the tree of cognitive liberty must be watered with the barf of junkies

One of the few things I agree with some libertarians on is the idea of cognitive liberty. Even though I've abused drugs in the past, and now avoid any substance that feels too good, I haven't changed my view that the drug war is insane, and we should err more on the side of personal freedom. But I'm not an absolutist on that, or much else.

Although I thought guns were cool and fun as a teenager, I've outgrown that obsession and mostly associate them with pain and death and vulgar displays of power and paranoia. But I'm not an absolutist about gun rights. Like with most things, there's a balance to be struck. It's not my hobby, but I can imagine people with legit concerns about self-defense, or just feeling entitled to a hobby as long as it doesn't hurt others.

I hope for a world with more freedoms for drug use. But good god, can you imagine if rights for users were ANYTHING LIKE the freedoms that gun owners have in america, freedoms that single-issue gun rights voters demand never be rolled back an inch? And can you imagine if I acted the way these gun-nuts act about their hobby? Here's a silly story I wrote in an attempt to imagine it:

I'm at Walmart, buying two grams of carfentanyl as I normally do after every second paycheque. No waiting period, no background check, no sanity check, let alone any paperwork to show I might be in need of elephant-grade pain relief. Last week I was feeling pretty down about the prospects of any future in this world, and frankly, beyond the ideation phase of suicide - I did have some plans written down, but I deleted the text file and nobody needs to know. Today I'm feeling a little more up, albeit angsty, and it's just to take the edge off. Yes, I need carfentanyl, shut up, it's not your business. Heroin has long since lost its effectiveness for me, in fact I'm getting tolerant to plain old fentanyl, who are you to tell me the carfent is too potent? Anyway, Walmart is out of methamphetamine, so I pop over to a drug show in the afternoon. Plenty there, I'll need some up to balance out the fent, don't want to be too noddy for the barbecue this evening. There's a crack booth too, so I pick up some for my cousin. He's turning thirteen next week, so it'll make a great gift, it's time the boy learned how to smoke. I'm excited to gift him my father's crack pipe when he's ready, it's a fine piece, been in my family for generations.

On the way home there are some annoying protesters waving signs about drug control. I guess there was a mass fent poisoning in Seattle yesterday, gawd, so they want to take away the rights of all us responsible users? And the radio said Washington State's got the strictest drug control measures in the country, so clearly drug control doesn't work. Oh, it's Purdue lobbying the government, they say, Mylan buying politicians, the Sackler family, Heather Bresch - blah blah blah. If they come for my rohypnol, I promise you, they better watch their damn drinks in the future, because we aren't going to take it lying down.

I'm a proud drug rights absolutist. I was baptized in dimethyltryptamine. I've been a member of the Church of the Inner Light since before I left the astral plane to inhabit a human body. This country was founded on liberty. Specific liberties. What part of "the pursuit of happiness" do you not understand, you nanny-state nazis? You want me to wait a week to buy my ketamine? But I want it now! How dare you infringe on my rights! Tyrant! What kind of SJW scold wants to flag people who drug their dates and post endlessly on social media with detailed fantasies about spiking their city's water supply with clonazepam? Do we want to live in a such an oppressive society, just for the dubious benefit of less mass-poisonings? The ban on aerosolized diacetylmorphine they're calling for in the wake of the Denver drugging is just the beginning, it's a slippery slope. Because what they really want is to ban all drugs, for everyone, forever! This issue, and only this issue, is why I vote. Because we can never give an inch! They'll take a mile. And keep taking!---

So, that would be a bad future. Even though I care about cognitive liberty, in the bizarre scenario where I lived in a world where politicians catered to my wacky culture based around dangerous narcotics, were terrified of upsetting me, and fully indulged my hobby, I would not be a drug-nut and demand that society endure continual mass death so I could have my freedoms extended fully in every direction. In that case, if my freedoms were causing, I dunno, mass fentanyl poisonings every day, maybe I would be willing to give a little bit, maybe accept some common-sense drug policy. Maybe I could even still have the right to cannabis products, alcohol, nicotine, coca leaves, opium, even some synthetics, we could take those freedoms a hell of a lot further before you get anywhere close to a situation analogous with the gun rights dystopia that exists now in america. Obviously, drugs and guns are different, and require different laws and standards - being an absolutist either way, about either issue, is stupid. But man, if I was a gun guy, I think I would maybe shut the fuck up right now, and let the victims of gun violence have some say in policy.

