March–April 2026 · Bewildered haranguing
Preface Note,
These fragments make up a [stressed, long-winded] bundle of outpouring, not meticulous design, that spans the last month and change of prose, veered into of a sudden, in the middle of working on poetry. I don’t want this happenstance frame of entries to be a habit for my prose, yet I worry of new standards of suffering being set for us in the bowels of the empire and everywhere those poisoned talons can reach, whose myriad flare-ups have shook something about what I do and what about. The simple fact for me is that too much horrendous, outlandish bullshit has been assaulting life on Earth throughout this period of our lives, of my best attempts to center my life’s work as an author while the shittiest period in modern human history plays out.
These fragments make up [part of] a long, winding personal struggle over specifics and generalities of present life, of all the implications of recent and distant history, as strictly dealt with, not enjoyed, by those who feel some distinct picture of more or less the same thing I do. It remains the root of my case, every room I enter and exit, every line that’s crossed, every patch I try to make something atop, that persons with hearts and minds have been exploited, regardless of generation, regardless of personal assessment of intelligent reasoning, to value every possible thing except what is evidently substantive, satisfying and sustaining to life; to prioritize the deadly vehicles of new and revised social sermons far above what substance remains, what substance is still bitingly felt to indict what imposes the bent knee, hangs the life that lives on its feet, captures and shatters the mind that thinks without dogma, stabs and bleeds the heart that feels — plainly.
For what is left of me, for what ever could possibly survive if — if — this storm is to pass, if I live to see it pass, all that I feel an active soundness of serenity from is representing life crying out in bearing the lashes of rule. All I could feel now that resembles “Hope” is the knowledge that the worst of things having come to pass, yet to come, will inform the proportional corrective measures on terms of solidifying defense of innocents, reason, contentment, the fruits and seeds alike of real peace.
A distinctly human tone. A general condition with no feature but strenuous bustle or internal, silent unrest from all we’ve put on ourselves, all we’ve assumed from the old, for us at now, in grief, all allowed to weigh us into drowning. All bought with rust and blood-coated dimes of mere survival.
Perhaps there’s a portrait in the mind’s eye when the irritation or confusion of some inane side-task of some busybody fuckery puts a spike in the nerves. I think that, maybe, that portrait becomes a bookmark for this or that time, this or that thread where the only sensation of dealing with things is the sensation of steel wool scraping against every sensitive appendage in perfect unison. A world-cage around the interior of the Earth wherein every single action is motivated by some variation of “Get this done and get me out of here. Get me to my sweet release of choice. Get me away from the world.” And in some cases, the additional demand, “Get me away from the world, and also let it all be mine and mine alone.”
A firmly [perhaps also woefully] organic and mortal perspective finding itself swept into the bludgeoning rocks of a damning spiritual glare. The rocks of that unseen glare stab into the hearts, plague the farthest sanctuaries of the minds of every owner of these, carry the weighted edges of the content of these times.
These waves, these forces are what push the [bruised & beaten] living perspective into trial by the wearing thin of wherewithal: the forces of ownership, of supposed “goodness”, of supposed “godliness” marching in spectacular lockstep toward the realized promise of perfect and complete sorrow, of universal surrender, of wholly mutilated innocence.
These forces were declared, in different dialects of cowardice at different times, by some resignation in the suffering humanity, as what simply must be....
.... as what simply must soothe us to sleep to keep doing it all ....
.... and we to be what simply must die for it.
“Orderly Shame for thee (the timeless peasantries), Gilded Sin for me (the parasite capitalist, the pro-cruelty cuckmonger, the forcefully deified pedophile rapist) — Forever! Hail! Hail to Ba’al Zabub!”
Peace, not the prevailing pleasure at present, is instead the driving object — its unmade detail the employing engine — surpassing what objectless delirium has eternally characterized “Hope.” Peace is becoming understood as the abolition of hope, the cutting of the stifling fetters tightened around our throats in the heat of reaching for hopefulness.
The immediate and maximal ends alike in this understanding are the effective, unwavering grasp of something necessarily not computable to what currently pilfers our every living pulse, and indeed of something that confirms the innate hostility and rapist mentality of what advertises itself as the sole legitimacy, the sole deciding force. When all we’ve been offered since childhood are “Opportunities” within the very menacing amalgam of institutions that function as playgrounds for sociopathic manipulation at best, the ambition to break from, to power off the vital functions of that prison — that prison mode of society — becomes the only honest ambition that works in line with the truest, deepest urges of human wellness.
Whatever is enabling the pilfering of our vitality, in money, in physical, mental and spiritual cruelties by the state that enforces coercive relations of money and ownership; whatever is professing the mindless surrender to some dead and gone civil religion, whatever is urging you to essentially stand around in public with the civic faithful — to burn candles, sing hymns, get spat on, get hit by a lifted pickup truck, get carried out of a sit-in protest in handcuffs, recover from the trauma, try again, try to find enlightenment and purpose in those repetitions — these are all you get if you simply give it your best try at an existence, not a full, capable, unperturbed life, but a “Stable” existence. These are the perfectly ordinary features of a dull, vastly thoughtless gratefulness for mundanity in the best of times.
That is sufficient to say that genuine peace, peace that deflates the fever pitch, peace that rejuvenates the faculties to consider and apply the surrounding material, is when rule from every invented top of every invented hierarchy, in all spheres of life both shared and private, is dead and gone. Peace, with its fullest spectrum intact, is when the individual universes of human beings are not subject to any exterior mandate in the hopes of brute forcing harmony, reaping merely social cacophonies of further vindicated nihilism.
Rather, peace as a universal quality can only happen through organic harmonies: free agreements, mutual interests, symbiotic happenstance, reciprocal and flexible participation — where relevant. And that can only arise from clarity bound with composure, by the means of passion made virulent by intellect, confronting the entitled screams for simplistic obedience in the shadow of embarrassing figureheads.
The wheel always turns.
Whether by implement, by evolution of general sentiment, by clear agitation for disengagement from the rotten whole: the disengaging of individual universes, having tried so desperately to contribute to society and the world even slightly resembling a healthy, functioning “whole” of different people with their presences, their earnest, heartfelt efforts — perpetually made banal nothings in the lunging shadows of capital, its state, its lifeless aesthetics, its horrific functions, its death wish for perpetual gluttony of hoarded treasure, the strange, infectious allure of simply “managing” this.
None will know real peace, outside of enjoying treats and excitable flares of the sheltered ego in exchange for one’s boundless agency, in the exterior spaces and operations shared with neighbors, until those who share in them, deprived and wanting, are engaged in the practical making of peace with themselves as it relates to the deepest wounds, harshest endurances never quite made perfectly clear, but always felt so sickeningly. From there is where gatherings emerge organically, surprisingly and beautifully. That is sealed — in loving peace, striving for it in full — with the understanding made a multi-worded mantra — almost never put forward explicitly with explicit adherents, but often shared in the strangest endearing circumstances among those unacquainted siblings closest to me and you. The mantra arises not from intense philosophical searching, but from what is felt in the grappling between a life and a world. The paraphrase, unique to everyone feeling it: No reasoned, skeptical and self-respecting person concocts a peaceful dismissal of what forcefully dismisses and spits on their peace eternally.
The mantra, its personal practice, its unique applications to the exterior matter that challenges, emboldens or obstructs the courses of lives, comprises the strange, sometimes disheartening and possibly magnificent whirl of our lives’ contents, of what we each put forward between the brackets of birth and death. We are seeing something of this present 2026 manner of life playing out. It is certainly and woefully not anarchy, although those bellowing Law & Order from high offices sure do enjoy their best go at it for themselves. It is certainly not the full spectrum of a chaos that would open wider possibilities for poor oppressed peoples. But it is also not “Order”, at least in the sense of there being a clear sequence of things that follow the means of a vision’s ends.
We essentially see a vast cluster of clusterfucks, some duct taped-ass idea of echelons, vaguely interlocking with, ricocheting off of each other to animate the sad, exhausted faces on each and every one of us.
Oh, yes. So bitter, so locked in the throes of “what if, what if.” Meanwhile, there are snickers of various sardonic sects of do-nothings, feel-nothings and try-nothings: perpetually, reflexively posturing as “superior” in the suspense of their false pride in some angle of one’s faith in an anti-faith.
“You and what ‘We’!? You and what ‘Us’!?”
I will say it again. No reasoned, skeptical and self-respecting person concocts a peaceful dismissal of what forcefully dismisses and spits on their peace eternally. That description includes me, as well as the many unique persons who share in it. That comprises, in that context alone, “We”. Every person who would lend to that, every individual who would participate how able, how wanted, is the person among persons who come Before what it is they create in common with their siblings of the Earth. We can and likely will disagree every day, all day, every hour, every minute forever about every single superfluous item of life, ideas, phenomena, material, whatever. But if you see me, and if I see you, and you and me are team-lifting heavy objects or performing delicate actions involving shared skills and insight, that is We. Whatever the duration of that is, whatever endures, whatever subsides, let’s find out together. Not as like-minded servants to a cult mythos around this, but as free agents of our own lives and interests.
Specific to the so-called United States, looking at it on paper, from the stories of those who struggled and died here, the notion of We The People is a unique concept of inhabitants of this neck of the woods in Turtle Island that comprise the manual force of operations, procedures, policies and enforcement within the boundaries of the country, on top of maintaining an existence of engagement with capitalism. This concept holds a rather distinct place in the socio-political history and culture, supposedly being the ultimate check, the final leverage, translated almost always into elections, engaging with representatives, whatever. (Here were the underpinnings of John Locke, et al., translated into Jefferson’s “self-governance”.)
At the same time, where the “self-governance” turned out to be that of enslavers, genociders and the early capitalists, there are incidents like Harper’s Ferry, Haymarket, Blair Mountain, Bloody Harlan, Standing Rock; there are endeavors like armed counter-secession from slaver secessionists, laying fire & lead down onto Klansmen, legal and physical confrontation with southern Jim Crow apartheid; there are utterly remarkable figures as Harriet Tubman, Lucy Parsons, Susie King Taylor, Mary Ann Bickerdyke, Nat Turner, Fredrick Douglas, John Brown, Joe Hill, Eugene Victor Debs...
At the same time as passing the odd confederate loser flag hanging on the side of a wrecked single-wide trailer off the side of the interstate in Georgia or The Carolinas, one will become acquainted with seemingly roughneck men who suddenly express great fondness for life’s vastness, for people’s variation, honesty and kindness. One will notice something, anything, of a turn, not everywhere, but here & there. And I have to hold to that. I have to nourish that with care.
When one glances at the present reified ideals of this country, one instantly recognizes a prideful backbone of every racist, homicidal symbolism. From the Gadsden “Don’t Tread On Me” flag to the Confederate Anti-Freedom Cuck flag to the Ku Klux Klan flag(s).
The idea of having a forceful approach in regard to a period-specific interpretation of the word Freedom, the raw fact of life in a settler colonial so-called “Enlightenment” era petri dish of early Liberalism, this idea has shaped everything that made this sad heap of shit called a “country” what it is. Tragic and Beautiful in every way. Some specter of “We The People [who worship our solitary treats.]” This, of course, does not mean that the supposedly ultimate check, final leverage was ever officially respected, ever officially given a seat at the table with the powers that prevailed, let alone ever officially centered.
Every power that was is a past tense because it was surpassed. Why was it surpassed? Because it was hated, had every reason to be hated, people quite simply had enough of it. And all of those powers, in their death throes, screamed about refusal to submit all of a sudden being unlawful, evil to pursue betterment that meets the times, against all self-righteous Gerontocrats. The essence of reaction as confronted. The so-called United States was a colony of the British Empire, and some actions during and after then lead to everything that brought on a Civil War, then the warped and jarring resemblance of the “country” now 100 years ago being barely evolved since. (8 Aug, 1925 — nearly forty-thousand-person KKK march in Washington D.C.)
This is the land of horrible and heart-wrenching contradictions. Contradictions that do not heal from some cheery good-heartedness from well-off liberal whites savoring collard greens done right, the blues, Memphis, etc. Wherefore the notion of Freedom was captured by a varying and strictly civil conception (always with a thumb on the scale for no one ranked “below” Anglo-originating land and slave owners), Freedom also meant struggling. It meant gumption, a will to drive it where it points: the directions of the crying, yearning aspirations of the innocents under the exhaustion that only a life in terror can produce. That could never survive if limited to the bookishness of slave owners and rapists. And indeed, it was enriched by Daring! In sound concert with the sharpest logical distillation of life, liberty, happiness. Perhaps at odds with the bludgeoning rock of the state that imposes slavers’ law, but in the highest agreement and innovation of the exact chisel of the exact essence.
While some bright, resolute minority took plainly to the words of William Lloyd Garrison when he declared, “That which is not just is not law”, as though clinging to the hands of comrades, in stepping on in the richest, unvarnished grace of human determination — there were those who stood in their heavy grandfathers’ boots in the muck of denial of humanity from an invented chasm, from variation named “difference”, “alien”, and thus “less than [me]”. This was their deified misconception named “Perfect Truth”, fighting for Death against the Living, for what being free is. And not one of these contradictions was smoothed out by kissing the heavy boots of those who fracture the human fabric with notions of supremacy, of command and obedience, of channeling God’s Will and, in effect, trying to Be God. “My God, me as that God, stomping on your head without quarrel. This satisfies me. All else triggers my All-American ‘Murder and Rape Everything’ reflex.” That is what governs here. That is what seems to repeatedly inspire the undone works, raising minds, hearts, voices and hands — still.
“We”, not simply “We The People of so-called America”, means we who endure, we who want ecstatic endeavors of the substance of living and bettering ourselves. That is quite simply the global and regional “We” alike.
Whatever in one’s mind could make this more complicated than it reads on plain glance, than it is practicable among informal unions of people with clear objectives in mind, I cannot care to figure it and trouble myself with it. But all I can see are those kinds of do-nothings, feel-nothings and try-nothings succumbing to their pride. The succumbing to pride becoming somehow attractive and normal.
Almost every day, some pillar lands upon me, something concocted often from the influence of those very types, thrust on me as a piercing interruption much more than weary, direct dismissal. Cost, in currency and energy, the prongs of dread, the international images of humanity come unglued, the dull shame of existing out in the open of any place on Earth.
Then the sense of something that can never deserve the name “Hopelessness” again, those here and conscious feeling clear that “Hope”, its varied strains and routes of administration, is exactly what has saturated and drowned the substance of our lives. The sense that someone else’s delirium of “Hope” in hurting and murdering people like me, in more than one way, is going to be the death of me and my loved ones and others who deserve full and free lives. The sense that liberal ass-covering is all that will come after our massacres around the west when they’ve ass-covered for every swathe of daily overseas massacres that they can.
The evident function is ritualistically tap danced around and away from, but liberalism is fascism in a clown outfit.
Enough. Enough with the regurgitation of unthinking narratives painfully bound with some asinine hubris, some pride in the ruling domination, be it with purely ideological turn the other cheek ideals equally so as with purely ideological total war ideals; some sad, desperate image among millions of self-important images in the foregrounds of a team flag backing.
Let’s not feel inclined to puff ourselves up. Anyone who feels truly glorious while performing some verbal juggling at this time is not in tune with either reality or mortality. The endeavor to me seems to be life, as curiosity tempts, as company hardens and solitude sharpens, as kindness is cried for and malice is cursed.
My dream is that everyone walks off the job, burns their papers. Just leaves. But it’s a dream. (I say, wanting it not to be.)
I am just another broke[n] loser with unique but not necessarily “exceptional” loser faculties. I too can succumb to an asinine hubris if I regularly allowed myself any lift, real or imagined, above the only dirt that’s held me, moved me and punished me. But I can try my best to flesh what I would relay to that random, unknown You out of baseline love of my unacquainted siblings caught up in humanity’s bullshit.
Out of all my stress, my disdain for broad portions of this human life having affected Earth and her wonder, I still love individuals. I love them enough to shut up and go away from them, resorting to this same thing I’ve resorted to for decades, hoping that my best record of things will leave my remains absolved.
I want you to do everything you can and want that does not hinder or harm me.
This, this pissant piece of paper? With all this shit scribbled on it? This is all that is for me.
Do better, do more than me.
I wish I could.
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I learn, I hear, in meditations my own and of friends, that we are enduring the growing pains out of Hope.
But they are in fact more than “growing pains”. They are necessary but in some sense devastating moral injuries, particularly injuries to all moralities set as “unalterable” pillars, later revised by some adapted orientation of liberalism, sacrificed to again and again in new ways that go on to make their own projects the new composition of the “unalterable” pillar made so by revised, “Correct” morals.
Liberty is bad, liberty is good. Liberty is bad again, liberty is good again.
Patriotism means Love Thy Neighbor, Patriotism means Kill Thy Neighbor.
I don’t want “Liberty”, and I don’t want either the obvious lie or the supposed “truth” of Any strictly outlined “Liberty” whatsoever. I spit on the self-describing “Patriotism” of restorative justice equally so as on that of white supremacy, imperialism, genocide. And I hate every compulsory vehicle of every state, of every state decision — changing with the winds of influence and wealth — by which my life has been stolen from me, to which my life has been coercively hitched, doing the same to every person, plant and animal on this planet.
The devastating injuries of morality in the self that compose evolving against domination at this time means looking reality in the face — that the existence of these states, these “Liberties”, these “Patriotic” symbolic rituals rests solely in the perpetuation and extraction of money, in the cementing of the malignant anti-relations of capital, of property, of class interest. Of every link in every chain binding the ankles and wrists and throats of our spirits... The disorientation from there. The flight to some painted ray of sunlight,
“Marxist, or Anarchist? Anarchist, or Marxist? Libertarian Socialism? Council Communism? Individualism? Democratic Confederalism? Nihilism? Optimism? Pessimism? Fatalism? Theism?”
All these varied pleas for redemption (“resolution”). All these appeals for piety (“unity”/“community”). All these creeds against the real — the real being the sum and simple, as I feel it is most ideally, when all -ists and -isms are thrown away: “Alive and Angry”. Alive and Angry, or Existing and Wilting. Wilting and Praying.
To feel and confirm a positive difference. There is the object, the motivating goal. But that object, that goal goes on to be fed through the tenants, the teeth of the wood chipper of some ideology: having captured a vulnerability, a sorrow, a plight made a fury, then quarantined from living matter, from critical, thoughtful aspirations, used to chain the hearts of young people with notions and images, eager to prove themselves, employing them in horrible crimes, horrible fissures in the fabric of humanity, pressing on with whatever alternative series of excuses to pursue conquest, terror and murder. Different flag, same practice.
Although so many are sleepwalking, although so many are dragged along rocky roads tied to the backs of these menacing state vehicles, we are thrashing: blinded by the haze of bustle, vexing everything about the nerves in the midst of the mind thoroughly vexed, scanning with extended, frightened hands for a better gravitation, for a means to sever those deathly binds. In the demoralizing bustle of an indifferent series of panicked crimes, pyramid schemes and suicides calling itself “society”, the easy jest of spectacle, making some scene, doing some painfully temporary disruption, all through a mode of “Never actually fight back”, becomes attractive.
