The Police Are Rioting

Has anyone else ever wondered how they decide which ‘cool cop’ videos they have stored up to roll out whenever some police officer somewhere does something horrible? I have to guess it depends on the national response. People mad online? Here’s a video of a cop taking time to tie an Ethiopian boy’s shoes on the subway. People taking over police precincts and burning things down? Holy shit, pull out the classic ‘cop pulls kid over and is amazed when he finds out kid can juggle’. 

The bottom line is, if you are of the people, and you see the people rising up, make sure not to participate in the dampening of that righteous fire by spreading ‘good cop’ propaganda. They have guns and power. They don’t need you to advocate for them, or to muddy the water. There really is no middle ground.

* Also, here’s a social media challenge: keep in mind how many woke white liberals were talking about police reform right after George Floyd’s death. Remember the reforms and abolitions they either directly supported or co-signed while that was the hot story. Notice how nothing changed. Keep talking about the issue. Notice the white liberal silence. Then remember what taking over a police precinct in Minneapolis, and then in Seattle, actually accomplished. They don’t count votes, but they do notice when their shit gets caught on fire.

Get Hyped!

"If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish." - David Foster Wallace

Just remember the movie It Follows: your goals are the people who have inherited the curse, and you are the monster slowly and laboriously pursuing them. They will have to sleep eventually, but not you. No, you will keep coming.

I’m pretty sure that is the creepiest motivational advice I can offer.

Family Values

There are 3 people I love the most

The father the son and the Holy Ghost

Don’t have anything to do with my folks
We’re just sitting here cracking jokes:

I’m down with Langston still coming up

Down with Jack he don’t give a fuck

I roll with Eliot he’s on his way

And homosexuals? 

You know they all gay

We all know Bush did 9-11

We all know this moment

This is heaven

We out here chilling 

Talking all kinds of shit

And our souls?

They’re all well lit

I do the dishes

And I sweep the floors

We’re talking about

What are we here for?

We don’t know,

But it’s all good

We don’t know

So maybe you should

Pack it up,

Light it up,

Make it up,

Fire it up,

Just do something

Do what you like,

Don’t do nothing,

It’s alright.

I’m just saying

I love my kids

I’m no philosopher

God or prince

But I know we’re making good

On our promise

There is no line

No space between us

I do the dishes

And I sweep the floors

We’re talking about

What are we here for?

We don’t know,

But it’s all good

We don’t know

So maybe you should

Pack it up,

Light it up,

Make it up,

Fire it up,

Just do something

Do what you like,

Don’t do nothing,

It’s alright.

Ever since I was very young, it has bothered me to throw any disposable receptacle I am using away without it’s lid. I don’t know if it’s because I took the Brave Little Toaster too seriously when I saw it in kindergarten, or what, but when I was a little boy I definitely anthropomorphized both the bottle and the lid, and hated the thought that they would be separated due to my carelessness after spending so much time together. I just lost the lid to my water, and am hoping maybe this split up will actually be a positive change for both of them.

The End of the Movie

One of the scariest things about Donald Trump—and the thing that finally pushed me to commit to voting for Joe Biden—is the fact that he lives for TV ratings, and that is literally ALL he lives for (he is a sociopath with no actual Ideology). In his mind, history begins and ends with him, and the world is watching, and he knows he has to make the end of the story dynamite, so it will live long past him. At this point, his main goal—as an elderly, unhealthy man with only a few years left—has to be to deliver a shocking, chart topping ending to the only story that matters, which is of course his story. We got a preview of his story arc when he had peaceful protesters tear gassed so he could do a photo-op with an upside down bible, but I am terrified to think of what dramatic moves he will make in the final scene of the movie, especially if he realizes he is losing his re-election to someone as cartoonish as Joe Biden. Here is to hoping the narcissistic fantasies of this sad man’s dying brain cause as few human casualties as possible.

Compassion

I just want to say, I had to cancel some appointments with clients today due to me needing a sick day, and the fact that 100% of their responses were to express understanding and to wish me well, was heartbreakingly beautiful. These young people are either homeless or on the verge of homelessness, and still manage to be compassionate and patient...It is an admirable and humbling trait I’m not sure I could emulate if I was in such danger.

