Et plus tard un Ange, entrouvrant les portes,
Viendra ranimer, fidèle et joyeux,
Les miroirs ternis et les flammes mortesA faithful Angel at the door
Will wipe the tarnish off and try
To bring us back to life once more.— 'La Mort des amants' ('The Death of Lovers'), 1857
Charles Baudelaire Transl. Walter Martin, FyfieldBooks
Note: Yes, I am basically just rambling here.
Wakefulness made torture. Waking at all made the worst insult.
I say so with the understanding that this is little difference from what Mexican, Guatemalan, Honduran, Canadian, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Serbian, Croatian, Kurdish, Syrian, Egyptian, Sudanese, Ghanaian, South African, Ukrainian, Russian, Tibetan, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Indonesian, Kānaka Maoli and Pacific peoples all enter into at the start of every grueling increment of the daily life of every individual human life. But it is especially damning to enter into this while residing in the most hated, most gluttonously wealthy, shamelessly homicidal shit hole on Earth.
Three crows in the early morning are perched on a billboard that raises AI-assisted designer advertisements along the sprawling sum of the stark workings of the state: every hostile design, every liminal square foot, every spiritually vacant simulation of "human" performed by every underling strongmen, every duped, dispossessed working class person always frantically editing reality to budge within their beloved "grand", "permanent" cosmic simplicities in order to excuse self-contradiction. In order to turn away from the inconveniences of learning, growing, adapting and acting as a reasonable human. To set something immature, cheap and snide in its place. To persist in a completely baseless pride, in willful and sanctified ugliness for the mission of lasting "Joy" in the naked assault of others.
These are the victors in that mission: the petulant zombies who brace and bend themselves to maintain a simulation, a series of careful images of a life that others envy, of a heart given over to the existent domination. And these are the ones we mourn the presence of, taken by their sin of refusing to bow: the bold, the bright, the caring, the loving, the truly loved.
This is all anything has ever weighed on. Glance around the sum of our dread, where it arises: see that it emits from social irons heated in screaming rhetoric, from personal regret for not sooner treating this Stark Total like the model of the extermination camp enlarged, refined and plastered across the Earth the way it's proved time and time again to be. It all weighs on the paranoid whims of the excitable and entitled princes of every age. It weighs on what they do to secure a suitably outlandish office to use as the facility for their improvident white collar crimes, their brazen punishment of those not bloated with fuck-all wealth, their brazen punishment for not glorifying and celebrating every hideous bourgeois faculty.
This merely animated death rammed into "normality", insurmountably vexing to those who revere it with "god" as a prop, enriches itself with their sacrifices, becomes their duped conviction while digging downward (insisting with ever-heightened anxiety that their podcast daddy says they're really digging upward), becomes the gluttony for buffoonish "masculinity", becomes the last act of life for the awkward young adult made victim of some domination, some allegiance to fatal rage disguised as something healing, going on to become resigned, isolated — embarrassing themselves on comment sections — or one of the daily active shooters.
For the latter, in the midst of daily white supremacist terror, we never escape the incessant demand for disarmament, for the otherizing and generalizing of those who have skill, knowledge and well-handled responsibility with arms coupled with a rational and friendly disposition, the utterly idiotic pseudo-intellectualizing drivel that tries to paint the existing liberal society as perfect, unquestionable and inherently correct in confiscating inhabitants' means of defending their person and possessions. ("If the government wants to take your possessions and murder everyone you love because they're afraid that you're all a threat, they will, and that is a reason to not be an anarchist and simply accept disempowerment without quarrel. Trust me, it is better to be powerless and alive in the numbness of dimming circulation without real joy than to be dead and rid of it all anyway.") Tying this all together is the sad, unyielding refusal to hear and consider any suggestion that this sum operation of a simulation of life, that these Failures By Design currently shit-kicked around by a mafia administration of a colonial occupational government on Stolen Land is ultimately responsible for the bottoms of many peoples' hearts and souls falling out. None of this is to be taken as love for oblivious, ego rush-addicted "FAFO" 2A lift kit princesses pretending to be men as they rant and rave about trans people, like me, not deserving 2nd Amendment rights on the basis of my transness. I wonder if that is the only breadcrumb of a right that they would be okay seeing me stripped of.
Liberals: you suck and you have no relevant "ideas." Stop acting like you do. Even in the context of someone preaching a romantic hope for a healed so-called United States, you refuse to accept the reality that, directly after the very first constitutional right is the second constitutional right.
First Amendment
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Second Amendment
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Go ahead and do your gymnastics over "interpretation". Just understand that it will remain a weak and failing move. It will remain a repeated dodging of reality, thus a reliable gift to right-wing talking heads who use the topic of weaponry as weaponry. Not wanting mass shootings does not necessitate any infringement. It necessitates, in the immediate, single-payer healthcare, fully funded public and higher education, access to help. But it also necessitates, in the macro, a discontinuing of alienated, trademarked simulations of living.
This is all said, knowing and urging others to know, that no "right" on a two-hundred and thirty year-old document promising the right to bear arms, that no "protection" shouted from the rooftops of a progressive stage play made landmark legislation is impervious to a capable, hostile power with arsenals upon arsenals of munitions and technologies, a whole set of rhetoric and a separate set of designs for exceptions that will never give a fuck in hell about your reaction video after the matter.
Whatever power you yourself would be capable of, whatever might happen, is up to you. Not whether some ancient order gives you permission, not whether some twerp centuries later wants to nullify or affirm that false "graciousness." Permission over self is broccoli to the happy-go-lucky suicides of societarianism, always pushing it off the plate of civic acceptability when permission over others is not even contemplated on the parts of the despots aiming guns at far better heads than their own. Potential is necessarily negation. Standing on your own permission over what affects your own self is always an act of negating what path is imposed. Accepting hopeless empty-handedness in advance, reviling the bare minimum, opting to kit oneself solely with spiteful words, or teary whimpers and stammers, is the consensual beginning of one's end. It is a discarding of potential generally. It asserts that a specific set of possibilities (in this case, arms and their proper use) are threats to all others. Where in truth, in the known outside reality of working people that aggravates Liberal delirium, these possibilities are left to be ravaged by owning class vultures and their state when not properly stood on and defended. They advocate for being unable to self-defend because of an inherently correct trust in a government to make us safe, but instead turning out to make it so that resistance to obviously harmful policy directives is now only futile. This foresight is certainly not the exclusive, warped possession of MAGA Alabama trailer park residents. It was in fact forged and tempered by black and indigenous peoples enduring everything that historical colonial powers would haphazardly weave into whiteness.
Potential is necessarily negation. It has simply been the persistent social weather battering socialized individuals that the negations we've grown up with are against the greatest, most delightful fibers of being alive, against the support and sustenance of health and wellness. They have been negations of ourselves, of our best contents, of potential recognizable in anything outside economic participation. They have been the black centers aimed outward of a simulation of life operating on managerial banality, everyday desperations and stunning use of state violence. We have not strolled without urgency through our places in the world, calmly appreciating delightful happenings and prudent faculties as pleasantly ordinary fixtures of our everyday settings and conditions. We have instead been moved to tears when reminded of anything beautiful and kind ever existing, for ever coming near, however briefly dispelling the numb permanence of the concrete, the company logos, the loneliness and the pounding sense of wanting the end.