And there is a staircase to spectacle that has to be noted. At the bottom step: the 20-person sidewalk demonstrations in Cincinnati or Baltimore. At the top step: the malignant “Woe Is Me” or “I’m God” performances of elevated worms in makeup, shitty outfits, the worst of human impressions applauded at pyrotechnic finales. (The highest step being what we’ve witnessed most in the last two years from the white supremacist neo-Feudal opportunists self-describing as “Christian”). Being on any step of this staircase is not winning you any closeness to the realization of clear ideals. That would be something else.
Too much is captured by anti-transformative intrigue: meditation (and ONLY meditation) in the disquieting sheerness of the ripples in the pools in the self; mindfulness (with ONE NARROW LANE of what is “minded”) when everything of this total mode of existence invariably becomes deafeningly overstimulating; peace and love (with MALICE and HATRED for those brave enough to effectively Fight for it) spun only in imagination, appreciated only in loss.
Along these troubled courses, I’ve seen individuals come close to, abruptly retracting from, passing the entrances of some foreign land within their own painfully widened intakes of knowledge — complex and effortless alike — concerning the sober playing-out of life. The sober playing-out of yesteryear’s many, many seeds of consequence as they meet the forward-facing course of every reasoned and resolute living being, finding their spirits gashed by thorny stalks ripened with poison. Somehow, that poison accelerated pity and cowardice. They’ve begun hearing voices,
It can no longer be curious snippets or dedicated streams of intrigue that emit conjecture, emit “Hope”. Emit the very poison of sitting & wondering, of disavowing the placing of hands, the moving of fingers, the working of nerves, the owning of one’s life, the bold confrontation, the audacious handling of all that affects that determination.
In the interest of seeing the many beautiful lights of lives not extinguished from sorrow: can we possibly shatter this poison circle? By all that the richest and boldest dissent vindicated by these absurdities? Can dissent cease to be more dissent and become deliverance? Can we trust ourselves to save ourselves? At what scale, and with what relation between varying scales? At what level of what vital opening?
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Every morning’s increment, that one wink of light building to a blinding miscarriage of illumination, is, perhaps for more people than I could know, the casual, cosmological prelude totem of this same routine taking up my foremothers’ hammer, pounding the head of another black nail into the coffin of the entire predetermining “unalterable” pillar of “THE FREE™ WORLD”, of this entire passive consent to destruction, of having the whole of our aspirations and livelihoods hitched upon its lifeless, disturbed animations.
Every mass of increments suspended, turned into noon, then twilight, then the shroud on this side of the world, is another completed link in the life chain of all that was pumped into me (beginning with Blues Clues, Spongebob Squarepants, Nick News with Linda Ellerbee, “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” “Mission Accomplished”, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”, “Leroy Jenkins”, every pop culture blot in memory from 1999–2015), all gradually melting into the corrupted VHS tape of invented American “glories” of power, the human skin suits of officeholders on screen melting, revealing their honest demonic essences to the terrorized inhabitant of that exact perspective made attentive, curious, building and searching memory, taking to cross-referencing histories, shapes on maps, shapes on the faces of factory workers in Soviet Republics or on the faces of partisans in post-combat revelry in newsreels and such to try to reach for any coherent clue as to what the fuck anything has ever been.
Every disjointed friend circle being exactly what time and matter have made them. Thus, under pressure and paranoia, enrich the disjointed condition of the circle. Whenever the basic shape reemerges, it is as though we’ve held our breaths below the surface for a year: always purging our most gritting, screaming, weeping malcontents saturated with the most intelligent hatred within our sandboxed in-home anarchies.
Snapping back to performing the nods and grins of compliance within the increasingly threatening realms of immediate practicality, in the regions of the world under the razor-boot of domination’s particular flavor profile in our time.
The pair of swaying steps through the centers of departure, processing ...
“Thought Criminal ... Thought Criminal ....”
“Life Dreamer ... Life Lover ....”
The Sublime, once again, only beautifully subdued, captured, as a wonderment made an episodic item of galaxy brain intrigue. Its capture made The Greatest Spectacle, the accelerated irony of earnest yet stupid intents, a pseudo-Sublime, invented and satisfied the role for itself: the only yo-yo-like contrivance of our lifetimes to simulate that lost sense of The Sublime, of its here & now potential of making the necessities of life immediate and within your grasp and mine, without really respecting, let alone tasting it.
That Sublime™, injected with more chemicals and redesigned according to popular appeal, is let to hover in place. “Oooo, Aaaa!”
Meanwhile the soundest enthusiasm of knowledge translated to the actions of the living, thinking, discerning unique person embodying an individual universe of The Sublime dashes forward only an inch before tackled into the grave, piercing the funerary ditch where only the neighboring dead can hear to lament.
My best assumption for whatever standards are to be set, for whatever “the future” is to mean: more terror, wider implications. More liberalism in those wearing labels they do not need to wear. More screaming, being pissed about who’s Right, who’s vindicated, what society should be, what a concept even is, quitting everything in rage. More exterior copies of “Me” rebuking and beating the “Me” that I inhabit in the first-person half to death, recovered to be beaten half to death again, indefinitely, being told repeatedly that “There’s hope.”
Sure. Let’s find hope here.
Let’s just stop here, give up — just kind of give up — keep putting makeup on a corpse held in the repose of pleading and livestream our deaths.
“Lol oops everything’s dead now.”
The final self-inflicted gunshot of proud and latent Liberalism having successfully failed itself into a perfect circle, after me and everything I love was killed for it.
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Knowing without denial or complaint that you and I and everyone are only ants with big ideas, castes and institutions who commit to atrocities, universal exploitation and the idea of The Individual™ with no access to the nutrients that feed relations of symbiosis and mutual interest. Supplementing this is knowing that even ants have capacity to move things and make their own existences without tripping over really any big ideas.
And yet our only capacity, rather than for moving things and making our own existences, is for bombing schoolchildren in Iran, weaving self-congratulating spectacles, disavowing every pinch of any vital motion against what brokenness clads itself in mythos to justify their part in the erasing of lives off the face of the Earth, cheapening life as a whole, berating people with any depth for critical thought beyond the strict bounds of what is accessible to idiots, what is a convenient tool for media (“Independent” and not), spectacle, institutions, civil society, whatever.
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The handfuls of either hasty or editorialized messaging themselves, in the macro, convey the unsaid to the degree that stimuli agitates us, grinds the gears of survival instincts relating to feeling/being fucked over, slandered, what have you. That is the constant of all that’s underscored in the content of all messaging, devoted to ceaseless messaging, never toppled, never brought about with actual urgency. Still, we defer the urgency of our lives as unspeakable experiences to elections, as though first we vote, or scream over bickering fantasies, and then, Maybe, we Enjoy Life.
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Conversation overall has lapsed — by resignation, lazy pre-acceptance of sorrow & death’s victory in the name of ridiculous, useless ideals that fuck over others — into the ballet of ass-covering, painting over the personal offense of being called out when spewing wrong, anti-thinking bullshit with the attention-grabbing hue of rage, claiming unique insight on something that really doesn’t even matter after the priorities are made clear, every heartfelt cry of the living swiping to grasp sense having its microphone cut in The Land of Free Speech™.
Chorus. A Fucking Chorus of The Individual™, in a hideous cacophony of every tone at once. “Me me me me me me...” And so there is only everyone and thus nobody. And so there is only the jokey usernames in the live chat of this or that Team Leader of this or that cult. There is only suffering, both overseas and in the flyover states/regions where nobody wants to be. But also there are only “Those Suffering —” no time taken so that lives are actually seen savoring hurt, heard voicing sober words of pain. None seen or heard to evoke the nudge of reality — “That could be me.”
It will be you, too.
Where will those liberals be, who seem only Brave in their Cowardice, to stop the Nazi with a rifle going into synagogues, mosques, black churches, LGBTQ+ support groups and social gatherings?
They will be nowhere, doing nothing that sincerely matters in any way. They will be sending thoughts and prayers, saying their mournful litanies that masturbate their egos through forced tears, persisting on with the 2007 Obama election campaign mentality, asking trans people to kindly shut the fuck up and go away from all public life forever, so they can try really painfully to win an election, to compete to be more right-wing than the Nazi “Republican” party.
“Because fuck your life, I have a podcast to do.”
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The rush to a brave performance of temperament, the “Trying to be smart about things” have enshrined in us both immense gullibility and immense disdain for ourselves, for all who come after. Especially accounting for the unmet, unconfronted, utterly shit-out-of-luck circumstances allowed to build up, looking at it all with a miserable toolbox of frozen litanies in hand, set to shit the bed for everything beloved, everything enriching to life.
Everything resembling good nature breaks whenever Life Itself is actually the topic of “discussion.”
Everything resembling love & care for a common human need for peace & reason just goes away when it’s underlined that Life Itself is doing poorly by our own stubborn, sad, slow suicides; working jobs that we hate or that are utterly malicious and disgusting, pumping air into the workings of our downfall, every single day, without care, ready to throw ourselves to the ground under the tank treads for more daily, disposable horse shit.
“Kind of just shut up, actually.”
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Can I just live and be okay?
Can life just be adjusted on that basic question, as it uniquely applies for every person when given the ample space to breath, stretch, nourish, contemplate and decide? To rest as needed? To awake as motivated? To rise and do as the substance calls for, as is certified to be clear by those contributing to it?
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The answer is No.
Obviously this is the answer if one were foolish enough to ask a fascist who prefers the term “conservative.” The answer to “Can I just live and be okay?” from Liberals and Liberals who prefer the term Progressive to sound heroic and palatable is “No, actually. Fuck your life, shut up and do what pleases my superiority complex. And even if you do, you’re doing it wrong and I want to spit in your eye, strangle you to death and walk away without consequence.”
So that is the answer one gets. And from that answer is the question of “Can I get away from this nightmare of Everyone else telling me to die in silence, to have faith, Have Hope?”
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I’ll not fret over the will. But I’ll wade an ocean of dread over the spirit.
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An exceptional time.
Perhaps there was no starker rearing of an undefeated Hydra’s new heads of contextually recent history resurfacing since the brackets of Weimar and the Nuremberg trials.
I am sincerely kind of astonished lately as to how low my mood can go as far as the sickening blight caring [probably way too much] about the [pseudo-]philosophical, mythological and historical threads of things.
It just really sucks. Perhaps a good deal of some rich fabric of humanity had gradually worn some grave holes through itself, and there are only faint margins of original being okay... but only here or there in the far outskirts of the Earth or the crevices of relative seclusion, however long it lasts, within the belly of the beast. (Whether a new fabric can be spun, I really hate to have to contemplate it more than I already do.)
And as we see in histories, most turmoil has to happen how it does because of small, self-assured pieces of shit.
The blunders of his 1980s-2011 quest for glory and admiration have amounted to the orange-painted louse summoning forth the whole of his past hurt, focused into his present project for godhood, while the younger folks, the genuine rebels are forced to ride out the new evolution of 2010s anti-SJW bullshit assuming the SJW role post-2021.
One then begins to wonder when any human conflict stops being an affecting ripple to the next, wherever down the line of histories.
Now more than ever is the loudest case study of dynamic inversions.
Have notes ready at whatever “The End” could be surmised to be.
▨
Some safe space of a trial in Texas, generously cathartic for the rapist pedophile-occupied mafia state, has made new political prisoners, has shaped new implications, has further cheapened — as pummeling a weeks-old rotting horse — the stale, debunked notion of Rights, of a state that will safeguard and honor those.
Somehow this is supposed to be significant, unlike every sickening “significance” poking up every single fucking day that is supposed to be “The significant” thing.
The Other brand new significant thing is the supreme court ruling in favor of torturing queer, trans and non-conforming people into suicide through so-called “conversion therapy”, which constitutes psychological and often physical cruelty acted on with a theocratic, cosmologically totalitarian vision in mind.
So that’s awesome and chill.
We also have, as Ken Klippenstein reported 5 April, a “budget request to Congress [that] contains the largest counterterrorism spending increase in years — and buried inside it is a new FBI-led center dedicated to ‘proactively’ hunting Americans the government classifies as so-called domestic terrorists.”
He goes on to detail how this abysmal immolation of funds for preemptive civil purges of citizenry “reveals, the FBI runs a dedicated ‘NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center’; with personnel from 10 federal agencies, it is busy ‘proactively’ identifying domestic terrorists”. NSPM-7 is a politically-motivated, retribution-oriented presidential memorandum [no. 7] that intentionally sets its sights widely on everyone enjoying the symbolic facade of “Free Speech” through anything from plain observations of American history, of the contents of correspondences between founding American figures, to healthcare advocacy, abortion and LGBTQ+ advocacy, “anti-christian sentiment” (interesting), “anti-capitalism” (of course), “extremism on ‘gender’” (“meaning the George Soros persecution of my Sacred™ White™ Sweet Baby Ray’s Barbecue Sauce® Down-Home Alabama Baby Jesus, who grants me the Perfect and Irrevocable Parental Right® to suplex my toddler to death for wanting to wear a dress”), and basically anything that has any iota of brain capacity beyond the Genius™ policy & rhetoric that falls out the ass of the president, or that of white nationalist policy nerds when they’re allowed to remove their butt plugs.
“We have to imprison everyone who isn’t a hyper-emotional, manipulable useful idiot white nationalist 19 year-old football player, rapist, alcoholic and drug addict. This will absolutely inspire obedience and not backfire. Not with Kash Patel at the helm! FREEDOM, Dude! We can say R---rd and T---ny again! We can kill f-gs and still crack some cold ones with our bros in the sauna! My dream! My dream come true! Stretch our legs — call it ‘Freedom’, after we killed all possibility of Being Free! Love it! ‘Murica!”
Another “significance”, another another another, along this pitiful, pissy yet comfortable bourgeois liberal podcast intrigue dogshit thread that harmlessly follows the unimpeded March of Terribleness; wondering, aloud, how things got to be this way. Wondering, aloud, what could have been done — what on Earth could have been done — to console one’s child from the heinous pangs of mourning after his trans best friend shot the brains out of her own head from a place of inconceivable sorrow, from the silent nod at the bleak stare of no hope. Wondering, aloud, how the thoughtful, terrorized, vilified, blameless children of stubborn, malignant, nasty and unhinged excuses for “parents” ended up beneath the heavy, cleated boot of distilled essences — what is often called “Evil” — of that wrathful paternal “Punishment” of “Disobedient” underlings, conceived of as every brown-skinned toddler as well as every elderly veteran — arising in the bellies of our tyrants, best constituting the word, Terrorism, always at the ready to deploy against those few with senses to judge this condition of life, pursuing the end of this distinctly Western hubris, this distinctly white colonial savagery projected onto innocents, forcefully revised to mean “The Ideal White Manhood”, stomping the bone fragments of eye sockets into the brains of innocents, screaming in the cackling ecstasy of surrender to the most dismal human darkness — calling it “Glory”, clothing it with white cloth and gold trim, singing hymns in the background.
All of it. Every bit of it is akin to Ohio white trash family drama. (I grew up as “white trash”, I’m not playing language policing games over use of that term.) Not being an Ohioan, I had to see it. Screaming, wailing, gunshots, sirens, confusion, foot pursuit, fatal shots fired, family showing up on site. More wailing, more screaming. More janitorial work for one class that either radios superiors or cracks the skulls of those belonging to a class that endures the shit heap of the boss class for nothing. That’s the sum of our lives as debilitated individuals with intact chains binding us to this thoroughly degraded (“cucked”) version of humanity. Tell me “there’s hope” and I’ll make sure both your eyes have my spit in them.
Every action, every lifted finger of this government and its citizenry alike is little more than, at best, what we used to call WorldstarHipHop videos, even as a physiologically crumbling golden spoon-assed diva pedophile is in the driver’s seat, every sycophantic perverted moron praying for “him” to have a moment of sudden enlightenment, turn the tide, or resign, or like many, praying he eats two extra Big Macs. But instead, like clockwork, “he” will make the situation worse right as it can possibly start to look up, scurrying like a fucking cartoon character to profit off the barely half-assed “solution”. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Dumbass finally dies, calls for reconciliation from Democrats, repeat, repeat, repeat.
Rest in Peace, Humanity.
You really just had to stay the course. You really just had to preserve the worst hindrances of redressing real and felt problems, for the sake of the least important things on Earth.
All of it is terrible. And the greatest day in humanity’s history will be when all of this (by no means limited to Orange dung heap) shits the bed in the most totalizing, fatal form, and it’s over. And then everything begins for everyone else.
At that time, I will want silence rather than celebration. Silence, for the horrid potential of a new and worse despotism if we choose to remain gullible, to celebrate the warmest, coziest gullibility.
And I pray to everything that nothing “takes the place” of What Was.
But because I’ve said it, I’ve jinxed it. Because it was ever hoped for, even in silence, it will be left to starve and die.
Because I’ve made a plea for peace and intelligence, sixty-thousand to a million angry, beer gut-having, ass-scratching fifty-five year-olds with ugly and impractical AR configurations will march on the gunshot-riddled skulls of college students to secure a Bright and Pure future of microwaved Salisbury steaks, perpetual infidelity and ripping one’s face off at the last stop along chasing a Holy Ghost up to the dead ends of sweet lies, the grave thereafter. Many such regretful instances.
One asks me, concerning all this, “What are your thoughts?”
“Thoughts.” I don’t have any. Not anymore. Until the second after being asked.
I wonder, “What would distinguish one subject of dread from another?”
I voice the question, “What is holiness to the dirt, bored to hold the cross? Or to the wood, formed to comprise the symbol? Or to the nails to give bloody substance to the covenant prescribed? What good is that holiness, in the hands of the unholy, that condemns the truly loving, the truest manifestations of a living, breathing blessing — to die?”
That’s my only Thought on anything. Especially my thoughts on “my thoughts.”
“What are your thoughts?” I’m not sure — what are yours?
Are they way more perfect and emotionally detached than mine?
Are they situation room analyses that are going to Mission Impossible all of humanity out of recession and nuclear world war?
Are they random Internet autist takes about historical forces, about how some particular ideology, calling itself by the last name of some red flag god hero, is going to inevitably turn all this into Stalin’s vision come true?
Are they something that is going to make me drop to my knees and give anilingus to your perfect, true, correct and undefeated optimistic vision?
And here’s a real zinger of a question: “What are your actions?”
“Well, we’re starting this new media project thing...”
...
...
...
Another low.
Another floor spent and replaced.
Another dimension of descent conjured up to surpass and claim brilliant glory in raping the spirit of life to a gory death, as the kindest angel in the prettiest white gown laid out, turned inside out, strewn across the Bleak Nothing that’s bought with sitting and whining and hoping.
...
...
Another low.
Low... low
...
...
That’s all that these hopeful “electable” types know.
That’s all that these stale pundits of civic rebuke offer on their fucking substacks, their fucking patreon episodes.
Going with the low...
Sitting. Whining. Hoping.
Sitting. Whining. Dying. Dying.
And they’ve won, insofar that life will lose. That capital, that vile interest will ravage again and again.
Every one of them is comfortable with complaining. Frightened, frightened of the hinges breaking off,
even after they’ve already fallen.
...
...
Because official decorum, official channels, official continuity are “more important” than children not dying, not being violated by the most vile people on Earth, hurrying to accuse the most innocent and fearful among us (queer, trans and non-conforming people, who are most often survivors and advocates), of being “The Real Threat” to the safety and wellness of children and young people. Predators in “concerned mom/dad” skinsuits touting “The CORRECT™ Grooming”, prioritizing fairy tales, magical creatures and childlike notions adored by powerful dementia patients who need, NEED an unmovable Grip on the life that they’re currently stumbling and babbling out of. Destruction of all education on personal autonomy, said to be “perverse”, to make the perverted as invincible and coddled as possible.