Driving Ettiquette

Sincere apologies to anyone who recognizes me on the road and honks to say hello, and just sees me stare dumbly in their general direction. That’s a real small response window, and when I’m driving I am normally deep into my own thoughts. To decide whether or not I should wave or flip someone off in that kind of space is virtually impossible.

So You Want To Be A Comrade

When you live in an immoral society, the only way to be virtuous is to commit crimes. If it can’t get you locked up, if it won’t be put on your permanent record—or come up when a potential employer googles you after an interview—it’s not solidarity.

School of the Americas

If ANTIFA is a terrorist organization now, does that mean the C.I.A. is going to start funding us? Because I could really use the support for my mortgage and student loans. Plus, one of my sons has a birthday coming up.

Make America Fascist Again

Donald Trump might be the stupidest person ever, along with his other gross and pathetic character traits.

1. ANTIFA is not an organization. It’s an idea. It’s a way of life, really. Think Captain America.

2. ANTIFA, for those unaware, means Anti-Fascist.

3. Welcome to the America where the President deems being Anti-Fascist a terrorist act.

At the very least, at least all the masks are off, and everyone knows exactly who everyone else is.

Heed the Muse

This weather is inspirational on a spiritual level. I want to start a fire, read poetry, have sex, cook a meal, talk to interesting people, build something out of wood, and listen to good music. In no particular order. Honestly, it might also be nice to get into a fist fight with a total stranger in a parking lot. I’m open to everything.

Chickens Always Come Home To Roost

The Highest Point In Culture

Still me. All the time. Ben Affleck may think he got into acting for more grandiose reasons than to be the guy in this meme, but the guy in this meme is the realest and most resonant character in all of art.

God Is Trash

If God made me
And all things return
To whence they came
I am God

If God made me
And I am trash
Then God is trash

Your Own Space

"I am alone. There is no God where I am." - Aleister Crowley

This quote popped out at me the other day, and it's stuck around. I know I have family and friends who I love and who love me back, but I don't think that's the aloneness Crowley is talking about. To realize that I am alone on a spiritual level...to realize that I am free to create myself day after day is liberating. There's nothing to fear about being alone. You really can't know yourself in a crowd. There is richness in the cosmic silence and absence of God(s). At my best moments, I like to listen to the silence. It's peaceful. It lets me know where I'm at.

Drinking the Mortal Brew: You’ve Got To Tolerate all Those People That You Hate

"We honor our characters as if they were distinctive to ourselves, whether we have worthy characters snd are admired by men or not. Therefore, We must esteem the characters of our neighbors, if they are friendly to us."-Epicurus, 7th Vatican Saying.

I love Epicurus's qualifiers: "If they are friendly to us".

Loving your enemies can be tiresome. You don't have to hate them, mind you (that can be even more exhausting), but loving them requires a huge investment that doesn't promise any returns; and besides, how many of us who attempt to 'love' our enemies really act as if we love them? How often is the love we feel for those who hate us really either just a self-aggrandizing veneer, or a sharp tool we use to beat ourselves down with when we realize that we are incapable of wishing well those who wish us ill? Why not just be honest about it?

Instead of choosing one or the other emotional extreme, Epicurus advocated that we tolerate the personality traits of those we encounter that do us no real harm, and as pertains to the other poles, I guess it's carte blanche. Destroy your enemies and love your friends to your heart's content. I endorse this position.

It may sound cold to advocate the destruction of your enemies, but sometimes it is necessary. And consider this: one of the best and most effective way of destroying your enemies is to turn them into friends. Discovering a mutual self-interest with an enemy can take you far away from a situation that would undoubtedly lead to much pain and suffering for both parties if it were allowed to escalate.

The genius and realism of Epicurus is notable in this Vatican saying: rather than calling us to strive for some kind of unrealistic ethereal ideal, he suggests that we understand our more carnal aspects. The poet Robert Bly has a lot to say about the way in which we unrealistically deal with our carnal aspects in his wonderful essay 'The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us':

"Behind us we have an invisible bag, and the part of us our parents don’t like, we, to keep our parents’ love, put in the bag. By the time we go to school our bag is quite large. Then our teachers have their say: “Good children don’t get angry over such little things.”  So we take our anger and put it in the bag. By the time my brother and I were twelve in Madison, Minnesota we were known as “the nice Bly boys.” Our bags were already a mile long.