We have become so hideously bound to a routine, fantastical delusion. Something sown after WWII that went through many toxic evolutions: an optimistic vision of a functioning society, wherein each and every one at once is encouraged to be a "distinguished" individual among the rabble... necessitating and simultaneously rebuking the rabble... in order to make the rabble envious, make them want to be like them, yet submissive, permanently affirming of that particularly distinguished superiority of an individual "owning" the rabble. The snide hero protagonist of the Fight Club 2 fan film. Delirious and gender dysphoric "men" alike doing everything but casually greeting each other by immediately inhaling one another's musk hungrily, then angrily, engaging in a [very gay-looking but Absolutely Officially Heterosexual way] physical dominance competition ritual as every not-male person in the board meeting stares uncomfortably off into space, waiting for it to conclude. We already do such in very fragmented conventions.
The rings of this society are the outer: the tired rabble of the uninterested or dissident; the middle ring: the hyperactive rabble of the duped, the engaged; and the innermost ring: the rabble of competing "deities" in MMA matches, over how tanned and potent-smelling someone's ballsack is or to what level of outrageous a statement can be made on shit-grin podcast number 876,923,138 or what horrible war crime or sex crime can get a presidential pardon coupled with the detonating of 760 United Nations Plaza and the massacre of all persons within. Participation trophies of the mid 1990s through 2008 have entirely morphed into every stupid publicity stunt of dumbshit 20 year old bimbo nazis going into a college class, smearing her avocado toast feces on the page with the sign of the cross drawn in her shit, submitting the shit-crusted page and getting faculty fired for giving a failing grade and also for being a trans student instructor. Mama Bear MAGA lawyers coming in hot, ready to do white christian sharia jurisprudence, only to be beheaded later for trying to be in a position of authority as a womb-carrier.
Assertion, poor performance of assertion deluding itself of "greatness", becomes the language. The language is no longer "Am I fed? Am I sheltered? Do I have an overall worthwhile existence? Do the people around me have an incentive to treat me decently?" This is all gone, forgotten. Until you can't pay your rent or mortgage. Then a veil gets peeled off of what you thought this "Life" is. Capitalism turns out not to be such a sweet fuckin' deal.
Yep. This is how it is. We awake, inhale our choice flatulence and deliriants, then rampage through the world like it's all our playground to abuse, break and discard. Never to improve, adapt and reasonably balance. Worse still if one has anymore than millions of dollars from connections with private death squad technologies or the like. That is the standard for living and doing: not a standard of interrelating on free and level ground, but of pursuing hierarchies within hierarchies. The notion that the existence of a hierarchy is the seed of life, with living exaltation belonging to the in-group.
All flows in its varied rage, hubris and drunkenness, draining into the dim corners of validation before rest, if any. But for the proud moderate, the radically Classical Liberal, it all drains into the comforting sets of rituals in service to what amounts to fantasy. The collective speaking-in-tongues of Liberal values evidently failed — evidently made a resurrection project through a blend of satisfying intellectual figures and an emotional sense of precedented rightness — the meandering, unsated mass of people in social and political chains resign to ornaments, to gambling on video game markets for skins, to stupid passing remarks in the unwanted presence at the unwanted settings. And the proud moderate, the radically Classical Liberal is not only unaware by choice of any problem with that — but is prepared to call the police on any substantive critique, as is their purpose. The project was always obvious.
A gray, imposing wall, whose foundation was designed in the first divisions of the spheres of life, is gradually widened. We who are older than twenty-five as of 2026 remember noticing it once, when younger, morbidly chuckling or finding ourselves powerlessly indifferent. Then we found ourselves looking again, at ten or fifteen years later, as we carried something dreadful in our stomachs, and something broke. We've been tempered, we found the real pieces of ourselves in hopeless brooding, forsaken. Souls mature in the shadow of, believing to be inherent, what obstructs the free form of living, the free resolution of problems freely confronted. The confronting of problems, their sources, with free thought and refined reason. Souls take the wall to mean the root of life itself, while the complete collection of possibilities in life loses immediacy, becomes a bygone novelty.
And any evocation of that novelty that would raise it up to be in the vicinity of the crux of this canvas for social "greatness" must somehow also be in agreement with what retains a paternalist instrument of punishment, of fear. It must stop in the middle of everything in ten minute intervals to reiterate that through some "grace of suffering", through "trustworthy overseers", we will find Light. But for over five lifetimes, there has been None. Only the historical hallucinated impressions of it in heroin, the New Left, Haight-Ashbury, MC5 concerts, the warm-up moments before the first acts of "Woodstock West." We are right back where we were, ready to fight to win in order to fight hard to lose and lick wounds later, doing it again forever, never ending the spitting and pissing on anarchists. We are right back to insisting that the goodness of society out from its "Rare" evil rests on a great and elaborate change of function and purpose, as though the purpose of a nuclear weapon could be made to feed and educate.
We have continued to tell ourselves that it is only "the bad others", defined "Correctly", that need punishing, while continuing to ignore what makes these unacquainted human siblings "bad" "others". It brought a great flare of perverted joy to the hearts of those deeply fractured individuals to see smartphone footage of mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters of color who speak Spanish ripped from cars, parents' arms, zip tied naked out in the cold, tear gassed on Halloween. How long until bombs are dropped here like they are in Gaza? How long until seventy-one year-old shit-stains are chuckling behind their smartphones watching the Nashville queer community executed up against a wall?
I don't know what this is called. I don't know what you call it when every section of life is no longer a part of a whole structure, but the splintered walls and shattered glass of danger, of the sense of being safe and at-home nowhere.
Our everything from nothing — this doing everything to gain nothing. Nothing dense with spiritual nutrients. Everything dense with poison. Poison sanctified. Poison made "god".
Here is all that the natalist invents specks of trademarked "Hope" within. Yes, I am an evil and cruel anti-natalist because I understand that it is Doing The Bare Minimum to make life okay to live before forcibly making new individual humans become injured by its incrementally worsening poor condition.
But surely Miss Rachel, continued manufacture of tablet computers, continued precious mineral mining for their manufacture and comically absurd draconian state intervention with Internet surveillance beginning with age verification will supply every little building block of a sane and somewhat exploitably "Okay" person — up until the flashes of every sober account of the violent, self-assuring, life-sapping events of history, made such by capital's every predatory urge, concusses the hope-groomed mind of the person staring into the onset of teenage years, wondering what the fuck put them in the worse mess they will have to deal with then.
All the battle is somehow corralled into seeing, seeing, seeing. "Make sure people see this." Why? What are they doing with having seen? "No Kings" every quarter of a year? We will further exhaust every sliver of bacteria on Earth to avoid admitting that capitalism, its state, its hostile, cancerous civilization and its spectacles of distraction and bickering have been the worst things for humans, animals and life generally. We will continue to flee from facing the reality that it is the fatal mistake of the "Brilliance" of humanity to become metaphorically yet fittingly addicted to meth, ketamine and angry white guy podcasters. And somehow, the prospect that "Pres." Dump will eat his last Big Mac soon does not pull me away from the thousand-yard stare into the worse intensities to come of any of this.