...
...
The grossly, unsubtly perverse, anti-thinking, anti-nuance distortion of the logic of “Decency” ...
project, deflect ... project, deflect ...
And all I see are people “Stressed.” “Overwhelmed.”
“Needing a break.”
Huh.
Let me just pat you on the ass for “Trying your best” and still FAILING THE VULNERABLE.
Why?
Why do people Fail and Run from recognizing it? Or recognizing the need to assume something new, something clear, something — if sharp wills and forward efforts will be kissed by luck on the winds of life — better?
...
...
Not the world, not this world, not any world ...
LIFE! LIFE will be as ash! By “Peace” and “Love”!?
By DEATH and DESPAIR!!!
...
...
Ultimately, I’m not angry at the fascists. I don’t fault the fascist for doing fascist actions. I don’t fault them for shoving imperialist and domestic wrath, carefree genocide, oil and money-colored wars of the leisurely choice of spoiled asses, which the poor are thrust to carry, down our throats, just as we’ve been literally cleaned out of greater purpose or better prospect in any formation of human society, here or abroad, where fascism is not different.
I’m not angry at the 30 to 90 year old pedophiles holding office or voting in the colonial rape government of so-called America, screeching and forcing folksy white man chuckles when nervous in the midst of bullshitting, filing bills every 25 minutes to ban people of color, immigrants, trans and queer people from breathing.
No. I’m not angry at them for doing what they say they will do.
I’m angry at those “Average Americans” being all talk, all quippy protest sign, all bold claims, with every excuse imaginable to Never step up in full. To Never Actually Cease to enable what is killing them, their children, other peoples’ children.
With every excuse imaginable to Sit, Whine and Hope. Sit. Whine. Die, taking their children with them.
Good job, Americans. So “FREE” and yet so wholly and perfectly Failed in every way.
Denial and delusion all the way down.
Down... down...
...
...
...
If we were animals, herded together in a stockade, then the eating part would be the only real thing that would interest us, and it would not be so important as to whether the trough is colored Bolshevik-red or Fascist-black (taking it for granted that there is at all a trough), whether the food-distributor carries upon his cap a soviet-star or a fascist insignia or a swastika, the main thing would be the eating part.
But when one doesn’t consider oneself as a stockade-animal, when one doesn’t place the eating above one’s determined, self-acknowledged, ever-developing personality and its traits, then the entire program changes.
There arise then different questions. For instance, as to whether the forced stabilizing of the production and of the consumption is as beneficial for the formation of this personality, where the production and the consumption through individual or various free, comradely unions; whether the hand-craft or a similar system is not better suited to build up the personality than the extreme mechanization and rationalization; whether a single dwelling place is not more suitable than a dwelling-armory; whether the shortening of the work time doesn’t depend more upon the quality of the product, or from the disposition of some superfluous things, than the surpassing of the mechanical mass production; whether no kind of education at all wouldn’t be better than such an education that has as its aim the implanting within the mind of the child a Bolshevistic or fascistic mysticism; whether public activities, as child-protection, the care of motherhood, etc. could not just as well be created through mutual associations of the participants (for example, union for transport, for travel, for correspondence-relationship and so on), than through the State?
— Émile Armand, The Individual and Dictatorship, Oct. 1935
What is “Adventurism?”
In the context of histories, depending on the historian, we will see this term used to characterize the last conquests of Empires, typically Rome, in their decline. It works as a descriptor for bottlenecked ambitions, disproportionate allocations of funds and resources, often with a backdrop of decadence and depravity among the patrician class, that become the fatal downward trend of a certain power. (The existing terrorist regimes in occupied Palestine and so-called “America” as of April 2026 are examples of this. Other fairly recent examples, with many contextual particulars to account for, exist.)
When we turn from strictly history and look to the dynamics of self-defining leftist social/political philosophies, their particular toolboxes and organizations in the last several decades, we can identify something that recurs in the average person who peers into the specific lanes of curiosity out of hatred for how beautiful life can be yet how degraded it’s made by capitalism, liberalism and fascism. One who is disheartened with the unfurling emptiness of liberal promises will lurk around the literature and social circles after Marx had lit a fire, meant to illuminate. The very thing, the very distinct germ of an idea, that others, who adored the potential in revised dynamics of authority, would take and use to burn everything down, everything with some adjusted, alternative vision in the same vein — possibly better.
The curious to ambitious person will profess, in the reading groups, in the vanguard meetings, a love of life, a love of joy, a love of cheer. The curious to ambitious person will voice a feeling: that life, joy and cheer can define the resolve, the practice and the scope of her comrades’ ideals; that this exact basis of a clarity of being alive and aware can be as portable, as coherent and as useful in the revolution as it will be in the friendly, ecstatic celebrations of the victories won by this simple, universal principle. Ingenuity, wit, love of comrade reciprocated with love of self — all aiding in the effective struggles of working and oppressed peoples.
A spell — a second or two — of silence hanged before the condemning drop of the rebuke.
“Adventurist Scum!”
“Lifestylist Filth!”
“Assume the supplicant posture of self-critique NOW!”
“Up against the wall, Anarchist Pig!”
Pummeled with adjectives, splattered with rotten assessments of character and intelligence, the curious to ambitious person will either grovel back to liberal conservative whataboutism, turn to some hipster National Bolshevism or give up entirely: embracing the fatal noise of being counted among some sorrowful statistic.
A place, then, is left for a true believer to fill and satisfy to a tee, to die for its radical spectacle and leave their families and loved ones to see nothing affected for the better, “victory” of the democratic centralist program or not.
Adventurism in its most brutal and noteworthy forms come from colonialist, imperialist ambitions. Yet it did not see any tangible definition in the realms of critical dialog until comparisons with civil unrest were drawn. Chair of the Illinois chapter and deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party Fred Hampton is often quoted, when referring to the Weather Underground’s actions in Chicago, as calling the more insurrectionary elements of the anti-war movement “Custeristic”, drawing a comparison to the malevolent, genocidal actions of Lieutenant Colonel George Custer against First Nations peoples after the Civil War. (It’s time to retire that adjective from real, serious use. It’s not 1969–70. “Radical” types should be able to see by now that this is a frightfully poor choice of words, apt for the time it was said, if one soberly looks at the faces and voices of those first traditions, struggling whoever they may at this very moment, whose land and humanity is violently torn from them to this day since contact.) Here then was a question posed about modes of formation, of force, of communication, of theory and practice. Something yet to be made whatever “Better” could mean for that. (Regardless of my differences with Hampton’s assessment, I have no interest in rebuking a man, murdered by the state in his own home beside his wife and child, who left more of a lasting mark on the revolutionary spirit of so-called Americans than, really, any distinctly “American” anarchist ever has. Yet I still consider,)
what does the fervent vanguard of the visionary proletarian state mean by “Adventurist” or “Lifestylist”? What of Soviet brutalities and of Soviet lifestyle? Why should the students of Rosa Luxemburg or the Trotskyist newspaper hawkers compose some strange division between the brave and noble [“Proper”] Marxist proletarians and the foolhardy anarchist General Custers?
“Adventurism” will always be used to tar those who commit to means, ends and consequence outside of party doctrine or civic dogma, as decided for oneself on one’s own terms. “Lifestylism” will always be used to tar those who join their personal joys and traits with the visionary joys of a joyful principle of self-ownership in free intercourse with those enjoying the same, finding a sort of identity — a so-called “Lifestyle” that makes a living shape of practice from a clear set of ideas, rather than a mass of particular people, having sworn allegiance to a particular strain of a “Better” lasting tyranny, committing to ritual, endeavoring to create a monolith — feigning “Unity” — of proletarian creed, with no love of life but of the life spent toiling yet again, praising the collective cult of sacrifice called “Work.”
It should soundly go without saying that this is not to disavow the efforts of working people’s autonomy, nor to diminish the purpose of analyses and dialog around class strategy, class education, dialectics, material conditions and the clear practice of consciousness. It is certainly not to try to say that the very capitalists, who design our miseries, steal our lives and tack impossible costs onto wellness are valid, are human too. Because I want the entire root, flower and seed of that poison wiped away from the Earth, and every capitalist has sacrificed their humanity but kept the [often slipping] appearance of the owner of a human heart. And because I attack the root as well as the flower as well as the seed, there can be no room for the red flag state capitalism of Leninists and Stalinists hurrying to do the same but with tweaked dynamics and swapped imagery. I want working people to recognize their power, to recognize the chains that pilfer their potential contained according to the interest of a system of exploitation. (That is precisely where the purest adventurism and lifestylism is: the interest and behavior of the owning class — deflected onto dissidents within the vanguard party, or those introducing the most mild of anarchistic suggestions.)
Further, I want working people to see the uselessness of sanctifying the very activity that enslaves their potential, the very patterns and habits of a system of systems, all programmed to incentivize some civic religiosity around toiling oneself to death. I want working people to see the essence of conservatism happening out in spheres beyond what people often think of as “the bounds” of politics.
I want the difference made clear to them, between the toil for the visions fed to them by some other and the genuine interest in something that takes time and effort, fulfilled according to fortitude and desire. In a very simple conception: life as free play complimenting free effort instead of unfree obligation that taints everything else about life around that obligation.
There can be no room for distortion of that. (If it could be confirmed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we’ve been so degraded as a common taxonomy of mammals that we cannot imagine life operating adequately in such a mode of free decision, I wish in vain for the swiftest extinction of humanity, having proved itself as a slithering cancer.) Anti-work means anti-dependence on certain necessary activities made miserable by the sheer misery of a totality that refuses, shuts down the meekest attempts at bargaining, the dreadfully thin exercise of leverage. If leverage and bargaining, glorified forms of begging, are not optional, then the situation must be wiped away entirely. Why should it be so sacred and forced down our throats when we all earnestly fucking hate it? Anti-work means never being cornered again, never having to worry of some threatening “Superior” to reprimand or deprive us again. And when pundits make stupid childish faces, grunts, huffs and puffs over notions like anti-work, know that they are not playing the Common Sense™ part in the media stage act, itself an embarrassing bit of bait to entertain.
They become instinctively angry, gnawing with rage that anyone would ever simply decide to go to the root, detouring beyond the pitfalls of civic sheepishness, to pull up the root of the problem, because it nullifies any ground on which “Normie” rationale can move in any real intellectual, civil rebuttal. Namely, the rationale of “I do the dominating because I’m white and come from money, and you do the submission because you’re not satisfactory to whiteness and do not come from money.” Those in the know effortlessly hold to the facts of the matter. This goes back to the 1400s. It was, in fact, always “The law of the jungle”. It was simply done with various facades and ornaments of high and mighty virtues as ready excuses for exclusive legitimacy over use of force and beyond.
Here we are after so many centuries of the conservative struggle, boldly swiping its blade at every exterior interest advancing beyond wiping the asses of despots. One hundred years after a burgeoning Modernism would rear its bleak artistic workings against the madness, yet to be fully haunted by in order to try to grasp something out of the horror, the conservative struggle is teetering. Because to “struggle” as a conservative only means tasting the bitter reality in the course of advocating for old and shitty formalities that every person with any streak of honesty has moved past, has set better sights Away from, is punished and persecuted for it by entitled boomers and wealthy opportunists peddling boomer-brained virtue signaling to sell poisonous unregulated supplements and get into political office.
And in that crux of outgrowing or moving past the enabling of their control, we see the crazed patriarch demeanor that makes up their language, their policy, their tone, their intents. “I own you. I use you. I dispose of you.” Conservatism will only ever appeal in strange, inconsequential focuses: when there is a character of a leisurely outrage about whatever discontents are floating around in times of relative, before-time stability. E.g., manufactured outrage at trans people participating in the economy, or advertising decisions made to appeal to an obviously multiracial, multicultural capitalist world. And when all that collapses over the sad, dismal years of its own flustered, frustrated swipes at totalitarian apotheosis, there dissolves the veil of innocence on their self-righteous end of “the law of the jungle”. There emerges the easy affinity among fellow human beings with sights set on the forges of their bonds. Wherein if one lives, if one feels and mingles with a good heart among those doing the same, one will stride unimpeded through the business of one’s own life, intersecting, or not, with shared interests. The vampires, the reactionary pundit figures, the capitalists all hate it, from a real place of fear, when different people groups join in common opposition to the multi-pronged center of domination. The conservatisms of the Leninist, of the Stalinist are only different in tone, color and influence.
This is to make it clear that their -ists and -isms, or anyone’s -ists or -isms for that matter, are no more or less useless than those relatively closer to my own perspective. What am I to gain in the here & now by calling the Maoist or Stalinist a “Statist”? I do not parrot the babble of “libertarians” because I simply call the Maoist Red Guard in so-called “America” what they are: not me. And if you’re not me, you’re not deciding on my way or my life.
What should vindicate the 1970s-style Maoist in 2026? Is it when gangs of punks behave in urban areas like privateers in the Golden Age of Piracy? Are they required to be specifically pirate-themed punks to perfectly fit the “Adventurist” label tacked onto the bold character of particular dissidents? Will that better fill the mold that the pious lot puts forward? Fuck ‘em! They’re not me!
Adventurism and Lifestylism are on my mind these days because as I see pre-2024 progressive types move somewhat closer to the actual left, adopting terminologies like “General Strike” (for one hyped up day), “Mutual aid” and “Solidarity” into their anti-gestapo activism and such, I worry for the fate of human beings generally if they allow themselves, driven by newfound decades or centuries-old ideals, to be caught up making suicidal miscalculations over some remnants of brain dead approval from some dead and gone FDR, JFK, LBJ, MLK 1997 PBS documentary ass bullshit in response to the guy who prefers to hang out with losers to make himself feel better, who sets pallets of billions of US dollars on fire to drop nightmare munitions onto school children, wakes up one morning and decides to sign an emergency executive order attempting to legalize child rape, giving himself proactive pardons, officially changing the government to a unitary autocracy handed over to Don Jr in the creation of a dynasty of yet another gaggle of perverse validation/attention whore “men”, crawling into his bunker or private plane when his own adventurism destroys everything it can in his final moments.
As this becomes more readily foreseeable, in line with the ridiculous comic book nature of things, the radicals have not improved themselves in order to save everyone. Their precious fucking notions never really became any sustainable off-ramp. In the ascent of death and doom as executive policy against humanity, these fucking notions, screamed about in front of computer monitors and various cameras, never went on to comprise a rich and effective vehicle. Their immaterial complaining gifted them material degradation in every sphere of life. These buffoonish non-dialogs, these smug non-elaborations, these shit-eating opportunities for self-praise in the middle of daily apocalypses: “You’re wrong! My redsails dot org article says you’re reactionary counter-revolutionary drivel!” “You’re wrong! My C4SS article says I can do libertarian markets and call it anarchist and if you disagree, you’re authoritarian!”
Everyone fucks everything up and kills each other — out of inventing an ouroboros of panicking and fighting to “not fuck everything up and kill each other.”
Vast self-importance, spending actual energy, in the delirious swats at conceptual perfection of theory with not even an empty lot of a context where praxis is adapted and applied. It’s all just piles of ourselves dead from the time that the hubris of frustrated, unadapted enthusiasm has burned. All for some gaggle of grifters and neckbeard dipshits to pull terms out of their self-righteous asses and throw them into the faces of those few remaining rebels when they live their lives, materialize their rage and wit for themselves without any breath wasted on a positive civic cause thrown at the feet of a hollowed-out society of wrath that radiates death.
The terms “adventurist” and “lifestylist” exist in order to Marxistly or Liberally shit one’s pants over a particular audacity, when someone or some formation of like-minded friends walks up and does it. When someone places a hand upon an object forbidden from touching and moves that fucker into the deepest abyss at the bottom of the ocean. When someone realizes what is forbidden from realizing. When someone snaps the backbone of a logic of servile disintegration. When someone does by example and Lives.
There has to be an exit from media, protest, media, protest as the vision for taking steps. The popular move into the fan bases of certain figures articulating a certain [and frankly also relatively conservative] anti-capitalism is, of course, itself also capitalist. Its modus is the same pseudo-individualism that makes new levels of team flag waving, logos, merchandise, in-jokes. All the junk of a foot remaining in the old world of treats and torture. And struggling to set both feet in the world of the living, we find ourselves wading through the contentions of dinosaurs and dweebs, wherein the many religious and irreligious faiths scream at one another over what can be taken into the senses, what can be communicated coherently at all, what can be practiced, what can be measured in theory and practice as an improvement.
“You can simply do things.”
Civil religiosity brain kicks on. “But... but... Doctor King and Gandhi.” Stalinist religiosity brain kicks on. “Doing things as free proletarians is adventurist.”
“Adventurism” and “Lifestylism” as earnest pejoratives are little more than playthings that do whatever you need them to. Has a band of nineteen or twenty-year-olds broken from the planned march and begun busting up the ATM machines and bank windows and setting dumpsters alight? Accuse them of adventurism, compare them to the most infamous figures of the very system that they revile, make bold disavowals as self-praises and continue with the standard cult practices. “That will make our Hoxhaist party appealing.” Has a friend group of vegan green anarchists and unaffiliated anti-state anti-capitalists quietly walked away from the space being used for a rally and tabling by DSA, PSL or some other org, opting to head over to the show at the freed space? Chastise them for having poor Revolutionary™ work ethic, for participating in subcultural elements that are subversive to the vanguard’s mass appeal. “We would rather endure the terror of unimpeded liberal capitalist ambition for all the lifetimes that humanity has left than tangibly materialize communism alongside anarchists and councilists.”
We seem to forget from time to time that we really do live in a satirical graphic novel that takes its absurdities seriously without the ability of any awareness and proportional engagement with our overall present condition. We seem to assume, rarely aloud, as the reality is numbingly hammered in over uninterrupted repetitions of seemingly unending ridiculousness, perhaps as the cope and ass-cover instinct of snakes kicks in, that we live in historically insignificant, politically predictable ongoing situations. There could be a supreme court ruling against birthright citizenship in the most powerful, imposing superpower on Earth by the time my words are available. (Update: the sitting so-called justices have expressed skepticism of the orange one’s ambition, his front-row staring them down notwithstanding. Unsure at present.) There could have been use of a nuclear weapon against Iran by the time my words are available. (Update: fighter jet down over Iran. Update: Search and Rescue mission. Update: Taking fire. Update: “A whole civilization will die tonight”, etc.)
In its malice or its demise, the world that indefinitely sucks the life from the Earth emphasizes something about human beings generally. The worst impulses on display in so-called “Leaders”, the best impulses on display in the lowest castes of peasants who are at this point only thankful for their very lives, or ready to throw even those away. The best impulses on display in some highly particular, fractured enclaves of working class North Americans, who have some varying measure of a spark left in their hearts, somehow, but soberly look at every waking day as a form of combat against an unrelenting series of reckless bullshit, whose authorship they struggle just a tiny bit less each day to aptly place the blame on.
People across the Earth speak of how kind and welcoming they found their American friends and friends of friends to be, as the American government levies threats and terror onto countries that pissed off some orange elderly rapist. Those American friends and friends of friends go on to enjoy each other’s company, repudiating the horrors at the hands of their government, mourning an old peace together that humanity left to those who would trash it, exploit its every desperate hope.