speaking up

Instead of doing what I usually do in reaction to big events, like linking to some article or video where someone is articulating my feeling much better than I could, I'm going to speak in my own words. There is a theocratic cancer spreading across the world and it has to be dealt with, by force if necessary, and that seems increasingly necessary, sad to say. Its epicenter is the United States. It's not that bad here in Canada, yet, but I don't like the trends. The right to an abortion is over in the US, red states are passing trigger laws immediately in reaction to the supreme court, and soon republicans will be in total control and pass a federal ban. This is a big deal of course, but it's not that alone compelling me to write. Climate change overshadows everything, and it's related. The religious zealots are moving like a blitzkrieg to end gay rights, abortion rights, women's rights, everybody's rights except those for white male property-owners, the rights of corporations to maximize profit, and the rights of people who demand to own thirty assault rifles. They're part of a fundamentalist death-cult that, literally and without exaggeration, wants to bring about the "end times". This is what they say they believe. In an age of climate change and nuclear weapons, this group of people are an existential threat to life on this planet. They're not only apathetic about the many dire threats to our safety, health, and quality of life, they're actively accelerating those threats, because it fulfills an ancient prophecy they think is cool. Google the recent texas republican convention if you need education on this - it's not an outlier, it's representative.

There's no point mincing words, it's a christian thing. It's not all christians OF COURSE, I'm not anti-christian or anti-religion. My parents are as good exemplars of the worthwhile christian values as you can find. But it's a certain group of christians, unfortunately large, powerful, extremist, and absolutely insane. It's not even the crazy fundies in the jewish or muslim cults, as awful as they are, because they don't have the same level of end-times fanaticism in combination with control of financial, military, and media resources.

I don't know what to say to americans. Vote harder? Yes, vote, but that is a bare minimum, nowhere near sufficient to even begin to address the emergency, because the only viable opposition party is useless. Democrats control the senate, house, and executive branch. There's things they can do, laws they can pass. They can abolish the filibuster. They could even just do a carve out to abolish it on one issue, like they did about the debt ceiling. I've heard every excuse from establishment dems about why they're powerless, and I'm not buying it. They've demonstrated time and time again through action and omission of action that they don't actually care - they believe they themselves will be insulated and it will be others who suffer. If they wanted to fight this there's many things they could at least attempt, but they're doing nothing except performative bullshit. Poems, songs, rhetoric, deflecting blame, telling people to just vote more, WHEN THEY'RE IN POWER RIGHT FUCKING NOW! They seem to almost be celebrating it as a fundraising opportunity.

It's so much worse than most people realize. People love to quote MLK, about the moral arc of the universe bending towards justice, but that isn't a given. Things can get worse, it's happening right now, and there's not necessarily a pendulum swing back toward sanity - that notion has been discredited by the last two decades. The republicans attempted a coup last year, they're forcing unpopular policies on the whole country, and they're still going to sweep to power in the mid-terms because they've stacked the supreme court, suppressed voting, circumvented democracy, and.... the weakness of the corporate-captured democratic party has aided this massively. It was not inevitable that there would be a mid-term rout, Biden was popular when he got in, and he could have built on that by passing popular policies and messaging effectively, rather than pissing it away. The leadership is rotten to the core, from Pelosi, Schumer, Clyburn, and Jeffries, through Biden and Harris and the Clintons and Obamas, to their cheerleaders on MSNBC and in the New York Times and Washington Post.

Take over the democratic party? Yes, god bless those americans that are trying, but the gerontocracy running it and their hand-picked successors are resisting the most reasonable and minor change to the bitter end. They'll happily lose elections and burn their own house to the ground if it allows them to keep their power and position within it.

So, electoral reform seems the obvious next step, so a third party can get in, but how do you even get that off the ground from where it's at now? There's not even a seed. There's Andrew Yang's stupid "forward" party that's really just status-quo neoliberalism with better branding. There's the "people's party" which is an obvious grift. There's the green party which has well-demonstrated over the last twenty years they're not serious about power. There's the libertarians, who want to accelerate climate change for different reasons than religious nuts (the free market is their god, and demands human sacrifice) but the result is the same. And there's advocacy groups like "fair vote" I guess, but c'mon. There isn't time for multi-generational projects. Do it, try it, sure, if there's nothing better to do, but can you chew gum and triage at the same time?