It only digs the anxious foxhole in the pit of my stomach deeper to think of propagandized nineteen year-olds in 2030 looking around, sweating bullets, about to cry, asking, "W-w-what's next? Chat? Please?..."
Because then that's when they begin explicitly rationalizing further disquieting horrors.
Some made-up new dawn said never to fade... striking me as though the author was convinced that it's a grinning threat for a "good time."
Some allegedly magnificent pillar of beleaguered "greatness". Every section of politics holds some single-issue working group, among the too many to compile, of "the revival" of what never truly was. Yet another copy-paste cis man or copy-paste cis woman with yet another podcast and a thousand-dollar tailored image to piss in your ear about "Building a big tent" in the midst of the forced casualization of every nazi tactic, very much not promised to be undone when the orange slug finally crosses that mortal doorway.
“The Golden Age.” Said with the intent of inspiring trust. Fulfilling only a boiling revulsion to everything ultimately begging for death, imposing it outward the Entire Way Down.
The lowest, self-hating masochist would not ask for any more. The lowest, self-hating masochist would manage to pluck the lone scintilla of self-respect from under the boot — biting, stabbing. Anything.
But not "us —" the "us" always employed as a socio-spiritual lasso to try to bind the mass social misery to me as an individual, to whatever courses my aspirations would or would not adapt to. So-called Christ-love invoked for a vehicle to celebrate whiteness and intensify its violence. So-called progressive Christ-love invoked to guilt me into doing free labor or being a token. All the same. No "us" and no Christ-love will save anything while you give up on yourself, while I give up on myself. All, evermore, the bane of the free.
It is as if the toolbox used to reach the conclusion, reached many times before by many others better than me, has been tossed from general, mature consideration: that the arrangements of command (from morality, politics, society), are incompatible with, and in fact detrimental to, our owed contentedness, our possession of and capability with self-ownership, that has not yet been known by those who now pay rent, stress over income and assert a contrived and incoherent purpose in the urban, suburban and rural societies.
It is the saddest thing to see humans so incapable, incapable of even seeing: it is the possibility for personal contentedness by self-ownership that we may actually remove any basis for any real worry of random, personal injury — as the abolition of society and its desperation that causes inner class violence will open the way for everything, including self-defense and redress, by the voluntary associations that affirm and support this, by every individual's agency enriched by this.
I do not walk around with a red flag of a radical "New way of life" that everyone must be a part of. I am against politics, I am against any compulsory participation in any affairs of any concentration of people. And as an anarchist, I come out from the myriad struggles, internally and from a vision standpoint, of the broader American left. My section was the bottom left of the now rightly despised political compass, very much a Kropotkin fan. My education came out from the left, but I certainly did not go on to become right-wing or far-right by any means. I flirted with the post-left anarchy label, but I feel at this moment that it was only somewhat suitable of a term to use at the end of the 2010s. As well as the fact that a good deal of liberals presently use "post-left" to refer to figures like Jimmy Dore. Now, almost every self-identifying anarchist who is not solely obsessed with workers' self-management of AI data centers and industrial chemical plants are implicitly post-left.
I will take every chance to rebuke the hypocrisy of weird, angry evangelical old men in equal proportion to every chance to mock the aging sex pest white leftist who haunts social circles of anti-authoritarian feminine and gender non-conforming people.
But one is repulsed by reality if they think that "There is too much hate for The Right." Well, no shit, dumbass. Who has proclaimed entitlement to All Power for the entire existence of politics and economy in the so-called United States and elsewhere?
All purpose, put forth by the yapping vampires on the screens of 18 to 60 year-old white men, seems now to merely generate vague "purpose" to hype young men up to be an action drama movie hero by mass murdering leftists, immigrants and queer/gender non-conforming people. Without a lick of substance that sincerely does verifiable good for oneself and others. "Substance" may as well have been officially labeled "Woke" and "Gay" by executive order. Stephen Miller may as well go right ahead, do a line of the designer meth swirling around this White House, go up on stage and scream himself into a stroke about how "it is only acceptable to feel an imposing heterosexual libido, hunger for bloody meat and ceaseless homicidal rage. Nothing else. Any other feeling will make you a terror suspect. Smiling or giggling will get you summarily executed. Sharia law is bad and we would never do that with the bible."
At some point, if we live — by some fucking outstanding proof of something loving and transcendent — we will have to admit that our culture had cut its own reigns and allowed twisted vampires to groom people into surrendering all worthwhile corridors of a sound and friendly life, into seeking a final ego-tickling grin in consistently unnecessary death, all in service to Peter Thiel. All in service to whatever Shadow The Hedgehog fedora-wearing moniker they give to their ultra-white supremacist pro-rape, ego-hugging annihilation AI "god."
Awesome. Proud of you.
You've done an outstanding job — truly perfected the science — of refusing to understand the value of taking any initiative at all in truly becoming a better person.
No, no. I get it. I do.
It was too hard for you to figure out how to distinguish between legitimate dialog/writing and what is shameless tactical rhetoric with no factual or genuine intellectual basis.
It was too hard to maybe start with some Wikipedia articles, to maybe read some texts on archives online, to maybe order a few paperback books (WHAT!? HOLY FUCK!) that do not include The Turner Diaries, et al., and to maybe talk candidly but respectfully with people you thought you'd Only Disagree With (NO! IMPOSSIBLE!).
I know it's easy to run with the Kindergarten assumption, well past embarrassment, that every one of us who opposes your aimless dog-chasing-the-car horseshit that affects all our lives negatively are solely opposed because of MY TEAM vs. THE ENEMY TEAM dynamics. This is the thinking of someone who enjoys owning and displaying edgy books on shelves, but without owning the ability to recount a single sentence of real worth from any of them.
We are opposed because we cherish life overall having quality, potential and meaning. Meaning that we ourselves derive from the substance of life that all are welcome to lend a hand in — not the facades of "meaning" shouted at us to be taken seriously without a hair of criticism.
No, hold on. I get it. Life is unfair when it doesn't exclusively pamper and coddle your every fucked up urge regarding other people. I get it. It's unfair when you have to actually do the work of actually making sense. Thank fucking god that Daddy Dump is going to make hurting a white "boy's" already flimsy, dainty heart an expedited capital punishment — how a big, thick-skinned Man does.
I get that it was always easier to just keep holding onto indignant tantruming, holding onto mythological entitlements, than to grow around the wounds of being wrong, of observably struggling with childishness, of needing an indefinite validation IV drip, of needing a consistent set of faces to stare at you with wide eyes and a static grin, nodding at every three words you vomit up. If memory serves, people were saying this kind of thing about people like me roughly ten years ago. Which is funny, because as queer and trans people, we don't really get to just turn off the disagreements with our existences unless we give into your wish for all of us to not exist in public life, or at all. Which collapses the now mostly abandoned idea that safe spaces were an effective way of shutting out the world.