Peoples and their governments, governments and their peoples — obvious now more than ever to ordinary people after WWII — have zero, nothing to do with one another. And perhaps only peoples and friends — not any government, not any institution — should determine the directions of the many places on the Earth we share. Perhaps there is no use in drowning in the same pigsty of unimaginative status quo conservatisms, claiming “Tradition” or “Progress”, that fights for the broken idea that peoples should direct governments, so long as they mirror France and England or the like.
Consider the necessity of a new, informal model for peace. A peace that is not centralized in the snakes of institutions and offices, nor bound to the overly simplified gains falsely attributed to a fictional, purely non-violent civil rights movement. A peace whose foundation is not the hypnotizing white and gold notion of vague economic prosperity — meaning, the continuing of the business as usual in extractivism and the development of new exploitations, new methods of deterring opposition. A peace that has a working nuance about means and ends. A peace whose foundation is each and every person, each and every association around affinity, each and every intelligent, good faith aspiration, each and every love, each and every fond, substantive contribution.
Such a model for a new peace can have no room for losing sight of our own flesh & blood immediacy. An immediacy spanning the globe that, when rocked by mass killing, unrest or the like, folds every distance on Earth so that those populations are brought together, more so now than ever before. Perhaps not physically, and while it is the richest quality to embrace one another, each and every other way that can give space to love and goodwill is filled, is made as plentiful as possible.
It is the scariest thing to me that we could ever forget that curious, revitalizing drawing near, that drawing near which negates real and felt distance altogether, whose collaborative will subverts the workings of domination, which makes my every international sibling as good as beside me. What folds those distances in our lifetimes in learned hatred for every relation of command & obedience.
Those faces worn by human siblings. Visible animation, the mounting scream of resolve for the fullest, unembellished realities of a genuine revolution, one that does not use the word as a prop for the sacred imagery of dogmatic ambitions that revise and build on tyranny. These do not stir either optimism or pessimism in me, but some unearthed stoicism, let to calm the forward motion into the self-made beginnings of the new peace, or whatever may come. That stoicism, deleting any sense of “Future”, eases some sufficient part of stress weighing on the faculties that move me through life, as I am, as better as I can become in this or that bracket, in bands of my loved ones, adapting, holding steady, widening everything where possible.
I intend to see a day of fulfilled, celebratory contentment from everything uniquely relevant to the lives of me, my loved ones, my reader, everyone. Some say that this is impossible, fantastical, that the revolving door of tyrants is the best that we can spring toward. I therefore commit everything about me to being simply the very fact of life, the very fact of living as the stare that disproves the claim of their resignation. It is right in front of you, and within you!
If you know yourself, as best you can, then you know your way, as best you can. If you travel on your way, you will travel alongside others, along their own way.
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I rebuke the dishonest notion that pure, unwavering isolation is the object of life to the anarchist individualist. Pure and unwavering isolation is the most bitter decay into death. There is no discussion about that. But the opposite of this isolation is not the winning rebuttal. If one is contributing something, and they excel in solitude, let them have solitude. And if or when they approach in earnest goodwill after doing what they can, what they needed, welcome them. One measure to another, all persons concerned in all shared efforts are fibers of each endeavor pursued and enjoyed in common. There is no commons whatsoever without distinct persons who shared in its effort, who thirst after a drop from its plenty, to reap, sustain and improve it. There is no purpose to even care for any commons if each name and face is reduced to a productive unit in a lifeless whole carrying on with lifeless allegiances.
I have no design to see to it that others begin to define themselves as “Individualists” or even as “Anarchists”. My desire is to live, converse, laugh, drink, smoke, offer insight as others offer the respective intrigue. And in this, being who I am, I still wield and aim at the sky, to designate the limit to surpass, the sharpened head of my own spiritual, intellectual spear: the brightest hue of every unique being’s light, mine gripped, on my own, as it is for me, welcoming yours.
Alone or together, light that is bound with the potential of life, acted on or ignored, is in you. And that is perhaps the most disquieting, albeit rewarding or damning thing to grapple with, as everything else rages around it. I have no desire to see to it that others define themselves as “Individualists.” I have every desire under the sun to see individuals love themselves, find and cultivate themselves, make their meaning (if any) on their own terms (in concert with a disciplined discerning of material forces, of indefinite pluralities of perspective,) see the use in being kind, thoughtful, as able, so that their baseline clarity finds contribution to what generally benefits every person concerned.
Please!— For our own sakes! Disperse this crowding around this particular formula, around that exact model or those static variables. Anyone, with any capacity, will find some germ of usefulness in this, that or the other schematic (within discretion.) How am I to surmise more use out of more talk, less action? What are the ornaments of ideals to the terrain my boots are set to tread on?
The very initial step of anything better, springing out from ourselves becoming the sustaining features of life, is seeing to the privy and passionate collapse of all that warps our perceptions of all our siblings, making them anonymous, burdensome husks called “Others,” obscured by the bustle of spectacular, self-important pseudo-individualistic drivel.
Know the precious alloy. Fathomless hate born from the stoic substance of videos of children, defenseless people killed by the state, by capital, by bigotry. Fathomless love born from kindness and brilliance — betrayed in what amounts to watching life die slow.
Let a single, opaque swipe of living inertia, with negation of what stifles the full flow of intentions and aspirations, level every demonic effort wearing angelic garb to kill us all gradually. It is to live! And what postpones living is what postpones every first step of steering into safety, into peace!— out from every single abusive metric, every single grab at our throats with a smile or a smirk.
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Tension is projected, strewn across an imagined surface of this strange picturesque twilight above me.
Everything in this life functions without sense, except for this one moment to myself. I know that when this moment becomes the next, everything will flood in again. My heart will go back to sprinting barefoot across volcanic, rocky terrain in all things.
But for now, I hold to this.
An absent-minded wound in the heart suddenly narrows into some out-of-place bliss of profound indifference, something only comparable to the sweetest gust of breeze on some warm evening after every reason to hold any reservation is suddenly taken out from the equation of You.
“Huh, it all just ...
...
...
goes away.”
There’s that one cold flinch at death, until I have to carry on with life, seeing the acceptance of death fade back into the little resignation to how everything is at present.
Wishing — somewhere within: cloaked in a gray shawl, tossing my foremothers’ denarii into the busted stone well at the center of my sanctuary — I find myself leaned and buried into my folded arms. Drained, strained.
Drifting aimless along an eternal yet abrupt mental thread of null, void......
color not seen, word not spoken, feeling not relented.
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This life, hateful toward the ethic and consequence of impotent subject-selves — told to whisk away self, take a break, never to lay hands upon and use the force of arms to move what makes life how it is from now to some better.
This very life, at this very present. Hated Now, ideal some better, morbid some after.
Not seeing or having capacity to imagine any better from the binds we’ve consented to with overwhelmed silence. Not knowing what can assuage oneself of oneself — for all earnest selves — if the priority is to give material, interpersonal reasons against vigilantism or the like. Met again with the purging of thought, deadening of nerve. Fear. Fright. Distrust. Self-doubt, self-pity in weaving pursuit. Being told, ostensibly, to lean into the rape and somehow express pride for it.
Much talk of hating bullies, sooner or later living beneath the dread of bullies at the wheel, running the vehicle of life into the floor of the abyss, and beyond. But too many people seem content with these fucking dances, somehow just so fucking important to some secular piety in service to the very greater parts of the machines our suffering, around whether or not we can even live, whether or not we can summon any fortitude and make it actually stop.
And seeing all the figures making up the “We” being stubborn — crossing a heinous thresh of coercive delusion, giving away the standards of sense — the heartbreaking question springs within.
Whether I, alone for myself, am that some better. And often I’m made to feel that I know the answer to that better than anything.
Until I have to admit to myself that I’ve had every chance to cut every person out of my life, go and be a feral, naked ghoul lurking in the wooded mountains.
I had not done so because people, how they are and the shit they say are interesting, sometimes sweet, endearing. And other times, less so. For me, no resentment or low spirit causes the final severing from every possibility, it seems. Those I’ve secured hatred for out of face-to-face transgressions, I’ve left behind. All else, I’ve decided on as tolerable or necessary. Either I am the quietest and truest masochist biding the temporary or indefinite dissatisfaction, or I have a design to draw something from all of this, regardless of satisfaction — as though simply drawing conclusions in the second before death is itself the satisfaction, the having lived.
I had not committed to any monasticism because the indefinite range of human beings interests, inspires and invigorates my case. Every stripe and strain of a person, every situation, every issue they respond to how they do is, at minimum, a noteworthy phenomenon to me. And knowing to never pretend to know everything, however it may seem otherwise, there is no prefabricated cookie cutter of concept, form and function that fits any person. Nor is there any such thing that truly satisfies any passionate curiosity. Every life, every universe of thought and feeling, is ultimately detached, singular, yet still affected somehow, and thus mutually, haphazardly attracted toward weaving informal associations, in complimentary, creative detachment (affinity) from what repels their spirits. This to me is what motivates a balance of solitude and sharing in something or observing the public, now and in whatever will be.
In observing, in considering oneself as if they were someone without, it is clear that there are those who are, as best they can, (not without ups and downs), free on their own terms at the same time that others are enslaved to poverty, debt, despotism, the carceral plantation/concentration system. There are those who suffer among the many, but not each and every one of their’s is the protestant work ethic delusion that alway stands on tippy toes, about to slip and tumble, to pursue lower middle class status through some grift. Most are just trying to pay the bills for treatment and medications, fight through the tears, subdue the gnawing ache to scream and rip one’s face off. There are those who admit to no suffering, are clearly in the direst of straits, be it the desolation of accepting poverty as life or the degeneracy of white collar excess, still claiming to be the chosen of god, the royal owners of the universe, etc.
Clearly there is a kind of madness to permanently surpass and gain the upper hand over rivals, over strangers. There is a tragedy sown into the soil of Gen X lives and onward, around how any one person fits into or transgresses fruitfully against some sitting or hallucinated power. It seems to be a madness that liberals and progressives like to call “Individualism” as a pejorative, while conservatives call it so as an element of mistaken flattery while clearly championing the anti-individual collectivism inherent in fascism. (Liberals/progressives typically going the clown outfit route of fascism.)
“No one is free until all of us are free” is a strange ultimatum against reality and ourselves, and every one of those idealists taking the time to screen print the slogan on fabric proves that it will fail.
There are those who are, in fact, “Freer” than others, in ways that challenge every eurocentric notion of “Free” and “Not Free”, when we account for the mutations of settler colonial white supremacist chattel slavery into a white supremacist post-neoliberal neo-Feudal corporatist techno-accelerationist slavery. Having seemingly rocked the marrow of western lives out of action, they become blinded with the idea of themselves in a vacuum, with excessive minutia that flees from the plain totality, that they cannot see that some have no part, no investment in. That some had either America’s bullshit or other despot’s bullshit dropped onto them, this is true. But some live somewhere on the Earth, however remote, where the problems in Durham, North Carolina or the like simply do not compute with anything relevant to them. The international sentiment is very clear at this time, held also by fellow Americans in shame as much as anyone. “Always with the bullshit. Always the effort for war and death, never the effort for health, wellness and happiness.” How and where exactly that is confronted will convey a great deal of insight as to what exactly caused this late era of problems, what will kindle the next.
This is not to say that international solidarity is not real and palpable. Quite the contrary. But solidarity never stands on single issues. It consistently arises where one fissure in the mundane fabric opens new fissures eager to breathe and cultivate themselves freely. It can only indict every malignant quest of the owning, war-waging criminal class that affects everyone who stands, crawls, swims and grows on the Earth. The assault on Palestinians’ lives and freedom is not precisely, at this time, the same assault on the construction worker, the gig worker in Detroit, Toronto, Dublin, Surabaya. Yet all different natures, intensities and visibilities of suffering arise from precisely the same, multi-armed center of domination that commences the respective assaults. That center is what convinces people through terror, games of hope and hopelessness, that they are, in fact, always powerless, always bound to picking a poison to swallow. But all are still free to think, conclude, confide in and emote with friends, family, loved ones in their homes, with some exceptions, some need for discretion within this or that regime.
The self-defeating “radical” urgency to build squarely and exclusively upon “All Freedom For All People”, while being exclusively enthusiastic for one or two angles of aesthetically pleasing rhetoric, sated with select privileges, dismissing the heartfelt pleas of perspectives that understand, that have notes for what pundits, organizers and candidates do not grasp, who avoid or fervently condemn the most vital fibers of the urgent howl of life: No Rulers – No Ruled. This is pathetic. It is more hope, more talk, more aimless disillusion in its end, until it’s picked up again, pumped with more desperate, lifeless air. It sentences me and billions of others to death, taking solace in oblivious rationalizations that did nothing while it counted, absconding, inconvenienced and scorned, to the billionaire bunkers or the final dens of spent and disposed enthusiasm.
It is not me, as a singled-out person in a vacuum, who is the some better for my own personal context or for anyone else’s life. I am as capable of being my own enemy as is anyone, given enough lapses in sense. Nothing at all about all of this or all of that on society’s plate comports with how life actually is, how life actually manages to be nice and enjoyable, at least from time to time.
I want camaraderie, leisurely dialog, laughter, hugs, toasts, sleepovers, morning coffee, fond partings of “‘til next time!”. I also want my solitude. But I do not want only solitude forever, nor do I want to play hostess every other day. And I see a good deal of people express the same feeling, not given adjective, in everything unique to their own lives. They know a dimension within themselves. They go to it when in bouts of deep sadness, when feeling the room, the world working against them. They can sense that life wants to unbind itself from all society, from all its politics of managing domination. They can sense that life can be managed as one manages, with easy care, the effects of leisure and joy.
In every single case, from struggling college students to factory and warehouse workers to single mothers to people in recovery to people in isolation — All can be free on unique personal terms in tandem with all that is genuinely harmonious, kind and intentional. There is nothing from my own living sense of expanse within myself, concerning that of the exterior that could hark back to something in me, that I would connect with civic virtue, with “good government” that claims to be able to keep factory and warehouse workers happy as factory and warehouse workers, etc. My sense of myself, my sense of outer lives, of modest and grand formations and ideals, of places and histories and grudges — all of it tells me that it will all remain in chaos, whether anarchy aptly harnesses that intrinsic nature, or liberals/progressives break themselves trying to tame and chain it.
I will do the ritual pittances of endangered hope, as any superstition of luck and favor, separate from when I convene with the hopeless. And they will remain separate, the life that survives and bets on harm reduction measures from the hostile society, and the life that lives in unique pursuit of life without these mere harm reductions, these bets on their materializing, called voting, campaigning, hoping. And separate, there will remain the antagonism, to be or not to be fruitful: the lives that envision society and life as one and the same, and the lives that know society and life to be blatantly contradictory.
I and others are struggling to both manage and articulate what could very well evaporate our last dregs of spirit. Should the metaphorical burner be jammed into place on “High”, some old, dead weight will have to burn away for there to be space for whatever is better, whatever can be the better normal, acting in order to get to the point and turn that fucking heat off.
I want the better, universal normal to be a free personal choice of engagements with vast decentralized webs of exchanges and endeavors based on friendships or fruitful associations. Without rulers, without ruled. This is not radical, nor is it the first and truest creed. This is, very simply, the creative want for life before so-called “Democracy,” so-called “Doctrines of Discovery”, before so-called “Ages of Enlightenment” that brought about everything we presently have to deal with, speak on the same terms with, play the foolish roles for.
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Do I enjoy firsthand at all? Or do I merely celebrate a stunted, frozen possibility of real, self-directed joy?
There is some arrant ardor that I wanted to be resolute in, before I chose to be another nobody.
Some portions of the means of enjoying firsthand make the ends utterly pointless. A good many things I carry are my own fault. It is the sharpest self-denigration to deny such.
The narrowing of the field in accounting for the one of two ways to enlarge the game. Give, take...
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Every morning’s increment, again.
I’m still lingering — been lingering for years — in this nearly three decades-old build-up to the funerary procession. The first nail is scarcely set in place, let alone driven in. My foremothers’ hammer sits on its head. (I find myself dreaming that we were just finishing up putting this fucker in the ground.) I’m still left standing to handle the pine box lid that would sit atop and cover the face of that “immortal” and “unalterable” pillar of “THE FREE™ WORLD”, while the demonic menace of power exhales rot upon my neck while waiting for the crowds around the hideous cadaver.
Fingertips to the texture, the edge of concept, the complexity of pounding it in... the uncomplicated reflex done to death by creed and schism. Texture lingering in quiet repose. Some shrouded weaving.
Some recurring cold water to the face, some dragging the self to the dim fireside, the glance at dark. Then, awake again.
The clarity again. The heart rocked with wakefulness.
Despair. The razor’s edge of panic.
Every morning’s increment. With my foremothers’ hammer nearly trained inward, not out on what would set it so.
It shouldn’t be a burial. It should be a pyre.
Every morning’s increment. Until.
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All I would voice is only what is obvious to me, from reflex or consideration. All I would voice where it applies is to make clear what I stand on, who I am that makes that so crucial for my entire time alive. I will be nobody’s “contemporary”, save for where the wisdom of some few ancestors fell flat, for where a shit excuse for self-respect fell complicit with malice.
I feel that everything should be voiced, as you or I would would respect ourselves before The Obvious (corruption, murder, genocide), as it relates to the thoughtful, vital suggestions and actions of human life at its best possible condition; as they yearn, in their many contexts, for what Christ, Lord Buddha, The Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) and every light bearer in the slates of dreadful dark had announced.
All I voice is to build what would stop me from giving in.
Not another giving in. Please ...
Not another leap of sighing, “Whatever...”, the continued rape of my ass by Yahweh in yet another form.
Whatever.
Yet another yet another.
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Moved by the workings that unimaginative laziness opens to exploitation, interlocking with universal resentment, a sense of being drained and carrying on all the while. A sense of “being seen” or “being called out” in all the hints and themes of media, advertising, whatever. A kind of existential entertainment to play a part to try to obscure these, notoriously humiliating.
That is the fertile soil for oblivious, self-righteous men in their panic to invent their own loneliness crisis, their own solid and comfortable victimhood through their anti-personal evolution, anti-accountability vainglory, blaming women/feminine people for it all; panicking to invent several different spheres of special personal care routines for absent-minded dropouts (tanning one’s testicles, $49.99 beard comb waxes, etc.,) fighting to manifest a foolish and pointless caricature of “Man,” “Male,” whatever. All to stretch and break the nerves, cry, punch walls, cry harder, eat shit for some daddy figure, be awarded some gold-painted plastic trophy of “Big Manly Man”, be disposed of by whatever he invested his life in.
The same essence, perhaps with a more cheery, “accessible” tone, is at play within the self-describing progressive crowds who are vocally, [ever so slightly,] less interested in obscuring flaws, faults and overcompensations, more concerned with matters such as midterm elections, gubernatorial candidates, drama between advisors and staff, whatever. (Harm reduction. Mere reduction. Yes, yes. Another dour region of the eternal whatever.)