Then we do a lot of bag-stuffing in high school. This time it’s no longer the evil grownups that pressure us, but people our own age."

he then adds what the consequences of all of this stuffing-into-the-bag is:

"We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again. Sometimes retrieving them feels impossible, as if the bag were sealed. Suppose the bag remains sealed-what happens then? A great nineteenth-century story has an idea about that. One night Robert Louis Stevenson woke up and told his wife a bit of a dream he’d just had. She urged him to write it down; he did, and it became “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The nice side of the personality becomes, in our idealistic culture, nicer and nicer. The Western man may be a liberal doctor, for example, always thinking about the good of others. Morally and ethically he is wonderful. But the substance in the bag takes on a personality of its own; it can’t be ignored. The story says that the substance locked in the bag appears one day somewhere else in the city. The substance in the bag feels angry, and when you see it it is shaped like an ape, and moves like an ape.

The story says then that when we put a part of ourselves in the bag it regresses. It de-evolves toward barbarism. Suppose a young man seals a bag at twenty and then waits fifteen or twenty years before he opens it again. What will he find? Sadly, the sexuality, the wildness, the impulsiveness, the anger, the freedom he put in have all regressed; they are not only primitive in mood, they are hostile to the person who opens the bag. The man who opens his bag at forty-five or the woman who opens her bag rightly feels fear. She glances up and sees the shadow of an ape passing along the alley wall; anyone seeing that would be frightened."

that essay can be found in a book by Bly called 'A Little Book on the Human Shadow', and I recommend it.

The message of Epicurus and Robert Bly is pretty clear here: Be honest about your shit, and deal with it honestly.

It's much less scary that way, and the results you get will be infinitely better.

H.P. Lovecraft on Why You Shouldn’t Kill Yourself

It may seem strange to most people that one would need a reason not to commit suicide, but there are those of us out there who need one. To some, knowing that the self checkout lane is open is actually a consolation. Hunter S. Thompson said "If I didn't know I could commit suicide at any moment, life would be unbearable". Of course, there are many reasons not to kill yourself. ' This Too Shall Pass' is the protective motto of those traversing the Territory of the blackest mind. The transitory nature of everything is reason enough to see if you can ride it out when it comes to depressed states, mixed states, and plain old bad luck.

Far be it from me to suggest such a thing is easy. As a person who has traversed this black landscape, I understand how the poisoned mind can laugh at our stoic bearings. Far be it from me also to suggest that there is anything inherently evil, selfish, or wrong about suicide. Sometimes, suicide is in fact a reasonable choice. Some choose to end their lives rather than experience prolonged pain and suffering connected to a chronic illness. I understand this choice, and would probably choose it for myself if it ever seemed necessary. Also, suicide is often committed by people with mental health issues. They do this while in the grips of a disease, and faulting a person who kills themselves in such a state is akin to faulting a person with a heart disorder for dying of a heart attack.

One of the ways we manage to survive is to remind ourselves of the transitory nature of our suffering. Another is to participate in therapy or counseling. Another is to take medication that is appropriate to our illness, exercise, eat healthy, and get good rest. Another way is to seek out folks who share our experience and struggle, and to empathize with them and learn from their hard won wisdom (all wisdom is hard won, isn't it?).

That brings me to the excerpt I wanted to share with you. I am a huge H.P. Lovecraft fan. I love his stories, but what I am coming to love even more than his stories are his letters. He was a great letter writer, and in the below excerpt he talks about a time he seriously considered suicide, and how he navigated his way back out of it:

"How easy it would be to wade out among the rushes and lie face down in the warm water till oblivion came. There would be a certain gurgling or choking unpleasantness at first--but it would soon be over. Then the long, peaceful night of non-existence..."