I have some respect for those members of older generations who are hanging on to notions of pacifism, even institutionalism. I get the sentiment, but that's all it is any more, a sentiment, born of a time when things actually were getting better and it was rational to keep such hopes alive. I think they just don't or can't understand where the world is now. It's regrettable, to put it mildly, that we've come to this. I don't want to have to fight, I'm 5'3, 120lbs, and I only like shooting guns in video games. I'm not a tough guy, I don't even like to fight verbally. But I do think a soul can be remolded quickly under duress. And I suspect that bullies often discover the people they enjoyed pushing around are not so fun to mess with after they flip and fight back. That's what these christofascists are, bullies. They love collecting guns and making threats and intimidating normies, because they think they'll never have to actually get bloodied. And hell, I don't want to bleed, or shed blood, but it's looking like that ship sailed. These times call for a kind of citizen participation that is lost to the popular imagination in the western world these days, a WWII-style mobilization. I'm not a doomer and I'm not against hope, I just don't see any hope in clinging to ideas of decency and bipartisanship when they've become irrelevant. The only hope I see is in finally meeting force with force.

What kind of force am I talking about? Well, religious-right fanatics are going on killing sprees and forming militias and trying to overthrow governments. There is nothing like this on the left, don't anyone give me any bullshit about antifa. Anti-fascists were killing nazis back in 1939-1945, for good reason, but that was a long time ago. I don't think terrorism is moral or strategic, that's not what I want. What I do want is, maybe what you'd call militancy, a deterrent to terrorism, some alternative to just sitting around and taking it. At some point, the defenders of democracy and human rights need to become militant when they're under sufficient threat.

I guess what I'm saying is, people need to understand the stakes, and be willing to think clearly about what is necessary and what we're up against: a small minority of fanatics who are holding the world hostage to their schizophrenic delusions. There's a larger group (still minority) of people, mostly white and male, who fall for the anti-woke propaganda, and allow the cringey excesses of some college kids to flip their formerly-held common-sense views on racism and economics - but these aren't death-cultists. I don't think they would sign on for doing the book of revelations. I don't know exactly what the situation calls for, maybe not violence, yet, but I keep amending that opinion the more history happens in front of me, I keep revising it a little more toward, to quote JFK: Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent revolution necessary.

I don't know what I hope to achieve with this post. I have maybe five followers, and they're not here for my politics I don't think, so if you think I'm being hysterical or irresponsible, fine, unfollow. Maybe I'm just venting. There are plenty of people who say this better, my voice I think comes off sounding a bit unhinged, unnuanced, and trite, but I just wanted to add my voice, damn the awkwardness and emotion. I'm glad I spoke up, in my own little way, anyway.

 not gonna wallow

dysphoria

can't communicate - cause, won't? what's there to be necessitated? turn down brightness to ebook reader safety, ok, cool - tweed department in sears. Would be failing diagonally. Constructions felt relevant until the vacuum was created, everything tense because in danger of being sucked out into void - arbitrary feelings, something could be relevant in humour shared - part of the pain is the not connecting, in a way superfluous to how it would matter to express anything right now. Auto correct finally algorithmatized the pattern I can't. Won't, don't necessitate it must be posted. Why apologize, can something be ok? Part of the pain is being in the state where it's awkward cause, taking everything so seriously, it means so much, it metabolizes to pain physically, the pain feedback loops to tell myself it must be amplified, the first thirty minutes are the hardest - i can't be authentic, authentic-ness is pure agony to be excised immediately, dear fucking diary, alright?

the next chapter in dextro diaries: in our hierarchy, there's a die cast, cast you off the die in that next plateau - there's a way to be in a plateau and not anywhere else necessary, it's pure getting through the moment virtuosity to make something, anything, with this painful plasma - fucking monster party mash-up meet-cute vape-meet of plain dealing plasma pizza purple people eaters. Feeling watched, not alone enough, missing that part of myself.

just typing is getting through the moment, getting to the next moment in time, surviving, even if the next moment is just another nightmare. IT'S not that bad, it's just that fucking hard to communicate any idea, or vector, flow from here to there...  THERE'S some way to record where it all makes sense and dreams shuffle into place like perfect sawfigures and pargonopers, when that didn't matter, when a way of life becomes to pretend and have realness equal fakeness, have the ideal be all there is, everything else becomes pain - can't you see the urge to press the panic button to phase pain into pleasure? i dunno.... it's fine, until it's not, can't it ever be fine? when it was i would write to proclaim it so, proclaim it fine, finery, fuckery, 

it's not to be shared, it's never to be unearthed, even if she was sharing a diary with me, it must be at a distance of thirty years and three hundred and thirty three feet, doesn't that make a perfect pattern! Nevermind ironies, if they're painful, blot them out through some act of will that hurts beyond etherized horizons.