One cluster of figures and followers points at the opposite cluster and claims righteousness. And then amidst the screaming is the random 40 to 65 year-old psychonaut/stoner, blowing with the wind somewhere along the gradient, off in his own little world, babbling about “both sides” (reflexively taking the easy vice signaling opportunity in favor of privilege and “Common [non]Sense”,) his niche micro-skirmishes marching on in his corner of no man’s land.
Nothing is for making resolution, let alone even clarifying resolution — my case being simply backbone, self-respect and a disdain for muddling the object of ever convening and associating. Everything against that is in favor of crying about needing [something like] it. Followers told to go and do but they only follow more, claim more, argue more. Literally spectacular heights, dramatic climbs up its stairs at nothing burgers.
“Both sides” conceived of as a vast, contextually-agnostic one of two varieties of one size fits all obscenity. Then, stepping into the heart of any heavy matter, one finds the side that very annoyingly tries to debate innocent peoples’ existences versus the side that welcomes honest and kind people, nuanced visionary disagreements notwithstanding. It takes time for the both sides to become apparent, dreadfully specific. But it only emerges from the veil falling more and more. There are no immutable binaries or monoliths within peoples and associations. Yet between historical, socio-political forces, in their heat of struggle, at minimum, there are. And then perhaps there is an upper hand a way down the path. One still has to consider the collaborators. And then the matter of generations, of revision to the history of reaction.
I don’t know that we’ll ever get the lesson so that it resembles “learning to ride a bicycle.”
Here again is the black coat’s collar turned up and wandering away from the color pallets and programming. Here again is the random person with a backpack and a cigarette waiting on the bus asking for a light. Here again is the face of an unacquainted friend who gets it. It’s welcomed generously: the average [and therefore invaluable] wisdom of unembellished disdain for the grifter pursuit, for burning money to fight to become an encroaching pillar of a dogma, setting peoples against one another. There is a seed of something alive and coherent, contrasting with everything shoved on everyone.
I see in these “average” people going through every motion, taking what effort they can to care and sow kindness, as being obliviously invested in being the random, decent-natured human sibling one will invariably need. What I’ve needed. I am set upon committing that singular perfection of humanity and of all living beings to the record of whatever might be. Here is one, among the many yet to be seen, who feels the same.
Here is union. Not of monolithic, reified “unity”. Union in the sense of organic gravitation that is so cherished and pleasing, that there can be no mind for duration or doctrine. Union, formation, gathering on the basis of being a person and being dragged through it all, the gravitating force being the prospect of not being dragged again, the duration being the meandering course of life as let to be, the doctrine being the throbs of the heart. This, made full and functional, is thus the enemy of liberalism, of privilege, of everything that would drag people through subjugation. And it is an unforgiving means of winnowing the fields of our concepts, of which can condemn and which can consummate our intelligence, our intents, our inheriting the Earth.
There’s nothing [in reason] to “Correct” in me, or in you. There’s everything outside of us as people to assume an adult’s attitude over, to make our own. Otherwise we just keep losing our capacity for joy, dying bit by bit every moment, swiping at cheap stepping stones of awkward, drunk coping rants seeing us to our death, not setting intentional steps to the self-ownership of our lives, the possession, use and improvement of what is essential to that.
I have never in my life seen any worth in approaching my thoughts and feelings in the way a scholar would compose an academic paper that ends up behind a paywall. As much as I had certain ambitions, I do not think that academic journal articles are going to assist in anything important to me, to anything that revitalizes a childlike wish for peace on Earth. It is my personal and practical sentiment that we [who are honest with ourselves, with one another and in regards to the type of world that we are wholeheartedly against] should speak to one another directly and clearly, without an urge to ascend the spiral staircase of spectacle, alluding to an intellectual fortress tower whose height is only the high one cultivates from excessive echoes that babble about ascension.
I’m beyond nauseated with it. And so from nausea, from an ache for life, I piss on notions of Masses, Rabbles, Mandates, Majorities, Conspiracies, Heroic and Virtuous Cells. I piss on these because these aren’t real to what really matters. Only you and I, only the various you’s and I’s of the world, as it is now, are real. And something about being alive now, suffering now, has to break through, grip us at once, or all who haven’t took the exit door after the hundredth, thousandth faceplant of hope just share more and more in the lingering pangs of extinction. Part of that, in its beginning, is normalizing persistent babbling about ascension while seated in the shitty rainwater, making an ass of oneself, not reorienting the focus, the purpose away from getting high off sponsor ad reads, watching engagement statistics.
We’re told to indulge strictly in the aesthetics of verbalizing thought, aesthetics of lofty enumeration, the shapes that recorded and prescribed experience, endurance are crammed into, without ourselves directing them at self-determined destinations away from the present powerlessness expressed in a civil religious form of gambling on our futures, aspirations in the form of votes, protest, “debate”. None really navigate, lend a hand in steering any current in any society. All is joining in on the clusterfuck with your own. Whether it is a regular bout of vandalism in Athens or Milan, or a riot to overturn an election in D.C., whether it is a campaign in New York City or a campaign in Budapest, the disoriented language of being socialized through-and-through, of personally and idealistically investing in a whole core function of life as the dance between hopeful and hopelessness, is to stand around, look around, shake hands, nod, babble and chuckle, have some drinks, fuck off, cry, jerk off, fall asleep, wake up, curse life. Blah. Blah. Fucking blah. In reading comfortably through the clusterfuck that is human socialization, in “making a way” in it, one has to be as dedicated to being fucked up 24/7/365 on its addictive, profitable vapors.
Not everyone buys it. But some are blown around so much after so long, that they tend to refuse to buy anything (metaphorically), and so they refuse even that which is offered freely, out of enthusiasm, out of kindness, out of baseline respect for an unacquainted life outside passing by.
In speaking clearly with those given your love and trust, having exchanged inquisitiveness on terms of clear affinity, from clear difficulty, clear and mutual acknowledgment of contradiction, one will find that words tend to seamlessly translate to fruitful deeds in the seconds after a certain kind of brace is touched by the angel of bolt cutters.
Gardens, freed venues, freed housing, freed education, freed medicine. Whatever it is. Do it. Talk about it. Map it out. Take a week, a month. But do it. Grow food, have music, acquire, disseminate.
“Freed,” as past tense verb going on with its own interest. Not “Free” as pittance, as inanimate adjective of inanimate, humiliating existence in a 501c3 hovel of dogshit. Unplug from the rape empire!
A day comes, (whether or not institutional cover-ups of child sex trafficking sends yet another mundane “shock” through the public,) when one cannot run from joining hands on what is crucial, what is in front of those concerned with it. Self-respect and self-interest practiced uniquely in agreeable harmony with shared interest will have to emerge how it does, calling itself what it will. It will have patchworks of insight, texts, oral histories, etc. But it will have to be. And it will have to help surpass, god help us, what has made rape and heinous perversion so glaring about the last 10+ years. There has got to be some flicker of flesh and blood reality, maybe a tatter of nuance left to kindle.
Otherwise, what is crucial, for just any one person to survive when everything has turned against her, becomes the scattering, splintering of humanity into insular experiences of universal blight, countering the sting of the unsalvageable nightmare with cheap, sporadic, jarring excuses for “Levity”, abrupt dismissals, universal cannibalism.
I don’t think anyone wants that.
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I do not write to contribute to bodies of theory. We no longer have the leisure of calm curiosity, no matter how much we in 2026 want to deal with our present world like we’re still dealing with the Occupy Movement. I am writing to do the more thoughtful version of, essentially, begging my unacquainted siblings to help me live, to help themselves live, to help rekindle, freely regulate, freely improve and infectiously widen a symbiosis that enriches a sort of selfishness, a selfishness that is good-spirited, anti-coercion, anti-purity, mutually exploitable for the shared better, for the flexibility to get together or to fuck off from one another at will, wherever no obvious, life-or-death responsibility is being abandoned or deferred to incompetent people who have not earned the relevant trust of those concerned.
I promise you that the skin of my nose is unscathed the whole day and night long that any given self-important person with no counter-point expressly disregards my words as worthless pulp among the bunch. And in all sincerity, they are not wrong for holding this impression, and there is only so much I can do to soften that. I apologize to that particular handful of insufferables who feel a burning need to manually lower every moment of a higher vantage that is self-aware of its eventual descent. I guess I have to apologize that I much more value those small, secluded church mice against the fervent choirs that cry out their liturgies: “perfect” formulaic sciences of “Freedom.”
I recommend in all efforts that my reader take The Crux of my plea and run with it at your own pace, employing it better than The Best of my flawed, sloppy ways ever could. Let us soberly act through the course of mortal awareness of our doom, of my doom, of yours, should we perpetually reach only beside the issue without ever grabbing its throat and putting it out forever.
Death to the noise and their machines — I want my life. Without figure, without follower.
Wading through the wages of our socialization: stagnated seeds, forsaken, discarded blooms. Is the string of hope to break? I look in vain for the day that hope has died — so that the first scream of life can grab hold again.
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On 6 April, Reid Wiseman captured a photo of the Earth as seen from a flyby of the Moon at 22:41 UTC on a Nikon D5 camera during the Artemis II Mission. The image happens to mirror, or maybe bookend, William Anders’ December 1968 photo during the Apollo 8 Mission flyby (16:39 UTC). Anders’ photo is titled Earthrise, Wiseman’s photo is titled Earthset.
Some disquieting pause, thinking of everything in the plain subject of those photos, either separated or alongside each other.
Here, in both images, is everything from the outside, contained on this “blue marble.”
What am I looking at? I really cannot grasp it anymore. Am I looking at something I am a part of? Am I looking at something I’m told that I and my siblings will inherit? Or am I looking at something I have been, and continue to be, subjected to? Am I looking at the sum total, the universal scale of the final thing I’ll be dealing with? Or exiting?
Free floating, continuous, mournful drifting within what free floats in the starry blackness, what we’re inclined to study, in the same inclination to dodge the gross discrepancies and unspeakable terrors we’ve begotten on Earth.
Strange entanglement, absurd rhymes of existence. Directions issued beforehand. Directions in sober retrospect. The wanting. The wanting for something weighted with life, illuminated with reason and sense, to account for every thread of malice, to fight under every grain of dirt, to cultivate the most spirited relentlessness, to seize, to endure the lifting of that which those who cannot have been enduring, to endure it into the fruitful turn of the wheel.
To turn it past what it’s been, before, during, post-war, post-war again, post-war yet again.
Human screams — Polish and Czech Jewish mothers, grandparents and children sobbing before their eighteen, nineteen, twenty-year-old murderers with Heeresgruppe Nord; eleven-year-old Bosnian girl shot through the neck, killed by a homicidal Serb ultranationalist sniper; dying gasps of starving babies in Palestine and Sudan, howling sorrow at funerary processions — Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, to somehow Bomb democracy (fossil fuel cartel ecocide collaborationist regimes) into the somehow unperturbed hearts and minds of the lives enduring, yet more, in West Asia, Africa and elsewhere.
And threading it all through, like some shrapnel or projectile careening into innocents — here she is, of a sudden, in these two brilliant fucking photographs. Terra Mater. Gaia. Erde. Whatever.
Just look at her: weeping beautifully, as always.
Blue whales moaning their vexation somewhere in her distant stretch of poisoned ocean.
Here we are, again. The propelling mission tools of death applied to exit the planet, cruise along the Low Earth, Medium Earth or Geostationary orbit, fully capable of taking a snapshot of the tools of death, on the ground, applying their purposes, kill, terrorize, working out perfectly. Unperturbed.
Some blinding white heat of screaming despair underlining the silence of that distance.
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Unacceptable. Yet accepted. An unacceptably bleak period. “Just swallow it.”
We who share the same basic age radius, the same items of recent history, the same measure of clarity. We inhabit a cold, wet ditch under a state of seemingly permanent social midnight. Having any less than this sense is something that I will not be altruistic toward with my silence again. Instead, I will plainly voice the dawn of the individual, the eternal day of the interpersonal, the enduring star of the solitary that dwells in every living universe of every person, feeding life’s fire how they will.
Students, educators, creatives, journalists, autodidacts, healers, porters, drivers, engineers, tinkerers, maintainers, gardeners, nourishers. All of them, each and every one of them deserves so much more, so much better. Here are so many people with so much to give to humanity, who had to push the breaks on their lives, in some way or another, because some eighty year-old tub of shit was allowed to install his own personal brand of corporatist autocracy, childishly revise the rule of law into a bulldozer to drive through anything and anyone that pisses off his baby bitch ego. Those who voted for him suffering, some coming slowly to something resembling “sense”, it should not be happening to begin with.
I hate seeing the enduring. The humiliated, miserable bearing of what should have never began. (Knowing of the too many points, long before our lives, where the seed, where the outer ripples of rationalized brutality were magnified.) Accounting for the hell of social mores throughout time, there was still some quiet understanding of being capable, of seeing the whole for what it is that was sacrificed, somewhat recently, in the panicked desperation for a standard for “Normal”, in order to proactively subdue wars, having been terribly traumatic for the fledgling United States after the nineteen teens, after 1945.
But this merely changed the dynamics, machinery and industry of war. It made war, devastation, uniforms, the notion of “enemies”, human fetishes of the most distinct feature of Óðinn utterly infectious, revered and sought after. Relentlessly sought after until endured. Until carried, long after setting the instruments down. And now, here we are, at the existential waterworks of forty, fifty or sixty-year-olds who were lead on by their pricks since 2001 or before.
And maybe one chances to turn to their kids. People like me. People whose reservedness, quirky distinctness, fixations, keen sense of articulation, muddled or emboldened by anxiety, were hammered into reflexes by degrees of all that the 2000s did to people, did to the parents, families and loved ones of people like us. We enjoyed much, took far too much for granted, spoiled and gave away far too precious much in the heart of early W. Bush, early Obama, in much obliviousness, until the raw sobriety of familial, economic and or interpersonal woes began shaking something. And that shaking was shook harder by new hardships, new senses of scope. In school, in college, in self, in prospects, in sudden changes to prospects. And it shook us into teenage years and throughout young adult years. There we poured our hopes and dreams into the creation of social hubs over the burgeoning Internet. The refinement of in-jokes, of passions, of collaboration around them. In here, we found lovers, life partners, lifelong friends, collaborators and associates. Our favorite enemies, favorite self-assured jesters chasing windmills.
Here we stewed in easy profoundness left atomized into forms, functions and faces of some ornate, insular enthusiasm, whose jabs at the outer world, if any, were marred with the strange lost in translation nature of Internet fantasy confronted with the raw heavy truck collision of a universally disoriented reality. Here we let half-assed humor become hall of fame items for the 2010 scrapbook of nostalgia to flip through with tears in our eyes, looking here and now.
All while life broadly just disintegrates. Data centers, the deintellectualizing of profoundly dire failures, grandmothers cornered into doordashing turning everything to shit.
Life, although the central focus of our conscious, verbal grieving, is outside of the sealed spaces where much talk of life goes on. Much talk of foolishness, too. Almost always of the rightly despised. Almost never of ourselves. So much pouring out its so little, save the heat of dread.
Whoever you are and whatever you do, (so long as you bide here in the same realm of the dispossessed,) I just want relief, wonder, kindness and a sense of being loved to spring from you, once a stranger, then a beacon of a light assumed gone, gratefully met again.
Could there be a clear basis for people, rather than merely halting this or that course because of some dark and depressing bullshit obstructing the way, to actually pursue the intentional turn of our instinct and our priority, as it relates to the persistence of our lost agency, lost mobility, lost determination?
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Glossary Detour
(Inserted in part for portions following, not for copy-pasting into any Book of Perfect Truth or Book of Heresies.)
Society, (1) the Official, Legal bounds, perhaps drawn in city limits, of a particular jurisdiction for enforcement of owning class domination, local ordinances, all working in tandem with white supremacist mythology/pseudoscience [in majority white populations], religious zeal to terrorize and deprive people wherever convenient or amusing; (2) the revered golden pillar of any warped mentality of individual human lives intersecting with one another that belongs to any strain of autocracy, theocracy, liberal democracy, left-wing capital, etc
Socialization, the process by which the functions of any social mythology’s thorny decorum (procedure, procession, legitimation) impose themselves over time in mental habits and ticks onto otherwise innocent lives in order to override basic human feeling, thinking, intention and aspiration so that it is only thinkable and acceptable to function in favor of that which brutalizes the innocent, that which feeds the alluring delusion of freely attaining membership in a class shielded from the full weight of accountability
Domestication, when socialization has become the default center of individual lives; when it jeopardizes health, stunts or warps development, attacks all accessible wellness, compromises ecosystems and stability in all spheres, shuns critical refinement of anything that contradicts capital and its owning class protection racket called the state, its religion called something along the lines of humanism, nationalism or the like
(A note for those who consider every possible ecology-focused strain of thought to be the work of some authoritarian primitivist who is going to smash your reading glasses,) let it be clear that domestication is an exploitation dynamic that one is involuntarily molded into by the happenstance of times and places, that one detests in accepting and moving beyond every area of foolishness. Domestication insists that human beings are supposed to somehow elevate themselves away from the vital concerns of a mere organism, are supposed to use our sentience and intelligence to arrange life around the full-throttle, opened bomb bay door satisfaction of that terrible idea. Languages, techniques, growing food, building dwellings, are not Purely, are not Solely coercive. Their origins, their hitherto modes of relation through domination, command, conquest and punishment undeniably have been
Socialism, a school of thought promoting the social ownership of the organs of society and economy as a supposed departure from how feudalism, capitalism or corporatism wring our souls clean of marrow; a school of thought that preserves conservative notions and activities (e.g., work, industrial management, mass production,) to take them on a supposedly progressive trek of “new ends;” a friendly-looking suspension of the real gore, the illustrated glory of hearts beating with rage, eyes set on horizons, bellowing youth sounding their ecstatic cries of docile reform or widened corrals of “revolution”, laying more bricks in the wall of sacrifice
While socialization often refers to the socialist transformation of social and economic functions, I employ the word herein to denote the wider nominal operation of human beings when made tame and kept busy, which too is crucial to all socialisms
Civilization, any purported balance of the above four items; not to be confused with the basic ability to have, i.e., insulin, eyeglasses, etc
Anarchy, any operable, tolerable situation, in dwellings or across regions, that has escaped from the clutches of the above items, that sufficiently opposes them
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If you fall, as I have fell before, wishing for a hand to grip me, help pull me to my feet, count on my hand.
Count on my arm to balance you. Count on anything I have lying around in surplus, if it means a better outcome for you.
If I find you with this same opaque matter of domination crushing you to death here beside me, count on me.
There’s the instinct. There’s the basis. Comfort cannot complicate, nerves in fight or flight cannot overly reduce.
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It should be grasped, as an iron grip from a bright mind afire, as one witnessing their loved ones under assault, that not everything is a discussion or a matter of awaiting approval.
If some tall, muscular piece of shit is beating on someone smaller, or some comfortable, pampered lot is slandering those who struggle and want for peace, that needs to be dealt with. (The “need” is that, if you allow yourself to fail whatever ability you have in tending to the shared fabric of life and things in it, you had better not complain when none will intervene out of immediate care for you, a stranger.) That is nothing to let worsen with protracted “care and consideration” wherein those two are left to remain inert, pointless, beside making oneself feel wise for doing nothing. This is what tends to get people killed, or at best, fucked for life. And it ranges from failing to stop one’s vehicle to tend to a violent wreck, to failing to deliver the centuries overdue redress of unchecked assault on life and wellness generally.