Something, table turn, something...
But hey — I get it. You in particular deserve your Better, More Correct Safe Space, except it's All Of Society. Even though it Already Fucking Is. I get that that's the situation you're thrashing around in, saying it's everyone else's fault. Like how you accused every single person of acting who genuinely experienced harm and cruelty. Something you never have and probably never will, tragically.
Being blunt, these deranged simulations of "good men" are pampered, stupid, easily-offended and stubborn. And maybe most of their individual lives are forfeit. How do you expect to have an okay world for anyone when you decide to make careers and followings out of screaming that "You know, it's actually good and masculine and godlike if you shit directly into your food source before you feed your family. Also, vaccines will transgender your gender and make Jesus Maynard Christ weep." If you put every individual like this in a room and try to have a mild-mannered, factual information-driven interrogation of their assertions, after two hours, he will simply start sobbing. "I don't know. I don't know. I just wanted to be seen and heard and validated. I don't know." Prove me wrong. Prove to me that there is literally anything at all to these fucking Sensational Ordeals, these fucking Public Event Ego Therapy Sessions expected to be taken seriously.
It is understood that these types oppose whatever "social progress" is supposed to be at this point. But they cannot continue to get away with pretending that their behavior and rhetoric does not advocate for Pure Unrest, Pure Dysfunction and Pure Regression as daily life.
Probably four years before transitioning, I understood, as a deluded, self-describing "male" at that time, that I needed to shut up. In that center of the 2010s, when feminist, queer and trans voices were harmonizing in calls for human decency, I did not get angry, I did not demand praise for being loud, dishonest and stupid. I knew that I needed to shut up, read, read responses to the material, read responses to that material and the response to that material. And so on. I did not remain calm and listen because I was a "Cuck." I simply saw no reason to wrap my arms and legs around sanctified oversimplifications and scream at everyone not to treat me like a child. It simply struck me as enlightening to listen to group call discussions on YouTube from trans voices about trans existence as a then-cis "male." It felt good to stop panicking over whether or not some cheap, satisfying jab is based in reality and to simply learn about things in order to inform one's reasoning, one's understanding. (In regards to improving mental health, people need to understand what it is to get situated in a better mindset per the individual, which is very difficult to recognize the importance of when one is committed to the losing fight against reality. Not in a purely socio-political sense, but in a combined set of improvements that are locked onto no definite end goal but the passive ease found in sharpening oneself overall.)
Alongside mental and intellectual improvement, I knew that I needed to get my shit together. I knew that I needed to take walks, look around at nature, go to coffeeshops, see life, be among the world casually as myself. Not as any puffed-up "Badass" unable to temper the compulsion to grab the wheel of everything, claiming to steer the ship through rough waters, but ultimately running everything aground, lying and spiraling at the end of every dumpster fire of an endeavor. And you know what? All of this contributed to me finding a loving partner, renting my first home, making friends in face-to-face physical settings and generally aiding in the path to who I am now. I'm better for it, and yet find myself heartbroken that this is all apparently impossible for some who tried to dig into the brokenness to find "Enlightenment."
After living through the version 2.1-3.2.9 of the Contemporary American Culture War c. 2013-2021 horseshit, I look at having gone through 2025 the way that a US Army Lieutenant looks around at the bagged-up 18-23 year-old bodies lined up for extraction alongside Dong Ap Bia. That same, technologically-worsened LBJ, Nixonian hubris-driven fuckery & fallout of Vietnam has been supercharged and dropped here, coast to coast, bottom to top, as domestic meltdowns in the form of millions of people's health insurance, pediatric cancer research, food assistance, Medicare coverage for every single thing Republicans demonize, on and on. "Winning," "Greatness". Whatever makes use of pretty words to put lipstick on a suicide cult. What every overseas friend rightly calls "America's logical conclusion."
All these considered, I have now the capability to imagine what these young "men's" lives were like that led them where they are now. But I wish I fucking didn't. I choose not to consider every possible variable of fucked up parents, economically ravaged pockets of wartime and post-war communities, shitty "friends", bullying, drugs, jail, etc.
And then you realize that the ethno-nationalist baby boomers are doing everything in their power to see to it that those lonely and bigoted late teenagers and young adults on whatever platform go on to be the new William Luther Pierce, the new Timothy McVeigh, the new Christchurch shooter, the new Charleston shooter. The nazi boomers are content with dying off so long as their successors exit the 1970s-1990s reserved spaces for white supremacist movements (where anti-fascists with spines would beat their asses) and begin throwing up the salute with all their chest, fighting for policy that ultimately leads to extermination and global conquest through less and less subtle destabilization and total war.
Having researched these types more than my stomach could handle, I would urge others to appreciate the looming social hell in equal amount with the opportunity to demonstrate life as freely lived, however it may best take form.
All I ever wanted for you fuckers was to use access to information for a better personal and shared life. But instead, you invented mythologies to justify punishing everyone who wouldn't give you a pity trophy, who wouldn't kiss you, who wouldn't touch your "penis", who spoke up about your coercive misconduct, who inspired you to literally become a villain in every way possible.
If one's dedication is to making reality agree with their strategically ignorant cruelty, I never want to hear anyone complain about any caste of people in my orbit ever the entire fuck again.
Self-awareness is less of a virtue and more of an indicator of whether to be taken seriously or resolutely moved the fuck aside.
Astonishing how quickly things become worthless. Every direction is a direction at hype. Every post, every group selfie with some deformed gaggle of vampires, every announcement, every scramble of journalists and camera crews to report on the announcement. All of it is to experience, to disseminate hype. To arrive at the spear's tip of hype, wrap up the podcast, the news hour. Go onto the next. And the next.
Why does there have to be a next to any of this? Any of this to mean... it's hard to say exactly. Why do we have to keep self-harming in these many specific ways that never really bring about the prize for suffering? Why do we have to keep searching for a moment of levity or insight within what hates and brutalizes all of it?
Some speak of Pessimism. Plenty of them use the word in a tone and context that evokes for the listener an image of the speaker walking into a shit-smeared public bathroom. A number of liberals think it to be a useful, strategic pejorative. An even lesser portion of radicals will intentionally align with the word or find it appropriate for a subject matter. (From others, pointing usually to Schopenhauer, but from me, pointing to Ardent Press' Anarcho-Pessimism: the collected writings of Laurance Labadie.)
Some speak of Pessimism, either contextually or universally, either in the sense of wage labor or in the sense of being alive at all. I speak of it by speaking of Nihil, the empty unused space in ourselves and in every concept (alleged to be occupied by a shining gold pillar of Perfect Truth), which for me points to a "Pessimism" that is universal in the social sense. This does not mean that we each have no friends, no family and no love. It instead means an understanding that to create definite structures of depersonalization deluded as a service to togetherness (in order to construct or reconstruct any social) is to negate the richest contents of people coming together, is to dissolve the spirit of togetherness among individuals in favor of social capital, pointless competition and bitterness. The basis of all society.
