The world is full of educated derelicts making ever more artful PowerPoints

And the people made powerpoints

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And the people made powerpoints

slide after slide after slide

trying to reinvent a presence at the vanishing point, you know the one, the gravitational mass on the horizon where all lines converge and the inflow of money might be pinned to a map 

The people believed that having faith in having faith would be (or simply is always) enough.

As though declaiming could make this confounding mystery into a puzzle, with coordinates and rules and the magnetic pull of a template endgame to which you might refer every hour on the hour.  

Like a scurrying centipede, but of segmented concepts instead of churning limbs, all akimbo and with no logical progression, reading slide after slide after self-referential slide climbing up the walls and scattering my force, every hour on the hour.  

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 Kvetch as kvetch can, have no fear, I will lap up what no one else is spooning out.  A thousand internal monologues fall by the way.  

It is never enough, this stolid 8 wants to be a palpitating 10, let me show you

Just-cleaned gloss is the fixed look staring back at me like a transparent omen of cemented insight. 

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Have I mentioned that this is costing nothing, my wisdom wrought from fierce design and slandered title. All of it just background music, counterpoint in a minor key, and I lord over this gloomy scrim of a window pane I’ve peered out of and breathed into, role playing  skillful lookout, every hour on the hour  

I am in that everlasting niche mediating the gap between insular mind-games and lambent group text grandiosity, five of us now, none the wiser, arguing over whether a cyclone or a tornado could serve as an epigram to the (r0) and the f(n) of serendipitous dread

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That no one will ever ask for this is not the biggest fear.  Martin Luther says that penitence comes first and pounded it with nails.  Luther Martin says that Chase was scavenged before he was ravaged.  and the people making powerpoints say that no matter what, this idea of an insurrection will pound onward.  

on the hour every hour, standing here feeling what it feels like to feel like this, muted until the sign off

(not another word) 

standing here feeding a well-fed thing that feeds on this newfound zeal for slick budget graphs and epistolary pitches

(not another word)

Starving hysterical naked

Explicating Seneca

Salivating over so much pithy cant

(not another word)

This time she conquers the digital maze and lasts at least 8 secs with the mechanical bull

I have a distinct memory of being told of an event about which I have no memory: I am in Oshkosh overalls, shirtless, brown toddler body and ringlets of blonde hair, playing behind a ring of bales of hay. The bull is out and the family that is babysitting me can’t find me. I am clueless, in the reverie of pretend play and the only lived moment of the present that is the only lived moment ever for a child like me. I get pulled out of the reverie and back to my powerlessness when a strong hand with a steady grip plucks me from the ground and runs with me, strung up like a fish on a line, to the nearest outbuilding. I am told - or else I conjure up this detail to help make sense of why I was uprooted - that the bull was panting and snorting and pawing the ground outside the ring of bales.

No not quite like this . . .

No not quite like this . . .

Horse shoes and hand grenades

Horse shoes and hand grenades

If she had only had a drone, and

of the maze had made a game

Much less strife might have been sown

and her calling could have saved her name.

She should have could have might have done

Those dirty deeds with Zeus’s son

Her body minded, it kept full score

She long outfoxed the Minotaur.

A thousand pictures not worth one word

A thousand pictures not worth one word

When it comes time to pull on the thread of memory, and remember what these days and nights felt like, there will be a greater or lesser tendency to fall into the rhythms of coherent declaration and speak in dulcet tones of soothsaying hindsight. And it will take someone brave to shout out that nearly everyone was clueless and beholden to that ignorance, like a moral cripple is beholden to the unfairness of affliction. “We had no idea what might come,” if said, will be poorly understood, because it will have came, come what may, and the equal parts of its promise and its wreckage will have already become encoded in the minds of parties whose poor understanding will hold us in good stead, I hope. I hope.

Leave the possible to those who are fond of it

The downstream consequence of this collaboration between my time and this entity’s list of objectives is money. Presumably an amount of money that exceeds the value I contribute, satisfices my need for enough stuff to feel comfortable and at the level of status I strive to achieve, and overpowers my desire to chuck all this nonsense and live perilously, without resource or any level of security to fall back on.

i have more humorless, obvious sentiments to throw down after a brief word from our sponsors . . . .

MetaComment on what this is parallel to, a substitute for, competing with

I had intended to assemble a diary that might read like a how-to guide in handling the delamination of self.  It was to be anchored to the idea of loss as a repulsive gift, something that however difficult or bewildering, was also bracing in reminding/insisting that stability is not to be taken for granted.  Very little should be.