A large part of things in life need careful consideration of all the available nuance. But the other large part of things are quite plain and consistent upon first, second, tenth, twentieth glance. And after so long, after thousands of sets of twenty or eighty glances, one has to basically have a screaming mental breakdown of the most direct and vibrant motivation in order to draw the exact sixty-thousand or so underlines of the core of any matter, the core of Why, the core of urgency. The urgency not strictly of subject, nor interpretation of subject, nor accessibility nor approval of interpretation of subject, but the urgency of rekindling the basic capacity to regulate ourselves, under all despots and through all social storms, without imposition, without dynamics of lived contradiction, which always negate any agreeable regularity that arises from simple agreement, common stewardship of not being stepped on, not stepping on anyone.
One has to first consider what is worth discussing and what is not. One has to stop and consider: “What is this dialogging doing for me? Is this helping or hurting me, all the while that someone minding their own business is being assaulted by someone bigger, more powerful while I twiddle my thumbs over my priorities?”
One has to meet things as they are, as able. And the ability has to be adjusted according to importance. Yet ability cannot become synonymous with obligation. That is where ability buckles under obligatory condition, is sacrificed for the delusion that obligation produces desired results. Let no one ever speak again in terms of “educating the masses.” (Educating how? Masses who? With what materials? With what goal?) Curiosity and capacity are all within us, are all that need cultivating, not along exclusive specialties of educator or representative, but along the foundation of being oneself, bringing one’s best and honest contents forward in the spaces where asked for, where sought after.
Educate, if you will, as an orthodox instructor. Or impart as a Diogenes. But educate or impart, ceaselessly, on the history and nature of the dominant ills. Educate or impart agency. Educate or impart the dynamic of ethics, the delusion of moral solidity that lurches to incarcerate hurt and care alike. Open, with a mature discerning, to every free response, free observation, free decision. To absorb, to grasp, to apply.
There is no incentive outside of proud allegiance to invent new stresses to counter the old ones. If it is not coming along easily, it will not come along at that present configuration. Those who I love want no stress of this nature again. And it seems now that every steep tidal is worth it to us, if it will hurl the superfluous baggage overboard and fling the ship toward any patch of sandy shore as we hold on by bloodied palms for a pittance of a promise for life.
We are not residing in the year 2009, 2012, 2018 or 2021 anymore. All I want is the sensible, the tragically understated to become the blooming normal that sustains the tangible better.
Hold to something simple but resolute in all things. In a light-hearted sense: be as the cats, the dogs, the birds, the harmony of an “order” that does not call itself so, that is equally not concerned with “chaos”, and is instead concerned with the tasks and aspirations that comprise their unique, your unique, my unique traveling along a distinct course in a complex and total universe of billions of inner universes, all going on at once.
All things in the cascade of the unknowable, self-regulated by the detail of will, met kindly, to prevail, in rich intercourse or in solitary complexity.
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It becomes increasingly clear to me in every passing day, without any mind for any rock-solid pessimism, that the strictly Social Terms of our frustration, heartbreak, fear and fury are the most effective dictators of our failure, are the harshest munitions to fall on any chance of our self-determined contentment.
Our social terms are speaking, urging, begging, gaming things without moving past and overcoming. Even when the supposedly Sacred Keeper Of Liberty & Justice called The State becomes the obvious harbinger of terror and existential punishment. Our social terms are retreating with false pride without disabling the tendons of the dynamic, at best introducing inconveniences given over to everyday janitorial work.
Our social terms are sad sacrifices made in order to have a social, even if it’s hostile, even if no one with substance and kindness feels at home, feels welcome, feels appreciated, feels capable of engaging with it as an equal party. Our social terms are appreciating shittiness, but also scorning all effectiveness away from a strictly shitty life.
Our social terms are the sad stresses of building a striking, contrastive brand of a “Movement”, spending resources on appearance and performance without doing whatever actually delivers the material content of the aspiration driving the [performance of a] fight.
A time comes about for perhaps every generation that endures every society. This time is defined by what the social terms are overriding in the human grasp of functional sanity.
Much banter and conjecture on agitation, dissent, methods of dissent, methods of moving or persuading the legitimizer, or beyond.
What I look across landscapes in bitter yearning for is for all the living beings with hearts and minds to walk over it all, indifferent to all its puffed-up nature, and by action, clearly impart, “No. I am alive, and we are in pain. You are in the business of our pain, our death, and you saturate your lives with decadence off of my pain, my death.”
How is anyone supposed to see any human being, to see any gathering of human beings as anything other than Failures In Wait when all the readily recited accomplishments of humanity are less than banal symbolisms, when all the failures done and pending concern all that is least affordable to be lost?
There is no soundly living oneself out while simultaneously treading the same paths of a dense, meandering mass constructing its own maze. Living, in the sincerest meaning of the word, only takes place outside of all that.
Your person is your point of reality, as my person is my point of reality.
Our respective persons are not the only realities, looking to other personal realities in either complimentary stride or combatant posture or in slow, disinterested disillusion as a consequence of some revision of conditions, meanings, purposes and implications.
My point and your point can both absorb the qualities of the existent bombastic buffoonery inherent in all rule, of the absurdity of the entire configuration of being dictated by democracy or autocracy, the absurdity in rushing to save and reform the same configuration that coddled buffoonery, seeing people put hopes in a new brand of buffoon.
You and I can both absorb, consider and judge, in the end, that we’re each worth infinitely more than any “official”, “legitimate” anything on this Earth.
It is our lives that are “official”. It is our intentions borne by agency and passion that are “legitimate”.
Wherefore every office is a glorified crime scene, every defacing and demolishing of every office is a raising of the spearhead of a life lived in sense, in clarity.
Persons and decisions. These move conditions, meanings and purposes back in alignment with the infinite field of unique individuals, enjoying reason and agency. Masses and indecision. These are made of persons congealed together by the force of stuff and bullshit, by the force of a thoroughly conservative social whole, fighting over progressive or privileged vehicles of power, always punishing downward on all shoved below.
It is increasingly clear to me every day that the latter formula is going to break in some sense, worse than it ever could before. There is no pessimism, no assuredness of grandeur and vindication in the next sad set of years or decades. I just see and sympathize with more people shaking their heads and wondering “what the fuck?”
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Critiques of purely social frames of revolutionary enthusiasm are by no means purely anti-social critiques that spill over to overwhelm basic parameters of usefulness and joy, i.e., having friends, family, gatherings, neighbors.
Two or more people enjoying each other’s company is not social, in the sense of having anything fundamental to do with society, its inflation, wages, taxes, whatever. All that society has to do with those people is giving them problems, giving them crisis. The interpersonal, where mutual selfishness is healthy, is inclined to disengage from the social. This is where life happens. The social is where life struggles to happen.
Critiques of discernible, obstructive weight, in concept or material, are not the advancing of the abolition of those actual, cherished possibilities stranded within a degraded dystopia of social tangles. People as unique persons, interpersonally, perhaps compressed within cities, will still enjoy the music and food at gatherings, the show ‘n tell smoke circles, the display of creativity, humor, love and joy. Society will perhaps not [blatantly] fracture interpersonal life, and will perhaps accommodate the free-spirited nature of wealthy tourists in cutesy ways [convenient to capital.] But interpersonal life, persisting within servile agreement, will stay corralled within social dictate, social walls, social ceilings hanging low above the unique personal desire over oneself.
I simply feel that a dense wave is hitting a lot of people at once, amid an unprecedented wave of callousness and fervor that has spiked since 2023 onward.
Often times, in my conversations with like-minded people, there is a new disdain for those particular edge cases of anti-authoritarian who embrace an unwell anti-communist sentiment, often particular to fascists, as a strange means of trying to reach that feral aspect of moving through life, as though all communisms are Stalin-adjacent, including all anarchist communisms. (2012 has turned to 2015, 2016 to 2018, 2019 to 2023, 2024 has turned to 2026, to turn to circa 2029. Consider, just for a second, how fucking horrible that bracket has been, how utterly dismal it is unforeseeable to become.) Even the strange hopes for some highly specific anti-social rupture are themselves some strange quasi-social effort. Rarely do I see them being much of anything that occurs on terms of enthusiasm, of spirited whim. It only really tends to be more conflict.
The social terms of this frayed life, distinctly drowned in owning class command, are not worth preserving, reworking, redeploying. We are so eager to get some break, any break from them, and yet so much of our in-jokes and parlance have these baked into them. The entirety of the existing social terms possesses the character of landmines: they are nothing to play with, they are only for doing away with.
It is that uncanny, sometimes endearing sense of space, something we’ve only felt a brief gust of in empty parking structures, abandoned industrial lots, wide grasslands.
That should be life: adapted accordingly, assuming the core of now, inviting thoughtful improvement at all times.
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“The contradictions are worsening!”
Oh, you have no idea. And neither do I.
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It’s strange to me, a white person descended of German-speaking Anabaptist and Protestant settlers, how European so-called America tries to be, and yet how nothing about it is. Some babble from the Nazis here (called republicans) about how western civilization and Grecco-Romano-Germanic customs are the cornerstone of so-called America. True, perhaps, that there was sufficient influence on founding figures by the notion of trial by jury (tarnished in this country) and some designs of English Common Law to give the aesthetic resemblance of a continuation of some supposedly Holy and Superior “tradition.” But the nazi babbling simply deflates when you actually experience who and what comprises every functioning tendon past and present in this land.
So-called [white] America’s take on everything is just something that’s been copy-pasted from Indigenous peoples, Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, Asia, etc., with the addition of ketchup and mustard, give or take the cowboy hat and stars and stripes pattern swim trunks. This is best exemplified in what individual, individual freedom and individualism suddenly start to mean when you enter into this utterly mutilated place on Earth. It is the very principle at the root of the loftily-cited Germanic Ding/þingsō that was betrayed in every which way by the actions of settlers against this land, against the peoples who longest held the richest stewardship with it.
I don’t hold to “belief”. I find belief repugnant, silly. Belief only represents a cowardly assumption of “completing” a personal evolution, or attaining a cherished, false elevation above how life comes at anyone. I hold, instead, to feeling. And I feel it is worth repeating oneself when needed, as I’ve bothered over words on this several times now. I do not think that I will tire of it, because its subject implicates everything for me.
I want to speak on original, unvarnished terms, while also weaving something that is digestible in the general region I’ve inhabited for decades. There is something lost on many, in regard to the school of thought concerning the individual’s relationship with bodies or institutions of individuals compiled into a mass, class or category, that I want to introduce new air into, into the same poignant terms, I feel, of old voices from France, Italy, Russia, Germany, all regions of stolen land in this hemisphere and elsewhere, who caught a nearly effortless hold of that lost something.
It should be evident that when we talk about “self-interest,” we cannot speak of objectivity. What may be in your self-interest could also very well be something that would keep me from something in my self-interest. This makes the blanket statement “self-interest and individualism are a tenet for colonization” a simplistic view of what self-interest is and avoids the question of whose interest it is that we’re talking about. As an Indigenous person who takes a strong stance against assimilation, colonialism, and capitalism, it is certainly not in my interest to maintain those structures.
Individualism is the idea that you and your desires are important. Egoism implies this and also states that one ought to act on behalf of oneself to realize desires. As Indigenous people, what could we use more than self-confidence? We need to know that we as individuals, and as an Indigenous people, matter. For centuries we’ve been beaten down, physically and psychologically. We’ve been oppressed by Power for so long that we’re convinced that we don’t matter, that we’re worthless, that we’re savages: less than human and unfit for society. The psychological effects of colonization have been studied, dissected, and proven to result in both internal and external self-hatred.
Some of us have accepted this; we abuse ourselves and each other. Or we self-medicate to numb ourselves from the pain. Some of us assimilate to be recognized by our oppressors, to feel a sense of self-worth. I for one want to appease to no one. I want to know that I matter to me, not to the society that denies me my desires, keeps me from my freedom: a society responsible for all of the damage done to Indigenous people worldwide. One thing that I do see at powwows all across the continent are bumper stickers and clothing expressing “Native Pride.” This is something that my elders have said since as far back as I can remember. “Be proud of who and what you are.” If we were to take on this pride and understand that we do matter, to us, and start acting in our self-interest, it would mean war against those who stand in our way, who keep us from our freedom.
— Cante Waste (Good Heart), § “Individualism as a Tenet of Decolonization”, Towards An Indigenous Egoism
An individual can embrace heartfelt association and symbiosis the same way that they would embrace anything else that pleases them, but always from the starting point of one’s own angle of it. From one’s own interest. This latter part is where American individualists (Spooner, Tucker, Warren, etc.,) have hoisted themselves by their own petard, pursuing a circle that cannot seem to soundly link with the former, although insisting on a better conception of the clasp. These are the types who insisted on some formula to preface individual interest rather than the other way around.
An individual is one infinite mystery of love, hate, stoicism, tears, laughter and words. An an individual can place their choice contributions on the wide table of voluntary involvement. Or, equally so, an individual can carve a path for oneself and keep it secluded, ciphered, whatever. An individual can mix and match. It is from this understanding that a formula without orthodox design becomes casual.
I advise to always stress individual without mind for any -ist. This is because I see the school of thought as something to merely take useful matter out from, apply it to an individual’s life where useful. Some may find it useful to introduce the label of individualist, denoting the thoughtful tendency, to the enumeration of oneself, one’s discernible individuality, with no mind for certain totality or point of final accounting. One is still an individual, and lives as one.
Individualism is ultimately only a toolbox, among many, in the form of moth-eaten publications transcribed to digital outlets, reading groups and the rambling enthusiasts within friend circles. What concerns those with interest and heartfelt investment in the matter is how a notion that is intended to be the art and science of the focal point of aspiration, determination and joy became misunderstood as a hostile mangling of these, an excuse to see the inaccessibility of joy as an opportune privilege, window dressing a new frontier of privilege as an “optimal, healthy life”. Permanently sacrificing at altars of Rothbardian Markets or left-libertarian mutual credit, indefinitely prostituting personalities to sad people to escape sad people status. (“We have existed in isolation. Pure. Disconnected. Alone. Stagnant.” – HELIOS, Deus Ex.)
I think that there is a solution that is almost impossible, and thus the most endearing challenge, to realize. This would be to return to the central understanding of ourselves as mammals, as intelligent individuals. This understanding would boldly account for our inclination to hold a common stewardship for the Earth that is shared with human, plant and animal kindred. This understanding would pursue a sharp body of sense, meaning a clear set of priorities and positions, in order to destroy the consequences of humanist liberalism in all spheres of life, to eradicate its homicidal indoctrination, its hostile societies, its madness of economy, to generally pursue the base material reality at the same time as bolstering the inner universes of those who have suffered, who have had to postpone their lives.
And demonstrating the solution as nearly impossible, entirely so if advanced within the structures of its nullification’s logics, is what underscores what is broken about us, our tolerance of being cheapened, taking the souring blows to our already vulnerable lives, what is perpetuating not only “collapse”, but real and felt pain protracted by some socio-cosmological “necessity.” New frontiers of this, in the recent forms of mass layoffs, AI data center ecocide, you name it. The impression I get from many of those my age and some who are my senior is not unlike seeing someone pulling out their phone and dialing a friend or family member to come pick them up, to take them out of what simply is not okay. Grown men in tears, over very real and heartbreaking circumstances. Some steroid-addled tub of shit screaming at him, all the litanies of patriarchy, “men don’t cry,” etc.
None of it has any special weight on any special corner of phenomena. It’s all about modes. It’s about the sledgehammer-like implications of certain modes lacking restraint. It’s about the imposing shadows cast over the brightest and most honest of endeavors. And this dominant mode is not pretty, not beneficial and is in fact killing us. This is the mode of every moralism, of every collectivism that makes promises to an individual kept vague, impersonal, in persuasion of what stifles and punishes real individuals with real, free aspirations.
I consider this individualist perspective to come closest to what the humanists feel accomplished over when they flatter themselves with their ideals, when they refuse to see that the institutions which exploited their ideals have finalized the very antithesis of the stated goals, thinking that a mere rearranging of capital’s quest for feudalism will work out well in the long run. But knowing that this is all that their flowery emptiness will reap, they choose to cling tighter to it, invent new pseudo-rationalizations for it. And this is where black flags ascend with the angry commoners at all times and places. A quiet unity against humanism, the casting mold of the liberalism that subjugates humanity with denial of healthcare, denial of all capable, lasting wellness. (“You love the human being, therefore you torture the individual human being, the egoist; your love of humanity is the tormenting of human beings. If I see the beloved suffering, I suffer with him, and I find no rest until I’ve tried everything to comfort and cheer him; if I see him joyful, I too become joyful over his joy. It doesn’t follow from this that the same thing causes suffering or joy in me, as that which brings about these effects in him, as any bodily pain sufficiently proves, since I don’t feel it as he does; his tooth gives him pain, but his pain gives me pain.” — Max Stirner)
I don’t want any turn, I don’t want any effort at getting better in the general social sense to remain some torturous existential question that drains the energy from a lifetime. The great mass of the great mistake carried on is not any deliverer of peace within you, of any contentment to characterize deeds assumed earnestly tomorrow.
I think the practice is squarely among each other, who are similarly privy to whatever you are. Those very ad hoc, excitable greetings of new friends who signal what you or I signal against the grain of what the many pawns of domination signal. (Signaling, either “vices” or “virtues”, exiting the pundit arena altogether, entering into the real substance of interpersonal interest.) Those are the richest incubations of our own futures and of those who come after. Those substantive gatherings equal to those substantive brackets of solitude.
Every life has a unique inclination to embrace good relations, to foster symbiosis with every possible mutually benefiting entity with agency. The jagged iron sculptures of every flavor of every moralist collectivism can contribute nothing to peaceable symbiosis. It is every life involved that is responsible for the general outcome of every bit of unique handiwork. Scale, when adjusted appropriately, is invariably filled with individuals who possess interest and enthusiasm. It is pure and simple across all projects.
And what does that mean for the world-to-be, if any? I don’t know, not for certain at least. But the humbling reality remains: there are no “Agreeable terms.” And that is the sole invigorating term that the insulted, the dispossessed, intending to hold, direct and use to renew their lives, will raise in the willing cohesion with those seeing potential in it for themselves.
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And yet the disinformed insistence, from a place of liberal humanist socio-theological dogma, is that every critique coming from a place of distinct social wounds is a demonic, perhaps even homicidal attack of any and all togetherness, any and all mutual, voluntary agreement.
One observes a prodding of broken hearts toward a merely deeper pessimistic “black pill”, “void pill” that could once recognize the potential of fellow human beings — but now only sees a vast ocean of angry, screaming, weeping and catatonic souls forsaken out of their immediate inheritance of life.
They opted to preserve, over all, at all costs, the very concrete structures that suffocate the wild organism in us that would assume the greatest achievements in knowledge and tools to carry life from the caves of cities and suburbs and into the bright multicolored sky of life let open. Opened to no malice against the harmless, the innocent, the unimposing.
But all our lives are trampled, scarred by the social generations of malice, stress, sorrow, universal disintegration. The very dominating idea of replenishment resting in civilization. We know, without saying, the points at which real, tangible human needs and aspirations are routinely watered-down, postponed or sacrificed for the “Sacred” processions of The Society: social mores, social constraint, punitive social functions (their lies of “Justification”) and social domination of all life and all land; the society and its mandate made the heads of individual lives; individuals outside of the club, considered “unexceptional”, forbidden from assuming direction over the society.