That is the entirety of my "Pessimism." That people have been chained with custom colored links to the existent social pillars and started thinking of themselves as autonomously chained. And that trying to begin to do the work of bettering life within what is systematically anti-life is like searching for life advice in a televangelist.
Seeing, feeling and knowing this: every optimism that comes from anyone even slightly upper class from me may as well have "KYS" ("K--- Your Self") tattooed on its face. Every optimism is an optimism in media, in the new face in Washington, in the symbolic mockery, in the fumbling unrest, in the poetic placing of our time, our failure to properly assert and sustain life against the appendages of animated death.
"Make sure the people see this." Why? So they can type as fast as they possibly can into their favorite Twitch chat? Is some journalist going to come on the show? Is the algorithm going to help everyone See the homicidal terror so they can do everything imaginable — except Get Real and Get Smart about taking life overall back?
It seems my station for the time, between 18 and 30 years of age, to make plain, clear-headed Grief for human brightness and love as principles the ever-daring saving grace-to-be — if it were ever to find itself walking up to the podium at some crucial moment in time, when a maximum of fifteen minutes could be put by for the vocabulary of communal self-admissions to flow forth, to resurrect individual and communal being as interdependent, distinct and complimentary.
But that saving grace is not my private property. And it is not perfect communal property. It is something that becomes an individual ownership across all human beings when very explicit priorities are treated clearly as priorities. As priorities that determine whether you live with healthy bonds or die under torture. Some aspect or object has become lodged into the pathway for what physiologically incentivizes the freedom outside of social "freedom": Freeness. The chief concern should be clearing this pathway of everything that attempts to make social decree and personal wellness indissoluble.
It is the project of those I love or would love dearly that life and its wellness are made the center of an anarchy that functions without sanctification. Do not be averse to thinking in relevant generalities about my meaning. This would include anarchist communists, anarchist individualists, green anarchists, nihilist anarchists, Stirnerian anarchists, anarchists of spiritual traditions. It would include feminists, social ecologists, libertarian communists, situationists. All where friendly discussion without competition or coercion is the baseline attitude. It would uplift and make casual queer, transfeminine, transmasculine and gender non-conforming existence. It would include comprehensive educational material on how the casualness of all calm, voluntary existences is nothing to be afraid of. And it would certainly welcome every goodhearted working person who has had enough of All This Shit, without regard for exact intellectual team.
What is anything, really? "Oh, well, you have protons, neutrons and electrons..."
It all just bleeds into whitespace or black plastic the further in you zoom in.
It cannot be that way both materially and socially, politically.
That's when life truly stops being worth it.
I want life to be worth it.
"We will do bad things and they will officially be called 'Good.' If you do good things for good arrangements, you will officially be called 'Bad'."
This did not originate in GOP think tanks or Milton Friedman's cult. Its essence predates the GOP, the democrats, 1492 and the wheel. It was accepted as necessary for globalization to be unquestionable, to drill complicity with disempowerment into populations by the ruthless succession of bloodthirsty state-approved devastations.
Is there now, soon to be revealed by DropSite, The Intercept or other outlets, a "counter-terrorism" intelligence flag for sad, late twenty to early forty year olds who crate dig on Bandcamp, Discogs and respect one or two texts on The Anarchist Library or Libertarian Labyrinth? Will there be a mandate to celebrate every presently reviled villain in film and TV? Will there be mass routine polygraphs to insure that everyone who holds US citizenship has truly become a vile, unlovable asshole like the fragile "boys" in the government need everyone to be?
We are enemies of an enemy order, knowing every order to be an enemy, because we want friendliness and reason to be universal qualities. And every single instance of those qualities, aside from the banal and powerless ones, are sacrificed for the intentional permanence of suffocation by society. That's all there is to it.
And on the flip side of all there is to it, a bundle of sad, angry and guilty people have hijacked the world. The world, if we understand it as a web of globalized economies and travel patterns, was seized by the workings of a sadboy epic marvel movie nazi villain sympathy fantasy, and everyone else who is normal finds themselves more than inconvenienced by this little experiment with their lives. But they tend to simply remain troubled while troubling themselves with the slavery tasks and subsequent numbing from entertainment that perpetuates the trouble.
They tend to posit, even in misery, that there has to be a government, a society, a creed.
Impasse. Impasse.
The human being among the many human beings made a humanity. "You love the human being, therefore you torture the individual human being, the egoist; your love of humanity is the tormenting of human beings." (pg. 277 The Unique and Its Property)
Deep-fried, bass-boosted meme videos are now the most honest expression of our social density pummeling our spirits. Rage, deafening sound, confusion. There sit all the qualities of this sad abusive house party called a society, perhaps spilling out to infect life on a DNA level.
How we perpetually exhaust everything to ultimately get nowhere good, to ultimately severely lower or negligibly "raise" the standard. On... and on... and on...
What does one do? Is there anything that some figure has taken up that is not a "better" land project, a "better" Makhnovshchyna, a "better" Ted K cabin, a "better" ZAD, a "better" outpost of defiance without overcoming?
Always gritting teeth through always being the bitch to the whims of some sad, paranoid old man, brute forcing his way through the last sour days in the actualizing of every John Wayne fantasy over the young and aspiring who would be tasked with wiping his ass and shoveling dirt atop his casket.
I don't mean a president. I don't mean a governor. I don't mean anyone living as of writing.
I mean the general attitude of the settler cowboy compelled to lasso and lynch every honest human expression. Its ghost now holds not simply influence, but political power. Its ghost obscures people's understanding that this is a fatal problem.
We've only known this dark side of life. We've only known any lighter side as a cute novelty, or an object of piety.
We've only known ourselves to sustain the frightening protraction of our deaths. If not bodily, certainly mentally and emotionally.
We've only known ourselves to submit to the new threat out of fear for the stability of our coping dens.
We've only known these restraining chains, painted with pretty patterns, brand names and popular cartoon characters.
Break them. Break them with mad violence and without permission.
Do not rebuild them. Become mad with violence toward any seeking to rebuild and reimpose them.
Do not rebuild them.
Why would you? Why would you ever hang onto the conceptual baubles made mortally heavy by the material consequence of pride-drunken callousness?
Why would you hold to a tapestry of lies, of snide, hurried promises? Why would you renounce control over your own life? Why would you try to tell me that I am obligated to do the same?
Off the algorithm.
Castigate the optimist to tears.
Nourish the old seed.
A life spent disavowing and combating every simple and complicated working of a placid natural world, of a cheery and voluntary set of organic regulations, is worse than no life at all.
It is a swathe of individuals from a poisonous heritage of private ownership and infinite expansion whose pride engaged their decision to be the cancer of human life. To be what is effectively anti-life.
Who is to really stand on the business of life?
Is it the unshakable permanence of our ilk that only when the precious item is fleeting can we really cherish it? Is the sole language of our appreciation only heard in the panicked flailing, in the last-second regret for everything resolutely pursued which had set about eradicating the healthy sinew of flesh & blood life, now showing itself in the conflagrations that torch everything cherished from a place of primal relational reflex?
There are behavioral languages in this hyper-scrutinized web of public affairs, the private, secret and conspiratorial rooms, containers of deceit, basements of hushed exchanges.