But something held him up:

"And yet certain elements--notably scientific curiosity and a sense of world drama--held me back. Much in the universe baffled me, yet I knew I could pry the answer out of books if I lived and studied longer. Geology, for example. Just how did these ancient sediments and stratifications get crystallized and upheaved into granite peaks? Geography--just what would Scott and Shackleton and Borchgrevink find in the great white Antarctic or their next expeditions...which I could--if I wished--live to see described?"

Lovecraft goes through questions about history, Africa, Mathematics, and other intellectual curiosities that he would miss out on if he snuffed himself out, ultimately concluding,

"So in the end I decided to postpone my exit till the following summer. I would do a little curiosity-satisfying at first; filling certain gaps of scientific and historical knowledge, and attaining a greater sense of completeness before merging with the infinite blackness."

after finding himself engaged in life to a much greater degree on this path of postponement--starting up an old newsletter, finding more questions at the ends of questions answered--he decided to grant himself another extension:

"Possibly I would wait til '06 before making my exit...one could drown in '06 just as well as in '05 or '04!'

Questions of life and death and meaning popped up over and over again in Lovecraft's life--he kept a cyanide pill on his person at all times just in case 'it ever got too much'--but he found his way through that particular darkness with the aid of curiosity.

Curiosity is a fine reason to go on living. I had just discovered Billy Collins a little bit before the suicide of a dear friend several years back, and was very excited to share it with him the next time he was in town. Before I had a chance to do that, he had jumped off an overpass in Tennessee. Not far after all of the other assorted kinds of thoughts a person has after receiving such news, it occurred to me that my friend would never get to experience Billy Collins. My friend--a highly intelligent, clever, soulful person--had missed out on something I was pretty sure he would have liked.

There are always new things to discover. Life is about change and possibility, and who knows what is waiting for us in the future? It's a compelling reason to stick around.

That Thing You Do

There are so many issues a person could have an opinion about. What issues do you often talk about in social media or in your personal life? Do you know why these are the primary issues that concern you? Do you know why these—among all possible issues—are the ones that concern you the most? Self-Awareness is so important, and so essential to understanding why the things that move us move us the way they do. Are you in touch with that part of yourself?

The BDSM Party

The sub/dom relationship between the Democratic Party and it’s voters is fascinating. I just passed a car with an ‘Any Functioning Adult 2020’ bumper sticker, and thought about how that was a cute liberal joke right after Trump got elected. They’re like, ‘Just give me someone! Anyone!’. Fast forward past all the voter disenfranchisement and shenanigans the party orchestrated to this moment, where Joe Biden is the candidate the party is offering, and the ‘functioning adult’ requirement of that bumper sticker is questionably met at best. And still they will expect party members to vote for their candidate, and party members probably will, because that is the cathartic nature of the degradation that occurs in sub/dom relationships. I’m just waiting for the whips and zipper masks and ball-gags to come into play. That’s when it will all be complete.

Here I Go

Call the doctor

I’m coming down

With a fever

Call a priest

I’m too scared to die

An unbeliever

Tell the truth:

Will I even

Notice?

Does it hurt?

And where does the darkness

Take us?

Here I go

Leaving my body behind

Just like my wallet, full of cash

For some lucky stranger to find

Do what you want

With the pictures, business cards

And the condom

I’m not coming back

And where I’m going 

I don’t need them

Here I go

Call out the punchline

Before the comedian

Finishes the joke

Swallow the bread

And gesture wildly

When you choke

There’s really no lesson

Nothing to learn

That’s worth keeping

It’s all transition

And that is why I’m leaving

Here I go

Leaving it all behind

God eats the fruit

And disposes of the rind

Take off your skin

After taking off your clothes

We’re getting out of here

To where?

No one knows

Here I go.


* These lyrics took a markedly gloomy and existential turn from where they began. I was talking to a friend on the phone about our various aches and pains, and was joking about I totally live up to the stereotype about how men turn into total babies when they’re sick. Then we got off the phone, and I thought about the narrator from ‘Notes From the Underground’ when he was talking about how gratifying it can be to complain about a toothache. That’s where the first lines came from. Then suddenly I heard Nick Cave’s voice singing the lines, and it ended up where it ended up.