The points at which we begin to realize more clearly that we are Slaves To The Social rather than Self-Owning Directors of it. Upon swallowing the situations in these points, the question arises if any society, however makeshift or advanced, can truly be in line with individual needs and aspirations coming together to accomplish mutual interests or distancing as decided for oneself. I think that there is a fairly bare bones sketch of it, (the easiest reference being the best knowable kinship bonds,) depending on how thoroughly one wants to intellectualize over it. Associate or dissociate. Do not rush to build some society of associations and dissociations. Let whatever is dreamed of for The Best Society instead be life!
But there is a tension that ceaselessly defines every present time. A tension that is the character of the lives of timeless rebels, primordial and recent, wholehearted, half-hearted and resigned alike. That tension is between Potential (incubating, comatose, fighting to awake) and Denial of potential through certain anxieties, considered seriously, made traumatic from self-righteous Gerontocratic privileges and traditions. (The innocence, as always, betrayed: giving any good faith to the ones who have not once given it in their lives.)
The tension strains at times such as now over whether letting the absurd course run itself into the worst outcome will really implicate the majority of lives of innocents more than the lives of the agents of malice. (As though this has not already happened about ten times in at least the last twenty years.) The tension asks of hands-off or hands-on, almost agnostic of what the hands are faced with. And so there is ample room for me to conclude that it is up to the lives living and facing the matters at hand to fill in that variable, to round out the equation. It has to be those encounters, those on-the-spot deliberations, adjusted moment-to-moment as is useful, that fills in the reserved variables, shows the participants of life to the output after “=” to make, expand or focus the use of. The tension, hated and acquainted with, compels every life out from the general condition, makes distinct the human tone in its time.
It taunts, taunts for life, as person, to rise and possess life, as common domain.
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Show me.
Show me a social, a society that is not, has not been, an all around calm or chaotic suicide pact, taken up seriously by degrees of the wages of the very desperation inherent in the result of our socialization. The result of this religious fanaticism that rebukes life, rebukes life for its possibility of Fullness, its infinity of desire, of aspiration, in favor of the very sadistic sociopathy that is society, in its truest completed circle.
It seems there was something lost in the quick caricatures: the abrasive and awkward goth punks with clothespin ear-piercings, black leather attire, asymmetric hairstyles, attitudes appropriate for seeing the course of the world in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Those attitudes originated somewhere thoughtful, but were sketched up as being snobby and accusatory, out from the thin air of dropping out of school, drug use or the like. These subjects, at the heart of mindless satire were, always correct, were always right up against the matters of struggle that news reporters only poked and prodded as part of their jobs. Here were the ones who went on both crate-digging excursions in vinyl record shops as well as rifling through shelves in used bookstores. Here were the ones who re-purposed the germs of these various items of pressed or printed creativity, care in thought, playfulness in execution. Here were the ones I most enjoyed drinking, smoking and laughing with in the final years of the 2010s. They should have gotten into office — to end all offices, to open all materials to the substance of life.
You don’t have to “like” the screeching strings and thumping drums of D-Beat Raw Punk, you don’t have to fight to find something to appreciate in a Bay Area, Pacific Northwest, Midwest or (god forbid) Southern bar/venue that smells like piss, hosts punk, metal, whatever. You don’t even have to like most punks, goths or most of anyone from any subcultural thing.
I would, however, recommend to embrace the effortlessly unifying crux of what mummified liberals were trying so desperately to paint as the deranged works of “nutcases.”
As it turned out, theirs is the domain of life.
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Depression.
Depression, and anxiety.
These made me an anarchist. These provided the basis of my own meaning for it.
No anarchist will exist again, after these two forces, depression and anxiety, have lost their every fuel, their every object, their every institution and become a relic of memory.
There will only be living beings in their unperturbed courses.
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There are, as far as I know, thoughts of a divergent synthesis, yet to be complete. Not one whose form and function is an agreeable basis shared with differing tendencies, but instead, a synthesis of lives, who are themselves indecipherable tendencies of their own.
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Because I do not have conviction for wasting energy on restraining, criminalizing and punishing people; because I do not advocate for doing nothing in the face of human trafficking given cover, persecution of already grossly marginalized people groups, all other ills: I find an unperturbed, universal resolution to every imaginable concern in either seeing to it that all conditions of every context are determined organically by those inhabiting them, or seeing to it that no conditions whatsoever can ever be made and imposed, as they once have been, again. I see to the joining the two together, made the tone and receptiveness of life.
It is a fundamentally white liberal frame of mind, a kissing cousin of white supremacist and authoritarian persuasions, to assert a clear necessity of “Control”, a definite “Consequence for Lacking Shame/Godliness/Whatever.” All countries with any white demographic have an internal battle with this violent delusion, as do all places with ethno-religious majorities.
I am not a person of color. But I have the capacity to listen to people and relate as humans under different appendages of domination. And all who go about life with awareness understand that nobody living well in peace decides to cause trouble or stir shit of a sudden. There is no mind for abrupt, forceful siege mentality that comes from peaceable plenty, harmonious potential in healthy balance; it becomes obvious and effortless from want, lack, dejection, existential punishment materialized in all social spheres. It is the social domination, the social mandate, the liberal Respect for the fascist-liberal changing of hands — this is what scars the flesh of our total kindred. This is what upsets the peace. This is what makes an acceptance of wounded, limping “peace” the consent to brutalizing. A dense circle with a nearly impossible exit.
Even now for a good portion of average Americans feeling it, feeling a unique rage at secret police terror slowly churning into the present character of life in the country, feeling the forced personal sacrifice for the most incomprehensible excursions of cruelty, they readily admit that it cannot be fully comprehended what kind of wound is will need to heal. If it will. If it introduces a solid trend of regression back to monarchic mythologies, all because pissy white baby men threw a fit over nuances in reality like pronouns. This government, unlike any situation before, has been usurped by sincere nazi pedophiles wielding totalitarian information technologies. That is tragically a clear observation of reality. And all of life on Earth is suffering because of this god-forsaken colonial superpower being piloted by a scorned dementia patient endeavoring on his last revenge at the world that wanted so badly to forget him, a class of sycophants eager to pick his fat carcass clean. Ten or ten-thousand steps above the egregious socialism for the rich by the start of the 2010s, a million or a billion steps below the nightmare hell-circus of his first term, I don’t think that anyone was ready to have to deal with all of this, whether things clicked for someone in 2016 or 2026, or not by much. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a cascade of mournful, furious jeers.
“Control” and multi-pronged concepts of it do not save or sustain anything. Let’s go ahead and spitefully embrace that the anarchist vision is unworkable, unrealistic and maybe even annoying as fuck. Let’s simplify and say that there is one, monolithic anarchist vision. Okay. I’m an anarchist, and I’m wrong and annoying as fuck. Got it.
Having “accepted” this, can it be explained clearly why a “normal” secular liberal democracy, not promised to leave the door closed to the very origins of our ongoing discontent, is the One, True Way? Can it be explained why we don’t cast ballots for what to eat for dinner among housemates every single evening? Can it be explained why people in their solitude do not petition for approval to brew coffee or make breakfast or take a shower? Or can it be laid out why [strictly basic] social democratic features are Always improvements to the secular democratic model? Or why Chavez-style Democratic Socialism is the final cut-off point for offering good faith follow-up questions?
Can any liberal please tell me why exactly the simplest rendering of anarchy is not the potent nutrient compared to the weakest germ of the highest possible liberal idealism, why it does not compute with the most heartfelt howls of common disdain, why it can only trip their fullest material potential, out of the drunkenly beloved bullshit marinade of democracy?
I would stand there, accepting and accepting without definite answer, more than will ever be good for me, and still the questions would be gracelessly dodged; my life would go condemned, as always, to some pro-owning class boss bitch insisting for something to “work” off the inert nothing that is the liberal rearranging of problems, calling them “solved.” If Liberty is the coal for Christmas to lives dreaming to be truly free, the Liberal Ideal is the clueless attempt at buying the love of step-children in the uniquely sad ways that only a champion asshole can.
And so we retain snide “acceptance” of anarchists being wrong, annoying as fuck, in the midst of this strange, increasingly disoriented fascism here in the Western Hemisphere still posing every threat conceivable, knowing still that peace & love are Only Ends — in the end. Knowing that kind, common people’s disdain, to which anarchy is a cherished friend, holds taught the thread of inquiry, of practice, and sees anarchists bearing it with them, without boast, with sustained engagement. Knowing still that peace & love are no practicable means against any armed, hostile domination.
A fighting spirit particular to someone, one that can carry over to the fellow sibling, the goodhearted, the actively humane, who sustain peace & love as ends, will gradually be found within themselves, outlined from those of ancestors, friends and loved ones, who realized in their own ways, at their own times, their nerve to assert their inherent freeness in spite of the stuffiness of how life can be lived, instead, simply doing the action of life, leaving traces to inform others in finding, keeping the light.
The spirit that sings the thrill of lone adventure also sings the happy banter of brilliant bands.
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In the same sense that the crux of what is captured by art, as an institution, is not a necessitation of that institution and its conventions, the crux of human, plant and animal life is not a necessitation of the total institution of institutions that encloses life to exploit, taunt, suffocate its sound, self-determined courses. On the contrary, this is a necessitation of unplugging, breaking down and erasing that institution of institutions.
I find it difficult to articulate any clearer. If the artist comes closest to the heart of her work, she will see a happy opportunity in the destruction of, or at least some escape from, Art as an institution, as an imposing gate of a judgmental “sanctuary” that she is expected to insert her work into, await the desired reply, be heartbroken, or worse, get what she wants, and thus see the substance of the dream reduced to objects, reduced to intrigue over objects. We are not objects, nor subjects to a permanent context, nor are we bettered by intrigue. We are living beings. And we with intelligence, we with soundness in the spheres of the self and of gatherings and working groups are who better ourselves, as every kakistocrat vampire intends on further draining each and every gasp for life.
Draw no breath of worry for gadgets or trinkets. Draw the breath set on living, first and foremost. Doubtless, having known trinkets and images for too long, most of us are uniquely eager to greet life, to keep it sound and satisfactory.
Life is not a bundle of plastic compartments with plastic trinkets, unless we give in to it. Life constitutes a ceaseless activity, a continual process. Abandoning one’s own specific stewardship of this is also abandoning the very best of oneself. In the end, while praising towering golden liberal pillars, or nourishing on resignation, or both, one sours into using that ignored, innermost anarchy for ends of malice and sleight, after every cultural warping has made those the sole, frantic elements backing one into a corner.
Life is ultimately at the center. Its quality, duration, substance, consistency, variety, creativity, zest, humor, empathy, serenity. These have to be given ample potential, and we ourselves hand it over, tending to what would tend and restore in turn. Tending to life... tending to life how able.
I just want a balance — so that I and others can cease with the rabid mania, so there is any chance of getting some grip.
I just want to garden, work with my hands, feed animals, lounge in the grass, listen to wind in the trees. But the content of my want is not the point.
The point is every possible inner anarchy of a personal universe of multitudes given a friendly chance to engage, as means and ends of accomplishment for vitality, with those gravitated to the same, from unique or unknown factors, always judged and adjusted freely.
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All that has form is shaped according to little more than whim or happenstance. One can doubtlessly see decision or indecision, at once or over time, affect this or that in their proximities. Consider the course of any person’s life. One moves away from their hometown, and one is not bound to any other’s likelihood of return, of going further North or South over the years. Any form of guardrails for persons and pursuits can only guide the journey out from what’s done and past, into what is striven toward. Because that is our lives: we live only in write-mode, with some allowance for playback, but not for editing in any way that is not writing new corrections after the fact, the past intact where it is.
That seems like the most foundational terrain. The way life is actually engaged with. Passion and Scorn: the motivating elements that compel the steady gait of thoughtful contention, passing through the woods and shores that confer some parcel of sense.
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There is some kind of case to be enumerated, in some way, for an Instinctual Conspiracy to live decent in ourselves, in choice, intentional relations, in ample space for solitary adjusting and balancing. But I don’t see myself as being a part of it so much as being merely another pebble on that dreary shore that prefaced a vessel departing it, containing what multitudes anything else or anyone else might.
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I gaze out at that distance of a would-be self-exile, at the opposite end of where all these delirious swipes at the gnats of audience, engagement, fart, shit, cum, take place. Sweet, sweet death. Sweet, sweet not knowing. Cherished not caring. Lovingly scorned — bitterly, lovingly scorned — still here.
Every annual encroachment of the Fuck It mode of things crushing us all into some awkward, panicked epiphany (taking its time.) Some periodic jumbling and re-jumbling of the conventional narratives according to how fucked we are (per week or month.)
“Persist and Suffer” is nothing to find strength in. If you would impose this, in some lofty, hesitant choice of empty words for suicidal people, I hate you so fucking much.
To infantilize, berate or discard people for feeling cornered in a global situation where they kind of truly are, where they cannot or will not mimic the murmuring mantras of the society that wants the truths of their beings exterminated. This is the most disdainful glossing over of humanity by the effect on the nerves of empty routines, of sustained urgency made mundane. The thrashings of socio-psychiatric shell shock. It is our circuit, consuming our humanity, until a heart is suddenly had, a grip is regained, a sense is assumed. Yet it always seems to only happen at the last moment before fatality.
It always has to get to that point, the point that so many great-grandparents of Gen X’ers and Zoomers knew and abhor. It always has to get there, and suddenly the reluctant partisan begs and cries for the same old face-plants of liberalism, rather than just the consequence of a lifetime or two of careerist face-planting, of collaboration with fascism, of never absorbing, taking history to heart. “Can’t we just fail as politics, and never blame Me, The Liberal?”
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Motivation is not any moral feature. It is a contemplation, or animation, that comes from taking something in. It comes from knowing oneself to share in it, one way or another.
If one’s immediate reaction is to argue specific morals, to self-righteously contend against what goes to the heart of things with no love for decorum, from some bleaker-than-thou bastardization of nihilism’s resolve in the real and living nihilist, than that person is another matchstick in the pile of my disregard. More to come.
If I give a friendly word, that you should be able to live a free and happy life on your own terms that hurt and coerce no one, that is not a criticism of your character, of your expression, nor is it a forced-conversion of your intellect.
It is the earnest expression of my desire to see you live well, to see anyone be able to live well, to see that ability open also to me.
There is no such thing as “both sides”, “two sides”. There are only billions of perspectives held by billions of [hopefully] not completely propagandized individuals, with no two being identical, facing the same dead bodies, the same air strikes, the same riots, the same cruelties, the same military occupations and the same apocalypse in front of them. Eventually it will be too clear and too close to shrug off. Screaming myself mute, watching all of it become more and more likely.
Our lives suck, our lives are unbearable and we perpetually mourn and scream and sob, because we thought for multiple decades that if we just argue with, berate each other with total bad faith over hyper-specifics of something Not Currently In Front Of Us, the solution to every problem will materialize in hand.
It’s because the warm satisfying feeling in the stomach, hearing someone spell the whole paradigm out, seeing faces awake with intrigue but ready to go to sleep with insubstantial busywork, dragged us to the edge of the ditch on our knees to be shot.
No one who happens to be a stranger to the shared enthusiasm over dense philosophical squabbles is going to read the 600 page treatise on anti-authoritarian ethics and forge a perspective that constitutes an ideal contender. Why in the fuck should they? At “best”, they can glean some specific direction from the literature of the past one hundred years Maximum.
Nonetheless, being skeptical too of the mere opposite of anti-intellectualism, a lot of us simply want to stop feeling capital’s state boot pressing into the hearts of our spirits. And the overwhelming majority are willing to work with those who hold mundane or minor differences in vision, concept, word and deed, so long as the center of the matter is life owning itself, in common as also individually.
In our plurality arising from the organic beautiful mess of human beings, we understand clearly that we cannot persist in the rigid mentality clamoring in the stairways of spectacle, in the anxiety of the unknown that reproduces the banal origins of our known and predictable hurt. We are not going to find salvation in any judge’s ruling, in any magical epiphany borne by angels to astonish and gradually redeem some sadistic tyrant already on the way out.
Sadly, as we all know — Americans are largely not very bright. And by this I mean that they are susceptible to the whole suite of grooming tactics that arise from this notion of a wounded masculinity, of an “oppressed” [cis white] man who is the most downtrodden person on the planet, burdened by trans and non-white people’s existence in average, everyday life. Among the core suite of operations for this notion, a timeless reactionary force adapted seamlessly to the Internet since 2014, is the The Cowboy, Roughshot Ethic. “I’m the man. I do the shit work. I deserve total authority over the universe, and the foreseeable nature of my entire life will be defined by that loud, palpable hurt I feel when confronted with someone else’s life confirming that I am not that authority.”
This mentality in every time frame it has ever seen has enslaved every vital function of every region of stolen land every to the whims of people who were 40 years old in 1980, happy-go-lucky American Southerners, liberal, “progressive” or in the right-wing cults, will commit to ceaseless apologetics for papaw’s demented patriarchy.
When optimism is proved to be our death sentence, is not some contextual cynicism, some strategic pessimism not some deviation, at the very least? Cursed, some of us are, with being too humble, simultaneously too interested in the details of history, political function, anthropological findings of intimate knowledge looked at now, impressing on us like something alien.
The too-morbidly not making sense, but mangled just enough to resemble sense in the forms of comeuppance, or the like. The aligning so that our chagrin leads us to lean into the faults, claiming “Fuck it,” or to lean into the excesses, claiming a different angle of the fascists’ “Kill them all.”
The tendency to fuck it all up. As a quiet, reserved infantryman who defaced his uniform with symbols of peace, refused to fire a shot against the resistance to imperialism in Vietnam may still fuck up by not engaging the CO ordering the murder of children and grandmothers.
As a troubled, alienated soul can still fuck up by not speaking their mind, at minimum.
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Like rising out from the dew-laden dirt with the dawning Sun, I awake to smear a rag with ink, flatten it across a vast open table, accessible to the terrifying machinery of this grueling, gradually distorting epoch, only reaching to lend my hand in some turn of a wheel... in some effort to clarify what needs making clear, to champion what is not unclear, but not for deciphering; not for flagrant handling, not for careless referencing.
Each will converge on what they will, how they will, but few will really do what they think they do if they repeatedly flee from accepting the plainness of what that is. Accepting also the plain countenance of every ending, every opening of every life chapter, knowing profoundness to lie in furthering, carrying possibility, extending substantive implication, rather than any trivial marvel of aesthetics or rhetoric.
Life itself contains all means, all ends, all unknowns, all vocations in motion.
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Contentions, doubtless, of what will be.
Shall it be inverted puritan, anti-social fundamentalist Shadow The Hedgehog void-archy, doing snobby emo counter-culture within the existing domination, without effect?
Shall it be socialist anarchists that fawn over Lenin, plaster black-and-red on everything, carry the torch of the beautiful idea every May 1st and go back to be a good for nothing every other day within the existing domination, without effect?
Shall it be more CBS, CNN, MSNOW “center-right” corporate merger news spin fuckery, chastising the aforementioned both, cheering itself for allegiance to domination, surging the asinine ego-juices of “the mainstream”?