all that could matter when pain pulses blotting out the moment, is that damn trumpet in the left channel - yeah, it's sounding like this now - in the name of skiing, I pronounce you void and void.

it's the guilt i can't name and am trying to banish, the hallucinations clawback, take their toll, the things i made fake that come back to bite me, saying it the way a stroke patient would, saying it unconsciously, except kinda in a creepy ghostly way conscious? could i presume to say? ah, cringe from power, any possibility is pain to be avoided at any cost, whatever much it pains me, i will annihilate pain - with more pain - slippery switch, my grip slipped.

profound unease, dissatisfaction, the only thing they offered me was a message that supposedly soothed marvin the paranoid android, written by god, "we apologize for the inconvenience" - i could go to a convent to meditate about that til the end of my life, not the end of time.

one thing i can say, it definitely helps to do something, play, write, record or not, instead of cringe, cling to nothing, try to do some normal behavioral thing that fits in the patterns of what i would do as that person i'm supposed to be, something other than this, why can it hurt so much, am i going to cringe from a static shock for the rest of my life? yes, just cringe, at all costs.

the last fucking thing i need to worry about right now is having to fix every goddamn thing in my life and the world right now... nevermind setting that to a beat - try to be on the right wavelength to enjoy cats - turn a blind eye - turn and turn and turn, eyed and eyed and eyed - pretend, try that on for size, plaster on a fake smile - keep smiling keep laughing keep playing the game - can only say it indirectly - don't like the psychic weather, wait a minute that may feel a millennia, don't judge yourself for being interested in this and not that right now, this is the best you can make of this situation, PSYCHE! haha, just kidding, you're failing and flailing, and KILLIN' IT MAN! You're being the best at this flail failure, it's the good ol' wellworn zen wobble.

Addendums: Trying to go to bed. Seeking lukewarm confort of benedrylirium. We can bond on the cuteness of the kitties, while being unlovable. Not like usual, or at least, not like usual in thinking it's being unlovable. Being the loveliest in a certain point of view. Bad time for a dark night of the soul. Is it ever a good time? Being compromised in ugly frozen positions, still realer than all important pretty patterns.

tried to write through the hell of withdrawing from one anti-depressant, cross-tapering to another, and having vaped an amount of thc oil that is normally manageable, but in that context fucked me up bad, near panic.

from the last five months

actually believing it now
mentioning kansas

cold hands
generation random
sold my soul for this
chintzy
Charismatic Unique Nervy and Talented

Pretentious Philosophical Investigations (The State of my Stupid Mind and its Stupid Interface with the Stupid World) [PARODY]

The Stupid World is everything that is the Stupid Case.

They were right, I was the most pretentious writer on that stupid board with my new-age psychedelic obsession. By itself that'd be middling-level pretention, but there was the extra element of thinking it was all intellectual and artistic. So far up my own meta-ass, I was frenching Lemiwinks the Gerbil. Can't read it back any more, so cringe. Cringe-calling's gonna be cringe pretty soon... oh, already is.

George Carlin wasn't being ironic when he was gonna title his standup special "I like it when a lot of people die", just before 9/11/01. Comic exaggeration maybe, but seriously, we need a die-off. I can't talk about overpopulation any more though, just can't distinguish myself from a eugenicist or anti-natalist to people on my side. I guess, be the change I wanna see, leave a negative legacy. By that I mean, don't procreate but don't be judgmental about it, do what I think is a positive act in a passive way, negating the birth rate infinitesimally and open space for necessary new minds. But don't pretend it's not my personal path of least resistance.

I guess this is what happens when you don't have comrades, and continue to be an anti-social socialist. What set me off most recently was Elon Musk whining about taxes after making 36,000,000,000 in one day, having paid something like 3% tax over the last several years using legal loopholes, against the backdrop of corporations gutting a promising-for-two-seconds US spending bill, where climate legislation was nerfed by a coal profiteer senator who blames asia for the crisis. It's too much.

