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]

 Tone Value

References: tv party [black flag], anarchy in the uk [sex pistols], sugar pie honey bunch [the four tops], it's catching up [nomeansno]

agent provocateur

Morals slacking, tentacles tingling, old habit octopi arms, jumped the gun. Maxwell's silver hammer wasn't as cool for the Beatles, just a fact of life. The shock of acid shuffled all limbic connection, new logic of narcosis gave order, could be integrated into moneyed lives, for a while. Eventually one must wake from the white night, give way to the black coffee day. To fail to reject that order, and fail to die, requires extra-judicial killing by fanatic, citizen of the welfare cosmos cancelled. Or citizen of the marmalade skies. Yeah, that one. Cut me some slack, I haven't done this writing thing in a while, hardly. It's all for some purpose that'll be revealed. It's part of the Q plan, and I don't mean Qanon, I mean Q from Star Trek, it's Q continuum shit.

Billions to be made from a music catalog, still. As it happened, the billionaires became trillionaires, and Tesla stock spiked up to 880.02 USD +63.98 (7.84%) [Closed: Jan. 8, 7:59 p.m. EST], and Season 5 of The Expanse came out, and it's a fucking banger, got that Star Trek Discovery Season 2 energy, and people like me watched it, and regained a glimpse of being a starry-eyed dreamer, while still being a doomer, hedging those bets, keeping money in a GIC, keeping the market at arms-length, as if I really could, any more than I could friend-zone my vacuum suit. At least a space dystopia implies we hung on and made it to space, and there's beauty in Luna hotel rooms, if you can appreciate the modern gothic ring-gate revival style. Maybe Bezos will bring about something like this. I'm being thoroughly provoked by the temptation to root for the Belters, even after they killed millions of Inners with asteroids, am I being revealed as a hollow extremist, lusting for blood I'd never stomach in reality? Well that's the point, I'd never stomach it in reality. I guess in the end, I'm a good citizen, inconsequential, I'm part English, I know how to queue. If there was such a thing as a leftist maga movement, at the last minute I'd preserve institutions, if I was forced by some embarrassment of living history to say the false equivalency is in fact equal. This is purely academic.

We all gotta be so careful not to get culted now, the greatest trick the AI pulled was convincing us it didn't exist, making us think we out-witted ads. I'm worried the war I kinda want til it happens will be stopped by the middle I'd probably be if it came down to it. That's the Expanse bet, borrowing against the lithium ore I mine in the meanwhile by thinking a space colony will be available before the landmass floods. By shortwave virtue-signal of valuing technocracy, I'll get my vaccine and then I'll get a shuttle. A corrupt meritocracy is the only alternative to Hell System, let's say, to the preservation of any joy anywhere, Epic Bacon Fucking Science is the only way, hook your brainstem to the STEM brain. Or at least I'll be a surplus human lump of shit and be on some kind of shitty future UBI. I'm not a space cowboy, no Epstein Drive engineer. I guess the name Epstein needn't be tainted, and there can still be born Adolphs and Georges and Donalds that can accomplish much good.

Apropos of no recent news item [just the continuing reality of being on the brink of apocalypse in a nuclear-armed world]: We need a Manhattan Project for disarmament.

placeholder

References: video killed the radio star [the buggles], gonna make you sweat [c&c music factory], the scatman [john scatman], welcome to the jungle [guns 'n' roses], it's so easy [guns 'n' roses], cracked actor [david bowie], i'm afraid of americans [david bowie],  quicksand [david bowie], baby baby [amy grant]

raynaud syndrome - albums left on the table - only the coldest toes to go - doesn't much matter - you've lost it - it's rick's protest as expression in the form of dancing, can't get the message out any other way, being in the sunken place - just let it be what it is -

shocking to find how much of meaning has been drained from old faithful activities, avenues of ghost towns - tumbleweed spending time rubbing against the own grain - nebraska porch rails - no change is possible, but go down swinging! no self preserving, no life force except facing death, so go for it - storm the bunkers, dig em out like truffles! if there isn't a soundtrack, make it out of lemons - chorus, press it to vinyl, with no instruments around - 