How the fuck do we bring ourselves, in a decade or so, to explain how the capitalists and their pawns began insinuating that child sex crimes are no heavy, unforgivable matter?
Kyle Kulinski, whatever your feelings on him aside, is correct to repeatedly point out that we are in an age where postmodernism is at the full disposal of the ultra far-right.
We are in a new wave of twisted hippie dogshit as self-righteously and intentionally dense white people drone on about their various snake oils, entering into some present day Make America Poisoned, Sick, Stupid And Cruel Again And Forever project, dealing deliberately reckless blows to what already crumbling healthcare infrastructures were barely hanging on. I will not go into the heart-wrenching details of what taxes the soul in trying to receive routine care while being trans in the so-called United States in 2025-26-etc.
I find myself strenuously grounded at the center of a wide and vacant plane that seems massive at my own individual scale, yet with livestream footage on the several illuminated rectangles informing my understanding that this is a mere thread on which I balance.
Something can be said about personally conceiving of oneself, internally, as a landscape.
There is a grassland, a patch of trees, perhaps a hill and certainly a sky. In the sight of the latter, there is an ascendant yet grounded wonderment that informs a sense of scale, practicality and resonance. This exists in a profoundly internal sense for every person who has had little choice but to retreat inward as the external environment does nothing but punish and persecute. I don't know of an anarchist who doesn't at least somewhat understand this.
And by now I'm fully confident that only monsters have no sense of this whatsoever. Only monsters walk through the world, interacting as if it's all their own living room to exclude other[ized] people from, make ugly and ultimately destroy bit by bit.
A lot of people just assume that anarchists are all scary super soldiers whose only vision is the unending smashing of windows, the nourishment of nothing else, when the majority of us are really just stressed out teddy bears who are nerds about different historical and contemporary figures, events and ideas.
It is effortless, especially on the self-affirmed left, to throw together the most horrendous, intentional bastardizations of anarchist thought, analysis, aspirations, solutions. Noam Chomsky, who merely flirted with certain politically-fixed anarchist positions at certain times, was outed in the middle of this month with photographic evidence of having been friends with sex crime ring head Jeffrey Epstein. A certain livestreamer thought it "funny" to make a half-assed insinuation of a connection between "anarchists" and wealthy predators, completely throwing the fact that many of us are survivors of predatory violence out the window, all to touch on a shitty, low, unfunny non-joke.
And that is one minuscule point in the greater fabric of this distorted, terrorized bleeding of all culture that would otherwise arise from goodwill, thoughtfulness and sincere creativity. Now we know our every step out of shelter to be far more chaotic under the whims of the state than ever without them. We understand a lack of chaos where there is space to process, emote, recover. We know now that, whatever Chaos is fearmongered about the anarchists, the punks, the artists, the laborers and the unemployed, it must be a Hell Of A Lot Better than the Chaos under the stars & stripes we've known since our earliest memories.
I inhabit this life how I do, limited, isolated, because of how things happened out. I do not advocate for resigning to mundane faculties and a rarity of deviation if one does not have to. But in my case, I had to. I still have to, considering the times. I stopped expecting anything to get any better some time ago.
Being diagnosed as autistic in childhood, the few afflictions that make entering and sustaining wage slavery unbearable for me are not related to being autistic so much as they are to the "corrective measures", the angry parents and counselors pulling their hair out, trying to shift my obvious intellectual readiness in elementary school away from being strictly concerned with geography and creative writing and toward maths and sciences. I possessed every drive relevant to my own sincere interests. But the standard mandate for the full scope of molding a starry-eyed young person to exploit later down the road, as it landed systematically down onto me, was right there staring at me. Sizing me up. Noting every shortcoming in the shadow of leering domination.
The result: struggle, breakdown, becoming centered, more struggle, more breakdown. I as an individual was only marked "Present", dealt with like cattle in the hope that I would go on to take care of the same society, the same coercive non-reality that bludgeoned, violated and broke my spirit.
Now this invasive emulation of "Life" is only characterized by struggle, by breakdown, by centering to become uncentered again — as though some new and better maze is supposed to materialize some time before the deathbed.
The design on the parts of educators and counselors was to instill a good heap of practical, applied knowledge, a very careful measure of critical thinking techniques — up until they're aimed at the arrangements of capital and its State On A Leash.
To this day, I cannot cross-multiply a fraction to save my life. But I can name every national flag on Earth by sight. I can list chronological events that nobody else cares about. I can name the line of iconoclast writers, of anarchist apostates to the Italian and French socialist parties. But none of that assembles an avocado toast. None of that crunches the source code for a mass murder entity's AI ordinance delivery system. None of that maintains the processing components of generating the "SUPER BASED" meme about murdering people of color overseas that will be posted on the Piss Drunk Pete Department Twitter account.
Those who rush to be advocates for me want accommodations and fair access to official recourse if necessary in the course of my being used by those parts of the economy not yet given over to AI. I came closer than I'd like to drop-hanging in my closet by the time I was entering my teenage years thanks to the physical, mental and emotional abuse centers called "Public schools". My only saving grace was being able to finish my school years in a hybrid homeschooling setting, where I could actually develop my own intellect, develop the person who would steer her, without the terror of class bullies. Aside from online assignments to satisfy the state law, I set to work on the base for everything I would go on to pursue fiercely, receiving my High School diploma at the end of those years.
The citizen politicians want to simply "make the best" of what is ultimately terrible, of what only exists because of our fervent worship of abusive dynamics, local and global.
Be it the desperate gardening of the same poisonous weeds of what terror regime presently slithers through everything, or be it the dense theoretical, practical development of the next "best" social smothering of the spirit of the lone bird within each and every one of us, if you can somehow manage to do your political society and economy without sacrificing the soil and water and air of a genuinely healthy existence, I don't really give a fuck. But unlike you, it seems, I understand very well that you cannot.
I've found myself being closer to Jesus now as a non-Christian than I ever really had been as a young acolyte, progressing into what scared, furious no longer young adult I would become, leaving all self-identity bound up with Jesus behind in the process. I do think Jesus, taken as a practical example, is a good non-religious example that contains all the background substance that we endure in the way we do today. I think that this well informs a non-religiously Anarchist Communist anarchist communism. But as a barbarian pagan, I do not parse "Turn the other cheek."
The alternative is exponentially more blunt and homicidal forms of foaming at the mouth over kindness and thoughtfulness "being shoved down our throats", the eager preparedness to deploy a social imperative to actually begin rounding up trans and queer people for some ridiculous, invented excuse for total collective punishment the same way that they are doing with people of color as I type this.
To hell with "Christianity" after Western Europeans got a hold of and muddled every possible agreeable thing about it, after every good thing ripped from Arabs, Jews and other Semitic peoples in Palestine, Greeks, Lebanese, Syrians, Egyptians, Ethiopians, North Africans. To hell with the rhetorical acrobatics of competing moralist engineering. Being Christ-like, without necessarily calling it so, is the inclination of all who have had to endure life as it plainly is for ordinary individuals.