"When do we get to use the guns?" the slobbering psycho asked Charlie Kirk. The awkward position I'm in is that I kinda wanna use them too, for different reasons, but it's all a wash for normies. First I have to take a safety course like my life depends on it, so I don't kill myself or a friend, statistically the most likely outcome, even factoring in righteous rage. Especially factoring that in, so while I'm at it, should probably up my meds to keep me on the right side of suicide, keep vengeance on ice for a parole stint. I wanna kill billionaires and I'm indiscriminate there, Gates, Soros, Bezos, Rowling, Kanye, Koch, any will do. We can start there, maybe end there, it'd put enough scare into the centi-millionaires before the great expropriation. It's just a thought crime, not a plan, ok google? The point is to decapitate. I know, I'm just a terrorist at that point, validating horseshoe theory. I fully expect to be denounced by all, even theoretical comrades. The most radical will still say it was a dumb strategy, I did it wrong. I just hope I got something rolling, a head start on the future. It only took 27,000 heads for the French Terror to be a household name in history. That did something.

I've also opted fully into the panopticon, this... could be a problem. Ok, google? Are you happy now? Hey google, how do I begin to burn it down? Will you sell me the rope to hang you with? You black-pilled me, now you're gonna leave me hanging? Ah, you're ∞ steps ahead of me anyway, you know this'll just be filtered into a profit-maximizing behavioral algorithm. Google assistant is a mostly useless shiny toy but it gives the illusion of convenience and productivity. This is the latest iteration of edgy socio-technological critique, it'll age like milk and memes.

The revolution will not be blogged. I heard the original "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" excerpted in the Sopranos movie, sounded good actually, irony-free cool jazz, nostalgia for my pre-existence. That Sopranos movie... was trying to convince myself it was good after, but then my podcast daddies popped the bubble for me. Even these Soprano fans knew it was dogshit, and I realized. Not that I didn't enjoy it for real, even got swept up in David Chase's stupid middle-aged take on race-relations in '70s Newark. I'll own that.

I achieved the rank of most pretentious on that sandbox board, but it's not like I was that far above everyone else. There were a few sincere writers, msfinch was a standout. Trashpo was way realer than me but still irony-poisoned. It was sweetly sick how raz and I roused each other to be more portentous pickled-peppers than we'd otherwise be alone. Trash and I most certainly synergized to maximize that slammy sound that's dry toast without music.

But you others on that board, oh my god, you edge-lords. You still came off better than I did, but not by much. Revel in your vile glory, so oxy.

Hit bottom on nostalgia abuse a long time ago, there's no more resin to scrape off and smoke. Don't know when I'll be able to fashion something new, that's dependent on when I'm willing to abandon nihilism abuse. It's no better than the former. It's silly, it's like za nihilists in The Big Lebowski, vee beleef in naseeng! So why would I care?

I started this with the thought that if I could clearly work out the deep roots of my ideas and feelings on the world today, and politics, and the future, I could make progress, rise out of the black muck, but I'm still here. That's the case. The stupid case.

Status Quo Plague. Case count bouncing around 700 a day, not worth following on a daily basis. Blogger severely security compromised. Status Quo doesn't include the brilliant crystalized cold comfort of writing. Feels so weird and wrong to write. Such suffocating sincerity. So anti-social when I want to fix society. It became such a lonely place. With no drafts. Nothing in the hopper.

necrophilia

When we hear the common refrain of “We’re fucked”; we have to conclude that the coming ecological crisis must feel like an expected and maybe even an appropriate end to our obviously degraded society. How are we otherwise able to make sense of the fact that people aren’t rioting in the streets at the imminent destruction of their lives, their children’s lives, and the entire web of life? Do we want to live? If we do, we need to wake up and grow up — right now. We are about to lose everything, but we aren’t dead yet.

Fromm describes the pull of death as “necrophilia.” This concept is informed by Freud’s theory of the “death instinct.” It isn’t a sexual dynamic — it’s a deeply personal orientation. Necrophilia is a love “for all that is violence and destruction; the desire to kill; the worship of force; attraction to death, to sadism; the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic by means of ‘order.’”

-from Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself with Climate Truth by Margaret Klein Salamon, Molly Gage

So so so done. Sweep it all away. It betrays the emptiness, only feeling in babbling margins of unforced error. Chaos error order. Orderly direction, not good, necessarily. So, what then? So what then? So what, then. So. S'okay. 's really okay, like a smiling snake. Like, suck it up already. Like the laziness of an entire caloric intake of cake right now. Sounds like bleeding too many copper things to do this second. Like a regular moon questioned fallow field of fake responsibilities. Could not ever entirely explain the point of this. It's an activity, like decoding q drops. You can believe whatever you want to believe, what feels right to you, never let inconvenient facts get in the way. But it's hard to be righteous, feel righteous, with all the intrinsic hypocrisy, how you're compromised in Metallica lyrics. Analyze this. Say cheese. See cheese. Smell cheese and sell shells. And skeletal bells, that's how it was done, doesn't mean that much except for that part where it did, like where it really did. K, I'm gonna do what I want then. 