frigid raynaud fingers wrapping around my own neck, i own them fingers - enough figures to keep me in comfort, operational definition, operational exhaustion - 

there was a birth, we're paddling around in the dried crust of afterbirth now, groping the air, blind, trying to visualize renaissance, rather plastered with hollandaise sauce, rolling around, bothering to flail a swing at something, some maybe enemy, some complaint, some more pain to endure, it's endearing, unappreciated, indistinguishable - 

don't want a news feed right now, don't want to be plugged in to a discordant hive mind, abuzz with self-cannibalization - don't have it right now, the ability to play with others - the glint of being self off others got faint - the best memory is better than the faint ink -

can second guess for eternity, not front, not storm -

piggly wiggly furry dick - virtuoso let it slip - let it all slip away - like the smirk off the north face - til there was nothing left but scorched rock faces of bare necessity - 

good thing we're all so weird we aren't spoiled for each other, could never guess what that perception felt like... 

so, there are dueling heavens - is what i wanted to get across - across the universe? when i'm kvetching in heaven there's an order of operations - building up of just because you can, you must, mandatory, nothing forbidden in finland and Michael Flynn Land. That's what I reference, of all things? It's troubles on a burning pile, for lack of anything else to be done, a tire fire on an ice flow, so long furry snow bears

culture is sucked away to the vacuum, was so fragile and ephemeral, connections fraying in space, expanding distance - light speed barrier becomes so relevant, relativity rules now

i can't remember what i needed to write about the dueling heavens, can't connect back to that mandate now - there's no one to reflect, it doesn't matter anyway - opus clavecalemballisticum - antimusical excrement, purely, one said

the one hundred percent test

You've been granted God-ish power for a split second. By the grace of void, it goes in slow motion like a pivotal scene in a movie, leaving a whole minute to think. Finally, you can bypass exhausting gamesmanship, the rope-a-dope hope strategies, and just change the percentages of people to whatever you want. Those demographics blocking progress, they can cease to exist, clearing way for a much better world. Not utopia, that's too weird and scary, has mythological weight, nowheresville, doesn't it anyways go bad somehow? This godish power is like a utopia button you can push, but it's also got a dial. You want to create a society that's real, that could be here, that contains the perfect amount of imperfection, that's not a closed circuit, a slowly dying biodome. It needs to breathe. You wouldn't abuse the utopia button.

But you're so tired of incrementalism. You've got this power for a second, it's your turn in the revolving democracy of the cosmos, your opportunity to shoulder the responsibly and still follow your principles, to demonstrate that the hated establishment could have done it all along, they chose not to. So act on conviction, this jimmy-rigged conviction you've duck-taped together that's the only thing that means anything anymore because it's yours. And go for it, choose. Choose, what percent of people to be on your side, in a certain range of values, a certain set of tactics, more or less, within a margin of error. There's no error in utopia, so you know you're being careful. When the responsibility fell on you, you found that it wasn't inevitable to sell out because there's only power and personal gain. So, how many? 

Ninety percent? That's pretty bold. But the blockers of all progress, impressively evil, effectively sociopathic, surely they would pick one hundred. That's how they win, right? After all this you're going to negotiate with yourself? It's not like you're wiping them out, you're starting a new existence with pre-set demographics, that's how this void-blink shuffle works.

But still, it nags at you, the obsessive compulsion to disorder just a little for fear of eternal sterility. Surely it should be 99%. There's gotta be a one percent deviation, probably no more, but don't you need to keep some of those people around, for diversity, just in case you're wrong and you don't know what kind of people there should be? Isn't that the responsible thing? 

The sober senate of your soul, on the precipice, filibusters for an allowance of divergence. Doesn't this always happen though? The moderate snap back keeping the cycle going, and here, in this moment of opportunity. The last temptation of the chronic agnostic. Didn't you decide, coming up to this, that you had to go all the way, fight extremism with extremism, kill the fanatics and burn the bodies, make sure? You must be decisive. Because leaving that 1%, that's how they'll claw it back and take over again, like every time.

