On the survival of the species
Improving our tactics for bashing each other doesn’t count
this is about stories, the new and the old, how to get along
Disney is Dead: The Coming Disney Crisis Happening Now
Disney is like a coin with two sides
medium.com
and singing about getting along, negotiation, the fire, redemption
(GPL 11/16/22 out of the fire comes a man
flavored like the old one
Batman Spiderman Venom
bearing too many branded memories
a quick fever dream, alternating and direct current
*
what’s funny is I’m waiting for the motivation to “save society” to restore itself; I’m sort of a humorist now, intrigued by how people stay stuck, how human nature really doesn’t change
Cut from the bottom, add to the top
Timestamps be proof
present your book as if someone’s going to read it
humans are mimetic creatures: monkey see, monkey do
now, you’re diving into your brain — and many men try to merge this quest for self with entrepreneurship, i.e. the notion that people should pay them
I am going down with the ship of capital — but language is also a ship that goes down
(yes, so any essay I write is just stuff I like and think to include)
I’m
sorry language is a ship
that goes down
while you’re building it.
though I thought I was remembering this
was I going to thrash some idea of someone whose fault this all is? That America is a toilet? Another poet said that
“Everything said about Gen Xers — both positive and negative — was completely true. Twenty-somethings in the nineties rejected the traditional working-class American lifestyle because (a) they were smart enough to realize those values were unsatisfying, and (b) they were totally fucking lazy. Twenty-somethings in the nineties embraced a record like Nirvana’s Nevermind because (a) it was a sociocultural affront to the vapidity of the Reagan-era paradigm, and (b) it fucking rocked. Twenty-somethings in the nineties were by and large depressed about the future, mostly because (a) they knew there was very little to look forward to, and (b) they were obsessed with staring into the eyes of their own self-absorbed sadness. There are no myths about Generation X. It’s all true.”
― Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto
The survival of the species relies on the different generations’ ability to communicate and understand each other. As it stands, they hate each other and for good reason.
but it all comes down to the next six seconds: whether you read more or stop to say something to someone; I think we all need to degrade; I think we all have the earth in us, and we all are key to opening up landscapes and vistas where we can see what’s killing us and stop participating; we all have to get rid of the old idea, the old ways, the “normal” people hope they can go back to once the pandemic is over — but “normal” was the pandemic, that was the emergency we ignored because we could get away with it, because the cashiers were docile, afraid of losing their job — if financial literacy spread like the virus and everyone realized the power of their labor, and didn’t let themselves be bullied by managers and owners, be bullied by their fear of running out of money for housing, healthcare, food, education for their kids…
“Time makes more converts than reason.”
— Thomas Paine
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
― Thomas Paine
Did parents care more about stocks than their kids? Could they care about their kids? Maybe I’m misremembering; as I’ve rehearsed online, my childhood really wasn’t bad…but childhoods for others are, and perhaps I’ve just grown up and graduated into my spiritual work as opposed to my professional work, and get tired having to drag my heart and soul through the machinery of “work” which is mostly about perception and integration, short-term gain, long-term ignorance…and now we are here, all of us half-dead and on the brink of becoming ill and at the mercy of a dysfunctional healthcare system because we failed to care about the right things. We meaning the adults in the room, who rather than read and talk and try to improve infrastructure, worried about signaling and new cars and wallpaper and vacations and appearing. Fucking idiots. I love you, but fucking idiots.
You deserve all the awfulness thrown at you and to be laughed off the planet. And you will. The fossil record will show who the most selfish generation was, and most self-righteous; the earth hasn’t forgotten a word that’s been spoken. Anything interpreted is forever kept; we are all a root system going deep into the earth.
America loves busyness for busyness’s sake because we hate thinking — we hate the notion that we might be irrelevant, and that it would be better for us to stay home than to go out and do what we were going to do. People hate thinking about consequences. It’s funny.
Watch a man try to do nothing. It’s the funniest media there is. He can’t do it. He has to go be significant.
~
Maybe it takes a collective ‘airing of grievances’ and maybe that’s what social media is right now. But eventually children have to talk to parents and they have to agree on a framework. Kids aren’t dumb. It’s actually amazing to see how competent they are at talking about politics, business, justice, the environment, rules…parents are lukewarm defenders of the status quo because they don’t believe in it ferociously themselves, while of course children are fiercely committed to freedom, creativity, honesty and fun.
“The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps even something deeper like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works towards sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can’t possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it’s true.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise
I spent 10 years “unsubscribed” from my family. I used Twitter to find people whose thinking I admired. This led me everywhere UCLA didn’t. I probably have too much contempt for institutions and American adults in general. Hammering my lenses on reality using social media may turn out to have been detrimental to my life—we’ll see.
maybe I don’t want to realize that I would actually have my parents and all my supposed ideological “enemies” as allies if I just explained myself clearly and had the patience and grace I wish others had
!
“Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It’s serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth. Not superficial costs — anybody can have that — I mean in truth. That’s what I write. What it really is like.”
perhaps I’m trying to right all the wrong things
my heart hasn’t forgotten,
trying
to balance the books of my conscience
or understand what really there is to do
in a world of minds paying attention and reciting their gospel,
if only I could make a point to all those people who need a “point” to engage: they can’t tolerate their being no end, no neat “if I do this, then here is what will happen”
maybe I’m just a person to talk to after you’ve ended your day of pursuing agenda item closure
maybe I’m just a person you openly think with
and this is my little corner of the internet
and my little life attached to it
~
Each generation has its skills to offer.
kids aren’t stupid, they’re mimicry machines, they do what they’re fed
she’s hot because she’s right
funny…the species *is* sexuality — where did I read it well-put yesterday? D.H. Lawrence…
“What sex is, we don’t know, but it must be some sort of fire. For it always communicates a sense of warmth, of glow. And when this glow becomes a pure shine, then we feel the sense of beauty. We all have the fire of sex slumbering or burning inside us. If we live to be ninety, it is still there. Or, if it dies, we become one of those ghastly living corpses which are unfortunately becoming more numerous in the world.”
— D.H. Lawrence
“Some years ago I was asked to contribute to a collection of six-word ‘stories’ . . . My contribution may seem facetious, but it contains a serious and bitter truth: ‘Should have lived more, written less.’ ”
do I make every post about what a writer is? Maybe; it is the obsession that pushes me on: what to do with all we sense? To what good shall one put all his awareness and agency, his ability to die and sacrifice? What is worth dying for?
I suppose I have found it; do I keep silent about it?
This post was supposed to be about how human beings can get along on earth.
go back to the beginning, be at your origin, be at the place you’ve always been
yes, my poetry is about a man trying to locate himself — I know what I have to reread
or maybe I don’t need to go back…I can’t even log in for some reason, can’t even get to the archive…
all you can do is write
I know exactly what I’ve been running away from in my writing and my self-presentation, and self-understanding and self-acceptance. Is this a gross tower of self-involvement? Is that what my work and life have been? Maybe; I don’t really care to seek a second opinion;
you are trying to tell a story, or read one to escape your own
you?
now I have deranged the senses of identity, so the art-making space has been prepared…
∞
story and reality are only vaguely related; the tension does not scale, cannot be proven or ported, only explained for a moment and afterward the raw material does not make sense
so now I have no fear of what I am not; is a fairy princess going to appear? Or do the days just go on until I learn how to pay rent and “move into a place of my own”? Do I just have to wait? What am I waiting for?
it is “pointless” to communicate but it’s all we have
there is no ground in my writing to stand on; it’s not a pleasant reading experience, though it may be interesting and in possession of artistic merit, but really who cares if — well, you don’t really need anyone to like it, you’re already an angel and graduated from this place
no, I will never finish a chapter of a book because a finished product is worthless; it may appear valuable today but I live in the future, damn the present, it isn’t enough
i could keep going, and will
i do
finally i’ve found my style and now i’m gonna die in it, a pharaoh
to be continued, edited, revised, sent up and down the chain, shaking all inner lives. Here. This, too:
also thought you’d appreciate this:
“Conditioned to ecstasy, the poet is like a gorgeous unknown bird mired in the ashes of thought. If he succeeds in freeing himself, it is to make a sacrificial flight to the sun. His dreams of a regenerate world are but the reverberations of his own fevered pulse beats. He imagines the world will follow him, but in the blue he finds himself alone. Alone but surrounded by his creations; sustained, therefore, to meet the supreme sacrifice. The impossible has been achieved; the duologue of author with Author is consummated. And now forever through the ages the song expands, warming all hearts, penetrating all minds. At the periphery the world is dying away; at the center it glows like a live coal. In the great solar heart of the universe the golden birds are gathered in unison. There it is forever dawn, forever peace, harmony and communion. Man does not look to the sun in vain; he demands light and warmth not for the corpse which he will one day discard but for his inner being. His greatest desire is to burn with ecstasy, to commerge his little flame with the central fire of the universe. If he accords the angels wings so that they may come to him with messages of peace, harmony and radiance from worlds beyond, it is only to nourish his own dreams of flight, to sustain his own belief that he will one day reach beyond himself, and on wings of gold. One creation matches another; in essence they are all alike. The brotherhood of man consists not in thinking alike, nor in acting alike, but in aspiring to praise creation. The song of creation springs from the ruins of earthly endeavor. The outer man dies away in order to reveal the golden bird which is winging its way toward divinity.”
― Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins: a Study of Rimbaud
THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THE POET who sees and has patience and does not need to react…one who can be present in awareness; now, what kind of life does this give me? Where are my robes and riches?