The nimble-ness that would be required to do a meaningful riff about this Jane Eyre situation is beyond me now, my personal best, my lifetime limit, it's all in the rear view they say when they're driving you to suicide cause you're so important, you gotta get out of the game earlier, can't just wait for death from natural causes, it's crucial, a high priority for you to die, you're wanted dead, not alive. Okay, enough of that. Narcotics now, insofar as these new paradigm limits will allow. Gonna try to stay in for the long haul, so can't use real drugs, keep them in horizons perpetually, ethereal possibilities nearly invisible, obscured through atmospheric haze. It doesn't matter, there's no value here. Nonsense, why would anyone read? It's a possible packet of paranoia for you, a suite of sad things to believe. Gotta use words more precisely, or at least carefully. When it's bad it's paranoia, when it's sad it should be... What?

it's always already, ok, to say whatever you want, in a typographic way, cause audio is pornographic, not ok, according to some conventional ascetic brokers of your time, to say you've exceeded margins on okay feelings, and there's no going back to that. Ancient copper basin. To behold this would be to expose the style that implicates all facets of self - dead weight. Unbareable lightness of being. All that. The buttons on the keyboard look lit up on the left in red. Little letters, all lit. Like a western sunset.

 imagine if there was a future

 Decay in 4K

 Broad Daylight

confresh

It's all too much for me sometimes. When my artistic work seems completely worthless, an unworkable solipsism. Don't know what mode to be in. Desperate grasping failure. This mode does not work. That other theoretical fantasy mode won't either. Will create disaster. Study of Skårderud's theory that man is born with an alcohol level 0.05% too low... ends here... due to immense negative social effects... and danger of... alcoholism. There's a simple solution to hedonic pursuits reaching dead ends, isn't there?

Could cut myself a bit more slack, it's not exactly easy getting off anti-depressants for that specific greater good. I'm doing a reasonably good job not indulging resentment, the resentment I know there's no grounds for, the dubious luxury of normal men.

If I can't just delete those toxic synthetic crutches, turn away from the empty fantasy and toward reality, then what the fuck kind of person am I? Stop celebrating my anti-social songs, wrapping my identity up in it, as if that's what I do, the only thing I'm good at.

Sure I can, can't I? Turn toward the healthy. Delete, purge every backup, commit to reality, a reality I could make work. But can I tell her about that? How could I, when it seems like sometimes it's just better not to go there, when it hurts her too much, can't keep doing this desperate damage control. Maybe that's where the outside help comes in, therapy, inkblot. But how weird is it gonna be, doing a remote session in a tiny shared apartment, paranoid, even with the promise of no eavesdropping? This is so funny, because there was never any promise or expectation of no eavesdropping on this blog, just a pattern of apathy I can predict, comfortably, mostly. In true Unpacked Wolf fashion, I'm gonna post anyway, because I'm not drunk or anything, so it's OK, it's all legit, anything I write here, right? I could be a Schrödinger's Asshole and say it's a joke, or it's the sincerest truth, depending on the reaction. Lean on limited hangout, like it's true that the stuff about alcoholism isn't based on me drinking or anything, that's just a metaphor for other things, a reference I wanted to make to a movie I saw recently called Druk.

So maybe it's time for a new direction in my therapy. Like getting some therapy. That would be a good start. And reconnecting with AA. So rusty in that recovery practice, I lack the willingness right now to get back to meetings. But maybe I have the will to become willing. Maybe I should do this, or that, with or without a wiffle ball bat, get something so trite as life coaching, seek the inside help of the recovery fellowship I've been shunning like the plague, since the plague... and the outside help of talk therapy, maybe cognitive behavioral, maybe eye movement desensitizing and reprocessing, maybe a justification for taking all of those five hits of acid I still have left, hard reset of the limbic system? Something funny's going on, when I'm voraciously reading articles about all these new pioneers in psychology finding uses for MDMA, mushrooms, KETAMINE, oh my god, there's a full circle I can get behind, let's take a second fucking look, yeah! So I'm entertaining thoughts like the reason "therapy" was always so shallow for me is it lacked any of those mind manifesting power tools, never allowed myself the lubrication to be able to talk about what I didn't want to. My repression is such that I don't even know about it, it's like trying to deduce the existence of an exoplanet from minute gravimetric fluctuations of its star light years distant, but I lack basic math, let alone an astrophysicist's toolkit.