The symbiosis, the being a thread among threads in a fabric... I do not name this "the social," I do not name this "society." Those two things comprise a fetish, an ugly outer layer. But there is a deeper core with no mind for that. There is a deeper core that animates a cluster of friends and loved ones around an Autumn bonfire. There is a deeper core that animates the dinner party, the casual gathering, the music fest, the protest, the riot, the victorious reclaiming of everything bought and paid for with tax dollars exclusively from working, non-owning class peoples' pockets, the dismantling of what tax dollars were wrongfully put towards.
Whatever the animation is, whatever the intent toward an ease of state and private terror, it must be effectively but promptly dialogged and done to an expertly Tee. Whether we are to do what Serbian and Yugoslav people did in the so-called Bulldozer Revolution (Sep-Oct 2000) against Slobodan Milošević, or we are to do OWS except it's now Occupy Earth, or whatever the fuck, do it to an expertly Tee.
And this is not an "Animation" that is compatible with the bustle and panic of daily political economy. It is certainly not the wasted "Animation" of zealots and their contemplation of "god's" ass hairs. This is the overwhelming [as a verb] of vibrantly intentional life onto the anti-life machinery of vampire techno-corporatist interests.
One who does not abide beneath rocks or wear blinders is nauseous and cynical of visionary proposals of any sort.
They were always the toy soldier sessions of white western anarchists who attached their favorite symbolisms to molded plastic tanks.
But gripping through the pangs of futility, here is mine.
A great Walk Out of this anti-kindness, anti-intelligent society would perhaps be a proper marker along our paths as eighteen to eighty year olds living today: heartbroken, lacking solid footing. I would urge them to effectively network, make workable, livable conditions inside that network and proceed, only after that initial phase is perfected, to cease buying, paying any taxes, paying rent, toiling for wages, adhering to white supremacist law and all related tools and dynamics of sinking, suffocating and obscuring the shared human spirit.
Walk Out. Walk away, together in bands of loved ones, or distinguished, alone — carrying your flag, or none — within the myriad clusters forming that mass abandonment of daily, operational malice.
Walk into that particular wakefulness as a human, as a person, as a cognizant organism with self-respect and mutual respect for the human, the animal, the Earth.
From gripping through the pangs of futility, there is mine. Take it, make it better, or don't. How can I even begin to give a shit, to be honest?
Whatever it is: exit, as friendly and reasonable human beings, from the dark warehouses that simulate a mockery of Life and Living. Occupy better ground, whatever it is. Throw off the economic and political weights that drown you in the screaming, deafening silence of all artificial empty.
Find the after. Make it well.
The politics of the society, the events of managing and maintaining the functional affairs of the society are no longer strictly reported, commentated on in the myriad papers of record by pundits, reporters, columnists and authors. The very politics of the society is driven in advance by how the pundit, the reporter will react, how any deviations from the official script regarding, for example, the 2016 era MAGA movement trying to persist into 2026 with its godhead visibly falling to pieces, can be factored into some next iteration of the same end goal of cruel domination packaged in what is satisfying to gullible, non-thinking people.
Speaking from a purely American perspective, the politics — the policies, allocations and officeholders made so by the mess of rhetoric and elections in the 2020s, and the society — the physical and cultural enclosure of vast variations of individuals, are intertwined in such a way that each of their puzzle piece spaces are lined with razor wire. Democrats and Liberals always fall on their faces except when Republicans have sufficiently torched the quality of life and the access to socio-economic mobility. There are only suggestions, visionary promises of smooth sailing. But the aptly expected character of everything turns out to be bedlam.
Somehow bedlam, as the coerced character of all things enslaved by the social, is supposed to be contoured to human life. Breederism, the hormonal mythological fetish of creating new human beings — that invents a fantastical image of succeeding generations growing up in dogshit existential conditions, necessarily resolving the many naive new young adults to copy-pasting themselves, expecting perfect contentedness — will have to die sooner rather than later.
All these stressed-out white people, angrily pursuing a dream — a fiction made material in a purely American naïveté, trying to impose a translation of that onto the rest of the world it fucks with, hold human life's continued existence hostage. The answer is obviously not unironic "white genocide." But it is the intellectual genocide of what excuses the genocide of human beings.
May that fucking G-word never need to be used again. May it be sunk in the ocean with all the other words that used to have weight, nearly made meaningless by devils incarnate, before the weight of the feelings of the words' actions grew up, stepped up and snuffed out the nightmare completely.
Now more than ever possible for me, I see every person as a tapestry of their traumas' behavioral and physiological workings. It plays a big role in my anxiety over people's ability to meet the moment, whatever and wherever it is. It makes me doubt that humanity possesses the sense for when it's truly enough.
Somebody please fucking prove me wrong.
As far as the perfection of English language renderings of Baudelaire goes, the exact merit of Martin's translation can be left to the majors in that field. I only thought the English appropriate as an epigraph because it imparts onto me the alternative image to Abraham Lincoln's "better angels" metaphor that would be sent up in civic hosannas on the west side of the Atlantic four years after Baudelaire would publish Les Fleurs du Mal.
No better angels over here, at one-hundred and sixty years of pretending that nothing south of so-called Canada isn't "necessarily" Dixie (no love to that merely northern corner of gut-stabbing history), or the old childhood grounds of indigenous peoples a matter of days or hours before white terror would ride in of a horrible sudden. Not the meekest straw to grasp here, in the aftermaths: where the worst of things led to lesser dreads to lead to exponential worsts piqued by propaganda, sleight of rhetoric, inspiring arts and expressions on the offensive against the slogging social mores that only new depths of discontent might ever produce. Movements, as heroic and brave as they were painted in tandem with the vilifying and terror-mongering insisted by media tools, did not produce effective interventions by clusters of individuals ultimately doing the correct and reasonable thing. The closest this country got to such a thing was in service to a complete dupe: January 6, 2021, in service to a now eighty year-old pedophile criminal — in fear of some other old white guy with a "D" next his name being THE REAL deep state sex trafficker. (Mind you, fuck all Democrats and Republicans, words that mean Fucking Nothing.) The second closest was the Revolutionary War, the third was the Boston Tea Party, and those are their own respective bags.
In these aftermaths, all the culture we find in front of ourselves when going out with friends or loved ones during the crises entices the single worst western conception of forgetfulness. Otherwise best exemplified in the proper settings of Daoism, the western bastardized corruption of it wants us to be strictly forgetful of core dynamics, explicit intentions and obvious harms affecting our lives for the worst rather than being in tune with a forgetfulness that encompasses every fervently-alleged cosmic underpinning of perfectly justified horror shows of use of force by state actors. The awful, definitively false caricature of wúwéi — always not-acting sanctified, ever acting universally hissed at. That seems to be the "Terrorism", the "Treason": thinking on one's own terms, not succumbing to the stifling spin of the mass culture module of fascism, soon to be kicked into overdrive thanks to CBS now being state media.
