted to this life, but I'm not going to great effort to prevent any sort of scaling back, like the corporate sociopaths, even if we all have the human condition, sure, we're all afflicted. Weaponize my human condition against me, blame it on said condition.

I'm swiping this, so the extra time it takes to correct auto-correct is frustrating. Got to try and be succinct, sidestep filigree fjords, can't make time for artistry, just gotta render the thought as best I can. So, looking sideways at the sky, I'm imagining Elon's rocket passion and can't entirely hate the guy, figure he must have some real depths and heights when I want to see this horizon-spanning smokeblot as a spot in context with the province - and how many times higher would I have to be to see? Out of the blue, into the black, 90x maybe. Didn't think it was possible to get giddy over simple scale since quitting kidhood.

Nothing but ash from Nelson to the Rockies and beyond. Still waiting for it to descend upon the zeitgeist. Where are the ten inch headlines? Social media diluted them to a trillion petabyte pixels spread chaotically through the slowly choking human world. The new normal is... just is, keeps rolling. You can gawk, or go about increasingly meaningless business. Or, the business is too full of meaning, hurts too much in the context I can only sense, driving by the rear view mirror.

Atmospheric haze is still a mystery to me, don't understand why I can't see the ground but if I was higher, would see it just fine. There's such complexity, such riches in this landscape that even I, after all the cartographers, topographers, geologists, geographers, satellite relay and people on planes... still even just me, could find something new, a connection (like the west-africa / east-south-america vase-face) except subtler, like the math could convert to intuition and back, left-brain / right-brain windowpane, going clear. Somewhere there's a reason why those natural lines are almost right angle human kinds but not quite, and in between are yet less straight nested crinkles, rock cracks between the millions of lakes. We could all have private islands in this tundra, or at least maybe every extended family could have one, cause the rolling carpet under my eyes is a flow of literally millions of lakes.

This is the future land rush, this tundra latitude I can see thanks to the efficiency of the great-circle flight-path cutting into the arctic over James Bay. When the vast band of temperate nests for populations becomes a wasteland, the endless rolling carpet of fresh water will be swarmed, maybe even somehow made small. How this must happen seems horrifying. Don't imagine it going in a very Canadian way, except in a precursor canadian casual slaughter and post-canadian see-no-evil rape of the land we're well into, post. "Supernatural BC" is still good marketing! The exclamation marks, when I don't mean them, are embarrassing to read later, when I'm forcing that friendly appearance in text, when my friendliness is genuine, don't need to bedazzle in synthetic gem crust.

Look at me, I'm looking out the window instead of being so bored and wanting to get there already. I'm not wondering why I can't dredge up the wonder, cause I got in such a rut that the jarring fact of being so literally high actually jars me! I'll even grant the exclamation, not friendly-like but accurate, even sleepdepped as I am. [Gutrot turbulence is perturbing suggestions into half-sleep, like I just remembered that the hip-hop artist del appeared for the first time ever in my dream career, I can place it to somewhere in the last four days, and then there was a version of anderson street turned tunnel unfurling fractally toward hex corners and a vr game with roman-polynesian monuments and rail conveyor shelves, important shelves that become salvia walls for a second, seems impossible yet I shift up the shelf backwards, a station ruined, always connecting to the schools and minor work stress, now chronically the janitor in dreams. All models are wrong, some are useful, he said, my new digital dad for lack of any better unnecessary substitute. I covet model airplane glue. Is a close bracket due ]?

Whatever else, I won't be the smug wonderer, wondering at everyone else's lack of wonder, cause we're in the sky, pissing in God's face, and I think I can see the earth's curvature. And I hate that cliche, that people have lost their wonder. I wouldn't wonder at it since I embody it most of the time. I've come out the end of that wonder, ditched into the mundane miraculous, so just cause I had a moment of goggling at the crazy situation I'm in, something akin to a God's eye view, doesn't mean I'm gonna pretend I'm so much better than everyone. But I will pretend I'm better for not pretending I'm better.

Maybe the smug goggler, if she really is wondering, is not actually smug but seeing more than me, all intuitive perception on the Meyers-Briggs, in a boosted moment, NP but not proprietary with that intuition, wants everyone to see. So many better people than me were so much humbler. Oh yeah, and sure, some of the patriarchal shit can go. Then I get the feeling, it's all been said before. This is a lukewarm mess, should edit the dead hell out of it. Edit: I did.

unplug outrage machine

rarefied

it's a bad start on a blank screen to crumple bits of text into bins - float a few tens of Ks of money toward a vague vacation, towards a tank of flotation, find some way to escape the mundane that isn't the done-to-death substance slaveways

the modulation wheel finally died, end of an era, the original keyboard is accelerating toward becoming a carcass - i can't remember how many letter ems are in that word - there's no kinetic decay here though, nor controlled demolition - i'm trying to write about this, this, it, as i feel the disgust of being passively vague - sober depression with no drama, no good reason - hope things go well in korea - there's never been this quick of a shift from winter to spring - i get high on spring for half a day, and then a noveaux green depression oppresses, a snap back to perma-depleted baseline, a feedback loop of warmth and light and sweat and short-shorts and me outside this, incongruent, why can't i enjoy nice things? can't enjoy green things, smoking grass would help me but i'm forbidding myself half-measures, they killed my spirit for: cleanliness and godliness and dignity and i don't even mostly mean that sarcastically, a good life, and being good to good people in my life, etc... yes, getting into the half measures, the codeine and kratom and cannabis and cough syrup and that quickly spiraled out of control, and i don't have any better way to say that, because i'm riding the worn rubber of the wheel, the turgid death of the wheel spinning because inertia

pulling teeth to answer all these step work questions, don't i like being interviewed, doesn't it stroke the ego, even if it's a cock-eyed narcissism? not if it's a book interviewing me, really me writing some shit about myself, that i've pretty much already explored and done nothing about - but i can use the urge to deflect obligation to finally write something here instead of there

it's exhausting and i already lack energy - trying to get through it quickly but feeling deeply bogged down - can't bother coming up with any artful or elegant way to say any of this - hitting a wall - when i'm analyzed whether it's others doing it or myself, there seems to be nothing there, ultimately

hard to get into the spirit of it - can blast facts, be pretty honest, but it doesn't feel good, doesn't feel hopeful, can't even fucking articulate why or how... maybe should just be honest with my sponsor about the process, the paralysis of pointless perfectionism, too many questions, too many angles, don't know what is most important... been thru it already a bunch of times... don't feel much from it... maybe it's just this lame weekend of being tired as usual, but it's worse being tired with time off to be tired, time to do nothing

royally fuck'd