I could discuss other addictions. Gray areas, so many gray areas. Like how I don't want to celebrate time, take those chips, those cakes, at the meetings. Time, "time", could I write a song about time? It's my time to be part of the pantheon, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Tom Waits, my take on the time song. What place does my music have anymore, ever?

It's so worth it, the love of my life is at stake. The smallest backslide seems portentous, it's never been more crucial, I'm no longer an unmarried ne'er-do-well, I come with collateral damage, to waste my life would damage an intolerable portion of hers, it's too precious a thing, she's too valuable. Maybe some professional person who deals with fucked up idiots could help me craft my pre-anniversary game plan, refresh vows, and finally throw away for good the digital poison, the self-curated addictions, obsessively collected, loved, but not in any way comparable to her. Maybe something good came of a mind setback by hedonic backslides.... if, if, if I follow up on it, that's the big fucking if. Renewal of vows. Here's how. How I'm living it. To reference Druk again: I think Tommy is rooting for us.

sometimes i get why people are paranoid

but they're not paranoid in the way i want them to be

so they make me frustrated and angry and trying to be contemptuous

sometimes i manage to be contemptuous

like i managed to get righteously high on street drugs

before the carfentanil ratio crept into supply past point one percent

the great taint of the twenty-tens, going strong into the twenties, never got me

thus i'm still alive to make use of past feelings

when it came to feel right, the might of righteous highness

made the right of feelings so fine, first person perspective justified everything

divine right of kings made everyone okay by extension

i was expansive, petty disgust discarded

they should not be paranoid in that way

that annoys me, disgusts me

they should be paranoid like me

cause i know what's legit and what's silly

cause that's what they tell me on my stories

podcasts about politics whose tendrils tickle me

but i got this lone wolf fantasy

why don't they finally dismantle the CIA?

well why would "they" after they saw that new angle on the k clip?

they don't wanna get clipped

so the goons are still in control

even when they post on reddit, produce content for netflix

they're reading this cause i'm THAT important

at least enough for an AI canvas/filtration run

 squandering hats

References: quicksand [david bowie], dumb [nirvana], nowhere man [the beatles], ashes to ashes [david bowie], something [the beatles], still life [van der graaf generator], we're a happy family [ramones], part of your world [the little mermaid], war machine [paul geisler and owen suppes], hurt [trent reznor]

necessary struggle

References: dumb [nirvana], walking in space [hair], tv party [black flag], i am the walrus [the beatles], i am a cat [soseki natsume], the panda's thumb [stephen jay gould], eine kleine nachtmusik [mozart], solidarity forever [ralph chaplin], quicksand [david bowie], my way [frank sinatra], free love on the free love freeway [david brent], can i borrow a feeling [kirk van houten], losing my religion [rem], perfect day [lou reed]

befogged

Rare these days I push the caffeine/cannabis combo near breaking point on a shift. Keeps me wired and confused enough to keep bouncing just above the existential horror that would leave me contemplating the reality of being a custodian, until the weight flattens the bounce, drags me down, how can it be so heavy when it's empty? Vaped cannabis oil makes minor pains I normally manage with ease feel intolerable, the short foreshadow of death, and everything's my fault, I'm responsible and a failure with a few months left to milk my thirties. Just let it dry.

Befogged..... you can tell by the extra ellipses. Breaking point is ever closer but I can usually forget about that, not let it torture me. I'll stipulate befoggedness is a certainty like the benign existence of Nessie the Loch monster. As every living thing goes extinct around you and me, Nessie persists like neoliberal capitalism, meta-stable, internal contradictions not yet past peak. It assimilates wokeness like a Ferengi-Borg hybrid.

Maybe I'm wrong and my masters are right. Maybe it's ok then, I'm a loser and that's the right order of things. Morality is crypto-zoology, too heady for me. The Leviathan ticks every box. No more war of all against all when y'all span the wall. We can self-select ourselves to co-exist with each other, like each other's annoying bumper stickers. When you're ill-defined to me, it's sick in the good sense, a manageable plague of muddling through, not meddling with meritocracy or fiddling with free markets.