We need the tarnish wiped off. The tarnish of moral anxiety in the face of swine zip-tying naked children out in the cold. The tarnish of epic owns and pitiful comebacks wrongly asserted as social nutrients from politicians before young people nearing voting age. We need that singular angel of something beyond the word "faith" present in each of us to be our nature, to be our life once more as we reiterate, again and again, that this mess of political performance, culture war identitarian hubris, mass media allure, economic tailspin and spiritual decay is not any inevitable sinew of our moments spent alive!
It is correct to say that this decay, this burdensome bundle of things is what we contend with. But we cannot contend with decay with merely shallower decay. We cannot combat the bundle with a merely separate and not terribly unique bundle supposed to be different and better. We can most typically see these in those circles begun by those who feel a false necessity in calcifying rituals, keeping draconian documentation on general members and inner circle fanatics.
This will never create and sustain wellness. Ours is humbleness bound with steadfastness; friendliness, open-mindedness bound with a liberated reason, a fullness of lessons that inform a discernment: what is earnest expression and what is inciting violence for stupid, sad non-reasons; what is a reasoned, good faith presentation of and what is a tactical performance with no earnest engagement with anything considered close to and in accordance with one's heart.
We cannot continue as young, entering middle-aged people who see now what those born in the 60s and 70s contended with, seeing those formerly young, hopeful faces slowly atomize and contort into the disquieting pareidolia of a lot of people looking around, unsure and mortally indifferent to consequences unforeseeable.
What I want to see much better distinguished going forward is the ambition for socio-political iterations or inertia from the ambition for Free People to effectively assert and retain control over their own lives, for a harmony of free association along agreeable, breathable standards not enforced by violence, but by open incentive to make standards peaceable and joyous. This should be the subsequent sentiment after someone confirms their being an anarchist.
And the project overall is to live, against every cardboard box-armored knight on a five-foot moralist high horse, against every haphazard panic attack dressed up as "strength" by every fragile despot.
A certain business of living has been alluded to at different slivers of generations facing intensifying turmoil. Without fixed romantic adjective, without stony, lusting allegiance, but brimming with a singular practicality. Albert Libertad distills this, in confronting his time's fascination with libertarian:
The anarchist, referring simply to etymology, is against authority. That’s exact. He doesn’t make liberty the causality but rather the finality of the evolution of his Self. He doesn’t say, even when it concerns merest of his acts, “I am free,” but “I want to be free.” For him, freedom is not an entity, a quality, something that one has or doesn’t have, but is a result that he obtains to the degree that he obtains power.
He doesn’t make freedom into a right that existed before him, before human beings, but a science that he acquires, that humans acquire, day after day, to free themselves of ignorance, abolishing the shackles of tyranny and property.
— Albert Libertad, Freedom, Translations by Mitch Abidor, Vincent Stone, et al., Feb 2019
What can avenge the bullied, the down, the not wholly deceased, the not wholly living?
A voice, a hand that find themselves always becoming the instrument.
And these two instruments have a minimum of three paths that become matters of will. A twisted and violent will is not defeated in advance by press conferences with swine After the shooting.
But if we are to assume that some matters of will can fall before those individuals who have heart, spirit, curiosity and the same varied measures of awkwardness in all public interpersonal business, unique strengths revealed in emergent circumstances, we can therefore assume that at least some among this already finite pool of individuals within the wider species can be receptive to a project of singular means and ends. If it is called "Anarchist", so it is. If it is not, but retains a spirit of autonomy and an active recognition to the structure fire of life on Earth, so it is.
Either way of things could not bring me to lower my head in cinematic shame while the boss bitch Liberal Mom steps up to save plant, animal and human life via her podcast and supplements.
Every effort hitherto spent...
We — as any living thing with spirit, feeling, yearning — find ourselves cornered into feeding on the ashes of our sacrificed appendages.
That statement, for those capable of thought and heart, should be readily felt and confirmed.
Let it be disregarded by those not to inherit the Earth.
A friend says something which neither they nor I can settle for certain whether it is a paraphrasing or something original. "If you cannot sharpen an identity into a weapon, it will be reforged into new chains."
And this leaves me wondering: can the identity of "Human" be ripped from the strange enchantments of not strictly identity but also the originating factor in such phantasms? The same old, early Humanism. The self-styled multidimensional school of humanity being definitively fucking awesome, dude — the decrepit school that made identity, made universal stratification and made the vast mythologies that promote a perfect, unyielding Social.
Our lives, whatever substance could have been — left to make the very lack the defining substance in the form of goths, punks, stoners, etc. — is only redeemable by intellectually substantive disobedience. We are simply entertaining a strange new neo-"Enlightenment" at the rate of spiritual dilution that we are now seemingly evolutionarily dependent on. This same sequence accounted for in the prompt fed into AI tools is what will prepare to exterminate everything for epic owns of libs.
All the while, new graduates are happily, intentionally stupid: eager to shit out more children who, in the coming decades, will drown in flash floods or burn to death within 120 seconds some time after the river reportedly rose, or the nearby hills start getting multiple tiny plumes of smoke. So I would recommend putting in the effort to do your part in effectively making life worthwhile overall before you decide that you "Need" to start a family in the middle of the Earth gradually suffocating on its' inhabitants hubris.
None of my closest loved ones know of any social sphere in their affairs with me. There is no familial or pack character to our gathering and conversing.
Yet there is a background noise for me. All the while that, in the immediate and practical actions of this face-to-face sphere of life among other people, being an advocate for a sort of "Big Tent" Participation between everyone from the neighborhood AGs to the [very few] non-profits [that actually manage to be worth a fuck] alike, I still know, from trauma and from something else, that any presence aside from one's own is dangerous.
It is the sweetly sharp, deeply grueling and morbidly humbling center: knowing that every little spark of brightened eyes suddenly stops happening. The sad, scared face of the simple want of the heart returns, colors the tendons of every weeping heave. And it is knowing that this is not something to be childishly thrashed against as if that can change anything. It is becoming aware that, as we age, we invent in our downtime more elaborate forms of only more anemic thrashing.
This was my first lesson as a toddler barely able to walk, when my biological not-dad stormed my single mother's house in a deafening blaze of furious testosterone-fueled contempt for leaving him. After the violence, I am told that a family member found me curled in the corner of a closet, shaking and whimpering.
The only presence I know of my biological father is terror.
Now, closing in on thirty years alive, I don't take kindly to seeing that presence be the ruling power on Earth.
I do not think it worthy of being merciful to in any measure.
I know now that the only reason I ever solidly felt comfort in calling myself, in actually being, the anarchist of my own life was the understanding I toiled in the form of reading, dialogging and living to have: given everything we've done — going to the moon, making computers talk to each other across oceans, building equal parts wanton displays of horror and loving solidarity across the Earth — there is no proven, immutable component of this known existence that makes it such that we can never live as friendly, capable individuals with no mind for hierarchies of roles, privileges of castes and dishonest structures of togetherness called "Societies" coupled with circus acts called "Politics" to impose these.
Every day, I feel the casually resonant perspective of every kind-hearted individual anarchist authenticated by the contrasts around us.
Let that verify and sustain the better turn.
I'm hoping to finish the work I've put on myself: a book of essays and a book of poetry. After that, I hope to do some self-care on hiatus, then return. A steady and resolute New Year to all.