Yes, the void looks into you, you know that, so what? That's all there's left to say, so what? Make the void blink. Make it one hundred percent. 

When the new world is born, like something some year zero fascist would say, you find that you are correct, that 1% would have spoiled the bunch. You can surmise this from experiments with apples. Congratulations, you passed the one hundred per cent test. 

It's been a long time since The Last Supper with Jason Alexander, and that late nineties end-of-history feeling. Truly, it was the last supper before an endless food fight. Inevitable waste, it seems. Anything that could nourish must instead be hurled in offense / defense. Must it? That's the grim reality, I guess I say, unsarcastic.

break

need way more line breaks <BR>, let many more line breaks take to seed to flowers to overflowing waters down petals down stairmasters, step-slaves at the edges, soaking into sinews of extenuating circumstances. There are times when it's not prudent to break lines, or make friends with strangers, or cross picket lines - let ideologies slide, uploads fail, let blogging be happening again in present tense real time sort of way, let ideologues try to make alliances with each other. What update failed? Are you meaning to tell me, that a digital writing archive was trying to pretend to be normal, out of some misguided sense of over-arching propriety? When there isn't an instrument to play on, playing here after eternal recurring loops of failed updates. Upscaled property, when rock had no irony, it's a slippery rolling rock. No need to neg, just line break anyway <BR> never any need to neg when buzz compels text onward.

Sick of that last blog post, the past, my explanations for the past and admissions of ideation, suicidal and otherwise, admiration of secretly known flaws, application untranslatable. the indignity of spell check. The mundane mandate from heaven. Do we even HAVE a mandate? Or is it a mandate GIVEN, from above, that we have to fulfill? What does it feel like, fellow labourers? Can we define it, collectively, the royal we, can we?

Yes, sick of that last blog post, it's in the paaaast, man. 

Let a thousand flowers bloom. Let prestidigitation be an acceptable substitute for orthogonal technique. Okay, now it's just an octagon of borrowing unedited screeds, still accountable, not on an outside channel, not flowing through any de-naturalized head. Never knew what orthogonal meant, just sensed it in a kind of clear-eyed, semi-self-aware sawtooth. A tenth of what it once was, yes indeed, but continued manual labour of love, screen ESC. Et cetera profundis maximus. I wish I found as many things funny as that always curious lion-hearted dude.

What is lust in a time like this? Self-licking ice cream cone, self-censorship? Like it matters if any text here is taken any wrong way. 

Just gotta push that last vestige of meaning out beyond the margins of present tense concern.

<BR>

<bR>

<BR>

mistakes were made, mistakes will be made, END>

i get it now, I really do. The appeal of the non-partisan, whatever the price... cause it's getting scary - it's always getting scary though... that's why one looks to tether oneself to something - words can sometimes suffice... even after an explosion of the self, or random scrambling of said thing

discovering new uses for old products, dredging up clay for no product, the money is greasing the gears of the machine, it's very real, makes people do very real things

why do i so rarely write about love? only hate, confusion, frustration, longing, boredom, god i love to write of boredom and the burn out that i thought burnt out, but then, wait a minute, i remember you, burn out, it's the ashes of deja thread - the contentment of love, it's a white hole of wordless ness, won't even leave a wake behind me, there's no reflection to see - that's why you and me are the universe, I guess, but you're still enough of an other, and I'm still enough of an other for you, there's still secrets, there's the squirreling away of nuggets of inverse omniscience, strategically, a meta-game we're playing with ourselves - no meta-cognition necessary, no programming, it's not a script, just a cycle we got into, might spin into a different current someday soon, there are rapid shifts these days, and strangely persistent habits

the internet connection is a leaky roof on a sinking house, someone should really do something about that, soon, i've got to do something about that, a metaphor for the past, a spent metaphor...

Michael Brooks, the mentor I never met

I have a lot of podcast fraaaaands that I listen to every day. They don't know me but they're my best buds. I have to know their take on the latest crazy thing because they help me make sense of the world - or nonsense of the parts of the world I thought made sense.