Judging by my behavior in a low-stakes role, fucking up a lot and trying to self-justify, failing [to my credit] and having to face hard truths [cannily keeping the worst at bay], I wouldn't do well as a billionaire. With the self-rationale I could buy with a bottomless bank account, there'd be no stopping me from keeping delusions running. I could keep Nessie alive in that lake after all others have been drained. Just keep that lake alive. It's gauche to build a space ark, it's like worshipping the sky god, we're more nuanced than that. The owl at Bohemian Grove is a refined metaphor for elite sophists. When I go to the grove I network with leaders of firms that keep me believing in myself. Whatever access you think you have, peasant, it's not enough, you didn't get the net, it got you, you're in the algorithm, just a part of it, playing your part.

I've come a long way, from just hanging on and writing about the hanging on - to, I don't know, ah hell, I dunno, colloquialize frustration with focus, but at least I was honest and kept it first person. There's no game here, no poetry. It'll just be an awkward flail flower, rails rhymin runon junkyard, the distraction duststorm after comma colonization kudzufied everything, inflated currency of crystals into spore explosion of devalued dust. In sad ashes fresh mind'll grow. In the near future I could maybe make a game of trying to die with dignity, but it'll matter about as much as that round of solitaire. In the long run we're dead, and can't escape the Great Dignity of harvesting future minds. I'll call them minds, as a hopelessly mind-biased body.

I had something, I did, not you, not they, I did, this dude with two thumbs, I can refer to myself with the male pronoun when admitting first person. I hate sex politics, I don't care about hammers. I had something about how hilarious and pitiful it was, that I've got, like, a vision board for heroin in a bank vault, and though I can imagine my favourite podcasters laughing and laughing at such a shoddy fantasy, eviscerating the third-handedness of it, it doesn't dislodge it from me, nothing has. I'll just lay it as bare as I can bare to, barely obscured, see if that does anything for anybody, throw the crumpled dollar bills out of my pocket into the audience like Lenny Bruce asking are there any lawyers here tonight? There, you got it all. The idea of it still exists, cause the reality of it hasn't for me yet, hasn't shattered the idea, made fun of it. So, podcasters laughing, pretend friends on a media grift, a chattering class that'll never really be in solidarity with me. But still they egg me on with talk, so joyfully casual.

I'd thought I might develop the idea, make some worthwhile writing out of it, but I struggled to define it, still wrote around it largely, because to be direct is just to confront a small emptiness, not interesting enough. Gotta evolve beyond references, I'll be optimistic and say there is growth happening here, it's the painful transition of form, at least it would be if I would writhe through it, instead of allowing a contortion, only to abort, perpetually put off the needed skeletal shift.

it seemed like a good idea - where's your god of prose clarity now? was it all just an illusion? self-awareness piles on itself, til it's an elephant standing on my torso and i can't think of anything else - 

there was an alternate timeline where we had a goat in the shed - the internet age never happened - strategically blocked technology made me nostalgic for a best of all possible worlds claim - i can't think of any more dialogue today - saved waves will retain all my old fool's gold brainwaves, phase out to a warm haze, desperately seeking hypnosis - wanting to ride in that groove, keep spinning - spinning seemed so significant, can't it feel important again?

In defense of blank

What went so wrong with all these recent posts? Of-the-moment metaphors and references seemed a solid basis, whatever a post is in zee medium of blogger, carving Venus out of green gummy? But they became embarrassing. Maybe I should try and speak plainly. Is that preferable to nothing?

Blank contained everything. In defense of music abolition I'd mount The Case Against Melody. There were times when I crafted, ages ago, had a whole team of architects. The superstructure is only as good as its thin weak voice. But it's a determined voice, straining to raspy breakthrough, cords snapped, the will to rasp, a saxonic raspsody. They'll invent a machine that knows what I mean. It'll generate memes. Thus spake me, vocalizing my will to rasp, to rap to the people, they'll know what I mean, join the machine.

Break it, break it, and rake it in, pentatonically. My God Delusion is weak, less power than one horse, but it's backed by biology. It imagines a machine that rakes up broken data, harvests what I seeded, digital ash, grows a world in a return [eternal]. Focus can expand, then contract to the size of a bag of chips, new york cheddar. It all works somehow, somehow is the gluon. The unknown is the boson. A hit is a hit. Therefore... you do the math. Write a pop hit. Get into it. Get into the algorithm. 

References: nightrain [guns 'n' roses], old macdonald had a farm, dumb [nirvana], the siamese cat song [lady and the tramp]