Shall it be more uncommitted types, more shitty attitude contrarian narcissists, equally committed to staying repulsive?
Yes, all of the above, all at once. Let them have it, their scraps of territory over the charred hope of “...in the shell of the old...” when all that’s left to win is the shell.
The concern for me is me, is my loved ones and could also be you. How these lives fare has about as much to do with society as it does with the weather, the storm patterns, the sea levels, what have you. Perhaps you cannot abolish the weather, the storms, the seas. But you can abolish, in yourself and on the Earth you’re owed, the totality of what has made all of this and more into utter shit.
So very much sneering, jeering from ambitious, at least modestly moneyed 18, 19, 20, 30, 40, 50 and 60 year-olds, assured in the narrowness of their purely civic conception for the places, things, concepts and operations in life. Why, why in this god-forsaken time is the essence of “Erm, actually...” the basis for arguing, performing, signaling taking over from learning, deliberating on substance, outside of where substance goes to the chopping block. Right or wrong thrown atop this or that picture, this or that news headline. Right or wrong. Good or bad, in accordance with this sacred ideal, or that “despicable” divergence from the truly despicable social death march.
It seems to me that one has to consciously imprison oneself in something desperately simplistic, to deny oneself that inner dimension of consideration for the possible, to deny all things with substance as “radical” in order to sincerely feel convinced of the ambitious management of the ambitious terribleness, in order to feel deserving of some prize for being a good angel for every status quo.
For those who dedicate themselves to harm reduction, in politics or elsewhere, good luck. I really do mean it. I want anarchy. And I also want healthcare and a modicum of basic breathing room in the here-and-now. But life as a vital domain is not saved, lives as profound, indecipherable personal universes are not healed with the supposedly noble gradualism of mere policy adjustment or weak lip-service of “accommodation”, always with a mind for resignation to the here-and-now rather than starting to move it in accordance with real, intelligent affinity and creativity.
My perspective remains, churns its vapors, all while donating time every term, as able, to the usual pittances, watching the same shit happen in circles of days, weeks, months, years, nothing really moving. The renewed pool of humans growing old, gnawing on the perpetual stream of satisfaction, scurrying like ants to maintain an existence, burning the daily pallet of energy, finding oneself at the end of the day wanting out or around all the Sacred Shit so childishly insisted on, but arising every morning with an empty, waking spirit filled with the most damnable notion put before us to force us where we are: “It is what it is”.
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— Awake! Oh Fuck!
I awake by the shutter of a dream of danger, some siege or stampede of intensity, but found in the next second that it was only some asshole’s car screaming down the street.
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There’s the lost being found in some mistranslation, made computable by accident.
The weary hope met with the excited promise of a more modular slavery.
Little needs saying. Just rewind all the promises.
Lay them out in their sober chronology.
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Everyday people like me, like any given person’s loved ones, give up on life because the pro-social hopefuls gave up on sensibly maintaining and stewarding life itself above and beyond the meaningless horse shit of “Justice”, “Decorum”, whatever lofty vocalization of civic gold that turns the mass of empty heads away from life, gazing into the stupid flickering bullshit of the zones flooded with utterly rotten shit, always diving upon the heartbroken to stay alive, stay tortured, upon their decision for themselves to exit the hopeless entirety of everything born into.
Somehow, you must know by now that each and every one of these institutions, whatever sector or sphere, Do Not help — but at best Hinder — life itself from soundly and autonomously self-correcting, self-regulating. Centuries of “Anti-chaos” efforts As The Chaos!
Life! Not any Society! In service to no death mechanism of Any Civilization! Nothing I cannot Move! Nothing I cannot Shape!
Throw the notion of “social creatures” into the fire. We are, as all lifeforms are, creatures of incentive, of intuition, of instinct. Togetherness is a condition borne from these as they become apparent in oneself, as one sees these being apparent in others around them.
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A seldom understood feature of wisdom: the ability to distinguish between what should, or can be articulated at some length — and what needs none of that.
Perhaps few are actually seasoned by the depths of experience to hold the perfect shape of this feature. Perhaps perfection is not the point.
To catch on to the sense of a distinction, case by case by case, (repetition repetition repetition,) here is the modest budding of every personal journey, in mundane routines or pursuits of passion.
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One shares the friendly insight where one sees the poor in spirit, the persecuted for righteousness’ sake, with no preaching of Christ as purported divinity, but all the intimately human extolling, a want to nourish common love, of the domain of brilliance in you.
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Strip the “God” and “The Divine” from the figure called Jesus. Let us make Jesus one of us. One of us who holds an interpretation of what I tell you.
Strip, too, the easy white, western atheist disdain for all possible substance that the white rendering of that figure implicates and negates. Strip, finally, the heart of the object of “white” Jesus.
Jesus is the friend who moves to aid, for example, a trans person when her insightful, bitterly persecuted detail of her own person is suddenly thrown away, spat on, taunted, when she endures the legal process over alleged wrongdoing, or even simply enduring the process of correcting past documents pertaining to her. Jesus is her friend.
Jesus is the friend of every trans and queer person.
Jesus is the one who gives the domain of life to the political prisoner, to the dejected, to all the children of the world.
Jesus is Alex Pretti. Jesus is Renée Nicole Good.
Jesus is the figure of compassion, of rendering comfort toward those enduring the total weight of their lives at their points of deepest dismay. An essence, manifested somehow, of who is so needed. Needed if there is any want for life.
That precise mode of Christ, extending to a modest life of sincere good works, is what I still love, remaining an ex-Lutheran for thirteen years and change. No mind for Redemption, Afterlife, Angels or the like. Only knowing all times & places to render the basic essence called divine, to furnish its vibrancy with the substance of our creativity, our gratefulness for life & joy reflected in beholding peace, personifying much of what is most beloved in mortals.
Fuck religion. That is completely fine, and I agree.
Just know that there is, in fact, some insight to glean.
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Lately I find myself more out of love with life than I thought I could be, feeling all the tendons of the merely existing fix upon making life irreparably corrupted. A shadow play of stripped-down likenesses of sincerity, warmth, substance.
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But still. I see something in some faces, hear something in some voices.
Something, at least some glinting germ, of the human, struggling...
struggling to live.
Embrace, in mourning or jubilation, this fleshy beating of heart... beating... from the upward crying out, of the idea! Of the lives that carry! Of the thoughtless doings that prove! Of clear conspiracy to enslave anew! Of disgust, the object — Hubris! The primer — Scorned Wrath! Just nearly set off! Just now, hinging on a mad man’s firing pin!
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I would say that a good deal of people like me describe ourselves as “anarchists” not out of any ideological unanimity, and probably in a spirited enjoyment of good-hearted back and forth, but out of an apt descriptor of personal orientation toward life, struggle, joy, sustenance and that elusive humbling serenity in simply living on self-determined terms.
Anarchy is already in our homes. Anarchy is already beloved without naming or placing it. All the anarchist wants is the adaptive, organic self-regulation arising from the fullness of every life, participating, solitary or yet to live and decide themselves, for themselves. Plenty of us have nuanced and broad differences, but all of us are against being quashed into statistics, body power, punched clocks and coroners’ reports. We want to lay hands upon our material surroundings and change them directly, immediately — according to relevant sentiments and done with a foundation of clear affinity — in order to extend the worth of simply being alive into the worth, and imminence, of accessible contentment.
What more does anyone want? Obviously something like Marxism has some alternative map of things. And I do not think that Marxism and the writings of some notable Marxists are all useless. The difference is that anarchists and the anarchy they dedicate their lives to studying and practicing harnesses something intrinsic in life on Earth, give or take this or that adjective, method, author fan club, etc.
Why is anyone so eager to plug into and feed the same mechanisms of shit that have only ever harmed and lowered them, that have only ever harmed and lowered me?
Why is anyone, why am I supposed to just shut up and swallow it? And why am I essentially bitch-slapped by strangers occupying the offices of my life’s concerns when I cannot find honest contentment in any of that?
My being an anarchist, anyone’s being an anarchist, is to some degree being a member, uniquely or nebulously-defined character, of an -ism, at least to some highly nuanced degree, yes.
But being an anarchist is also a matter of knowing oneself, knowing how the game is fixed, how that fix for some exceptional class implicates the life possibilities for yourself and billions more. And whether someone is queer, trans, neurodivergent, a person of color, a disabled person, a working person, a person seeking any insight, intrigued by the very possibility or impossibility of it, any mix of these: this only widens an entry into the heart of the entire purpose. There is one’s thread, guiding to some material, tangible shape of coherence, lending themselves to a personal or shared effect on outer forms & functions, or creating our own, striving toward fruitfulness from every nuanced, bottom-up agreement.
The anarchist endeavors for a certain immediacy to aid the greatest features of an open, ever-evolving nature of intelligent life to assume every crucial, every carefree project that relates to the bettering of someone, and often, of everyone.
I want mutual engagement, I want interpersonal terms of affinity. For all my days, I will intelligently taunt every useless item of societarian, bigger-than-me-bigger-than-you productivist, “electoralism forever”, “fuck you get a job” liberal conservative fuckery that whines and cries and shits itself when those who endure express feelings against it all.
Endless jerk-off gestures directed at every reflexive paternalism against the thoughtful reflex to live.
“Bourgeois and proletarian, though clashing over questions of class, of power and of the belly, still always remained united in common hatred against the great vagabonds of the spirit, against the solitaries of the idea. Against all those stricken by thought, against all those transfigured by a higher beauty.” — II, Toward the Creative Nothing
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Break the course that implicates the lives it ravages with humanist impunity.
Negative approach for effectiveness, for punching through. Positive approach for nourishing, for sustaining — only after the negative has sufficiently made space for the [actual possibility of sustaining] the positive, only after the careful, decisive and directed negative has replaced the overall, spiritually and physically encumbering negative with the overall, spiritually and physically rejuvenating positive.
Every order under the sun that arose from the ruins of something else haphazardly followed some similar formula, only compiled after each and every fact. Now, in my raising the assessments that bore fruits of fact, is the abandoning of “order”, the abolition of “rule” in favor of individual lives, of life’s common domain freely given soundness.
This is said in disregard of the armchair relativism of what is “Positive” and what is “Negative.” What I mean should be clear. “Negative” in the context of social struggle means “done with negation, done with a sober embrace of our being at odds, being a force confronting a contrary force of response, response to the response. Done with a recognition of the social circuits and the potential for their running out of gas from our lack of feeding ourselves into them.” “Positive” in the context of social struggle means “done with self-defeating impotence, suicidal participatory investments in the many zones of spectacle, of a new managerial sorrow, with no mind for the human stoicism that disproves every commandment of societarian ‘Realism.’”
There is no further useful esotericism to this. There is no valid discussion centered on the new societal salvation to sit quietly in the casual masochism of tolerance for it, for the delusion that it brings about the soundest resolution, that anyone outside of the individual can know, that even they can know what resolution on strict terms of society is to anything that matters to them. (If one has never known a life of making crude habitation every day or every week while living out of a bag or two, it can be difficult to place it at first, but the average human being really does interact with their own regional and global life conditions as if they are meandering in and out of encampments of the dejected. Because they are in some sense or other. Power is very much obstructed from them. Official power, and equally so, individual power is broadly calculated on social terms to simply be crime. And in defiance of every working of the allegiances that ensure, that lend all the aid they can to the mission of permanent subjugation, persecution, mockery of the heartfelt, torture of the body and shattering of the spirit — not one form of blunt, substantive defiance will get a word or rebuke from anyone who matters.)
You either do the negative force -> to -> positive intention in the proper sequence and reap the spoils, or you delude yourself with some other sequence which only reaps spoiled, Negative fruits. (Examining the spiral of chronology, it is not strictly ourselves who failed ourselves at strictly here & now.)
It is precisely those tendencies that moralistically implore a civic coercion of initial positivity (e.g., a hatred for all practicable diversity, a fundamentalism of turn the other cheek, a celebration of signifiers and stagnations), making a humanist sin of going past every obstacle, realizing the vital will to dare and to surpass.
This is what is responsible for us dying each and every minute. Not dying, necessarily, as in bodily cessation of vital functions, but dying as in always hurrying every moment, as if with merited purpose, but in truth, in bitter subconscious awareness, bearing none at all. The latter is at least something of the norm for those residing North of the equator, seamlessly corralled away from struggle, from the raw substance of being unabashedly fucked over, fawning over the jangling of cultural keys in between state bombings of children.
Among the broken glass, the “less lethal” casings, the various objects set ablaze upon the same ground of the coming disintegrations — the old world in the hospice care of those whom it has fucked over — we find no urgency to define and repeatedly declare a position. This is because my position cannot be comfortably pinpointed on someone else’s map, and probably neither can yours, no matter the affinity with this or that notion, no matter the rivalry between this or that sect. It is my position, where I stand, it is my affair whose basis is me and me alone.
It is me alone who determines where next it will stand beside me, within me — if I will ever stand again after today, after tomorrow. And I want this to be the germ of the idea for everyone curious, for everyone rightly concerned. And life, generally, concerns everyone. And every element of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant machination of theocratic white supremacist terror wearing warped, demonic emulations of smiles claiming “secular democracy” is proved, proved to be an active threat to all life interested in living and growing without terror, in the genuine reaping of peace and love.
Surely it is clear now that putting the positive before the negative is the greatest preemptive falling upon one’s own sword — that is, if one’s moralism allows them to affirm any use of arms, to affirm any actual win in the say over one’s own life. Our liberals are pious toward their own special place in their dimension of fascism.
Sacrifice for the ideal is antithetical to the ideal of living — which must contain even in its self-regulating practice an opening for a breath of basic & vital recognition, of self & whole, if not the odd low chuckle, or the resonance of a wholehearted laugh. A meal, warmth, company. If there can truly be no joy, no semblance of a break from the tides that batter us, there can truly be no life, and nor should there be.
The ideal is that all should live and do with clarity, potency, access, mutual passion and a good heart, given everything in life to remain a good heart. To make a good heart as easy as breathing.
One cannot die or be ensnared as means, as journey of achieving this. And no achievement is worth the loss of the ability to enjoy it oneself.
The anarchist, the average person tired of the many years of the middle, late and end-stages, tired of the whole set of totally abysmal stages, simply wants to enjoy life, simply wants the careful arrangements and performances of our shared iteration of slavery to be overwhelmed with color, chaos and ruckus. From there, to make the mutual and solitary business of life sound, substantive and shared agreeably as possible for all concerned.
Because fuck it all anyway. The adaptive nature of what those in their own anarchic realizations want to happen, in this or that time frame, in this or that context, and how, will welcome the relevant lightheartedness that manages to carry the turbulent motions of the intentions in action, even in the hurricane. A disdain for every self-aggrandizing “Great Vision” of every weirdo touting opaque ideologies becomes the evolving trust in ourselves. The simplest, most primordial seed of it all predates every vision, every language to articulate. The “great visionaries” should be more concerned with truly proving the anarchists wrong rather than saying they already have, doing ten more book clubs for every Food Not Bombs cluster of friends feeding and conversing with the public, pursuing the interpersonal level of equals becoming the expansive safeguard of life. Replace the FNB with anything you want. One will never be limited to book clubs, official party committees, the future politburo preconfigrations. No idea can soundly expect to override the boldest, most longstanding ills while also confining itself to self-obsession as idea, ritual mourning of a disgraced people group (infantilized as props for dogmatic, self-obsessed models,) old stagnated frames of critique, idea only as idea, prejudiced against all personal assessment and reassessment, against all flexibility, against all action arising therefrom.
Prove us wrong! Climb the mountains that are supposedly forbidden to me, somehow, by the religion you assume I have in “Chaos”.
Prove us wrong, that states protecting coercive arrangements of selective/exclusive ownership, that the protracted grafting of money and its logics onto food, water, medicine and knowledge, that the same mandate for surrender to work revised according to new mythological enthusiasm can accommodate the infinity of every infinite possibility of life as person, of life as dimension!
The wheel that zealots hate when it turns away from them is always turning, at varying paces, without ceasing, until all matter and energy vanish.
At some point, the wheel is going to rest upon a realization, consistently thrown physically or verbally into the centers of new intrigue into new tyranny, that what is called the social contract is simply the very first tradition of domination, the very first calcification of rule carried into and against every succeeding formation of intelligence and goodwill: enduring, endeavoring to extend the fields of life below new and better skies, the contents likely not ours to see to in our lifetimes.
Entitlement. Not to wellness, as if to breathe is to behave entitled. (In which case, hey, conservative boomers: chop fucking chop, let’s go!) Entitlement to securing a grasp after you’re gone, as if it’s your world. (“I have to leave the grandchildren something: a shit hole that’s only attractive to capitalist vampires from far and wide.”) That’s what we’ve tolerated, killed ourselves in the tolerance of. So many “astute” Thinkers® of ultraconservatism in 2026, always weaving seedless non-fruits of babble for the Gone Too Far impression of tolerating human variation. And here we are, staring at all the consequences of agreeing, from a very different angle, beating them in theory and practice as life.
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Bitterly unsettling, how I see and understand very bluntly: my life, any life is made to simply Not Matter amid the cackling, bustling platinum priorities of the world that pants and froths at the jowls for the glittery magic of owning class conditioning, necessary for a cemented and expanded reemergence of slavery. Torturous and distracting in all things, to see my hyper-attentiveness to this rebuked, scoffed at, remarks about The Handmaid’s Tale, Nineteen Eighty-Four and the like, persisting in what refuses to challenge and confront such embodiments.
“Nothing we can do, nothing we can do...”
I am assured in nothing but how I understand the brokenness, in tandem with the self-betrayed potential of human life. And so I have to assume that probability, in spite of every closing window, will eventually afford the spun, wrung and dried-out lives to have their stopped clock moment, as so many already do within the unique, outpouring confines of a person. Without a mind for any aesthetic quality of that translated to the practice of a life taking on tall, difficult tasks, I see it as a kind of step-sibling to the same shit that’s been, but with some significant weight found missing at its core.
Space to plant anew. Simply live. Not toward a character of simplicity, as in minimalism, as in “Simple living”, but to Simply live out the process of nourishing and tending to simply living. To live is not to do one single and total action. That would be utter nonsense. To live is to move through life in a personal effort of balancing, making complementary & sound certain items from a bundle: instinct, contemplation, concept, concern, critical discernment, creativity, warmth, compassion, some organic measures of stoicism, cynicism, hedonism, some reliance on the decisive discussions with fellow humans and those silent discussions internally to self.
We have lived drastically unbalanced, in no flatly mathematical sense, and fought both ourselves and our dearest loved ones to compensate by merely, strictly surviving, some, just barely, without life. Without love for the eternal mundanity of eternal tragedy, perpetual loss, trinkets of reward for servility, exploding in horrific displays of compressed resentment, rabid malice against particular existences, seeing any and all kindness as something to bastardize and perform in order to secure a seat, an office, an audience, an army.
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A drum sounds through the street.
I hear, in the firmness of succession, that it is beat by the very first voice to announce that vital cry against the descent into this social valley, singing the vantage: the wide sprawling towers of individual peaks.
It calls for you. Will you meet it? I’ve just now laced my last eyelet.
Will you meet me there?
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Some force within compels us to study the free and fettered dimensions alike. This forceful essence is only applicable through being shaped by hearts, minds, spirits.
What are words when you’re angry and alive?