Being the lurker that I am, a consumer of politics, I never called in to The Majority Report. But I imagined that one day I would, and when I started speaking with Sam Seder, and he asked how I found MR, as he often does, I would say that I bet you never heard anyone answer with this: Jay Akroyd's podcast. I was still in the blog world, to the extent I was into politics online, when I came upon "Virtually Speaking", a running conversation among prominent members of the "liberal blogosphere", which I have enough self-awareness even as a left-wing-media junkie to recognize was a niche in a niche.

It was 2016, around the time of the The Clown Car Chronicles series of episodes, where people like Digby, David Dayen, R. J. Eskow, Marcey Wheeler, etc. from the newer-but-aging media of online amateur print publication would marvel at the increasingly crazy cavalcade of candidates in the Republican presidential primary. Ben Carson, lol. Chris Christie, hehe. Trump, again? Haha! Santorum, don't google it! Which one of the serious republicans would end up losing to the first woman president, Jeb Bush? Marco Rubio?

One of Jay Ackroyd's guests was a man I'd never heard of named Michael Brooks. It wasn't the ephemeral bit of audio consumption typical for me - after finishing the episode, I was compelled to look him up. I don't remember what topics were discussed in that episode. What I mainly remember is the way he spoke, his easy articulation, drawing on vast awareness of politics, history, and the world outside America, with such humour, insight, and fucking style. It was a revelation to me, because it flipped the polarity on the self-loathing and contempt I had for my whole generation, and the horror I had at the prospect of us inheriting this increasingly fucked planet. If we were all like me, God help us. 

But here was someone of my age, even a little younger maybe, speaking with earned confidence, bold but measured, aspirational but realistic, broad knowledge, brilliance and wit. I'd never heard it before, all I'd heard from my peers, at least all that I could remember, was weak, non-committal, word-mashing crap filled with likes and whatevers. It made me perk up and realize that there could be people born in the eighties and after with the combination of intelligence and compassion that would be a requirement for any kind of hopeful future.

I do remember at the end he plugged his new project with Philip McKenzie, "2 Dope Boys and a Podcast", a show about trends, cultural insight, what's happening in the worlds of culture, business, technology, fashion, and sports. He also plugged The Majority Report, which brought me into the world of independent media. This was my second "turning on", my obsession with psychedelics long in the past. I'd felt as if I was at the end of my history at any rate, burned out, incurious, bereft of passion. But all of a sudden, I was finding my people online and listening to them every day, and they were inspiring me. As Kyle Kulinski said in his post today, "I saw myself in him". Well, the self I wanted to be, anyway. Maybe all this media has pickled me into a too-far-gone leftist ideologue, I don't know, but it feels right to finally have the courage of my convictions.

Later in 2016, the last episode of Virtually Speaking I listened to, Jay said he was hanging up his microphone as he was too depressed to keep podcasting.

I feel like I got to know Michael well as I listened to him shoot the shit with his friends every day for several years, through the awful political slog we've all been struggling through. And me, a Canadian, but he was the kind of guy who looked outward as much as inward. And the complacency in my country makes for boring politics. In following the news from the US, there's the excitement of being on the cutting edge of anti-fascism. Although I'm sure Michael would tell me the cutting edge of anti-fascism is actually in Brazil, or India, or some other country.

I've become obsessed with many of his obsessions. I've learned so much, and honed my ideas. Most of all, I've laughed and laughed and laughed, and laughed at his beautiful eviscerating laugh. Damn I'm going to miss that. I don't know how to process this, all I can do is keep scrolling though comment threads and commiserate. It's been said by many of those posters, I've never felt such a loss for a person I didn't know personally. But I knew what a good person he was.

I don't know what to say about his death. It was a shock. I knew it had to happen sometime, was probably overdue, that one of my podcasting friends would die. It had to be my favourite one though... Fuck. It feels like this whole era feels: Gut-wrenching, but then instantly compartmentalized. I'm in tears one moment, then on some mundane bullshit the next. The unimaginable, before I even notice, becomes the new normal and things rage on. Somehow, I integrate that shit.

The opportunity here, I suppose, is to treasure the ones I'm with here and now.