  Except I am probably the last person capable of outlining how to do anything, not because I don’t know how to, but because I can’t seem to consider the perspective of the person to whom I would relate / to say it simply without becoming buried in abstraction.  

Instead of a steady diet of riffing on the repulsive gift, I am trying to distract myself with art, or daydreaming about travel, or reading abstruse theory from media-software savants or 70s-era psychotherapists who play with meta theories about capitalism and selfhood - lots of self-hoisting topicality in other words.  and also trying hard to have basis to reject (better: disprove) the notion that I am doing something other than distracting myself.  

having seized the means of production, I am my own boss, and he is, in most regards, a real demanding son of a bitch. That is a chief and primary means of distraction, which is a tacit refusal to accept the repulsive gift.

Ride or die, Hephaestus

As long as every man and woman who crowded into the cathedrals on Easter Sunday was a principal in a gorgeous drama with God, glittering angels on one side and the shadows of evil coming and going on the other, life was a rich thing. The king and the beggar had the same chance at miracles and great temptations and revelations. And that’s what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own individual lives. . . . Art and religion (they are the same thing in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.

Spes Sibi Quisque, or Appreciation for Mike Mills

Writing a history of love, as opposed to the history of love, and avoiding getting carried off into the ether of autobiography for its own sake. Check that box.

Avoiding the idea that recounting an idiosyncratic history is enough, as though the story will take care of itself and momentum is a function of quirky pastiche . . . Check.

Being grounded without seeming uncool or disconnected from the vibrant pulse of present creativity - mmmmm.hmmmmm.

Also funny: also voiceover narration but who needs Puritanism: also Beginners femme fatale be still my beating heart.

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An aside:

the thing about grandiosity is you can’t feel ok with just being a normal non-descript self, happy for those who you care for and happy with yourself too. Contentment becomes inachievable; it seems impossible to live outside the terms of comparative assessment. So that so much of the cognitive metabolism is bound over to what someone else has or doesn’t have, what someone suffers from or excels at - and the someone exists as a foregrounding for the self’s obsessive shadow. that comparative lens is THE lens through which all the data points get filtered, and all the most piquant self-involved flavors are contradictions waiting to get sharpened. I prefer not to see in this way and eat at this table.

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A disjointed stand in for the fear I have of liking art that appears tied to a milieu to which I can’t relate and that is in all material respects too cool for me, which is to say

I like my LA with a strong dose of Nova Scotia re the design side of things. Lambent austerity.

Flight, but for how long?

The final consisted of one essay question, a take home, for which the intemperate professor had allotted 72 hours. It read:

assume a crow and an eagle have each lived a long, full avian life. Each will die today. Is it better for the crow to die in mid flight so it it rebounds, lifeless, off the ground, or to die with its feet on the ground and wings folded in? How about the eagle - which form of death would be better? How would Parfit answer? How would Diogenes? How would Cavell? How do you?

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The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.

 The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those

That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.

A Frenchman and a Welshman (as inhabited by a 7th Day Adventist antinomian aesthete)

€€€€ ~~~~¥¥¥¥ ^^^^

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Astral America. The lyrical nature of pure circulation. As against the melancholy of European analyses. The direct star-blast from vectors and signals, from the vertical and spatial. As against the fevered distance of the cultural gaze. Joy in the collapse of metaphor, which here in Europe we merely grieve for. The exhilaration of obscenity, the obscenity of obviousness, the obviousness of power, the power of simulation.

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Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It's no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment's knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.

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We are an encephalized ape that won’t last long

“I lived,” writes poor Teufelsdrockh, “ In a continual, indefinite, pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: it seemed as if all things in the heavens above and earth beneath would hurt me; as if the heavens and the earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring monster, wherein I, palpitating, lay waiting to be devoured.”

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Bedevilment is as bedevilment does . . .

acidulous heart canker

Borges teaches that the obscure and forgotten are not the chaff. What counts as wheat does not causally correlate to merit.

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Yes, essay means to try. And for however long, it was my particular defect to pledge only to try to try harder. Not simply to try harder, much less to just do the thing - period. To essay a change - so what? To change in fact: and off we go. To try to not have insomnia. To not have insomnia. To structure a life in which sleep can happen at anytime.

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Lest this be taken as too precious or rich, I can say that I was walking on public land that almost everyone assumes is private and came across a dead Canadian goose whose bottom half was beneath the ice and whose wings and neck were above it.

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Think / Classify [ . . . ] Take Up Residence in Your Own Existence

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Not having known hunger, it shaped a sense of necessity. It seemed necessary to acquire multiple appliances. It seemed necessary to be able to discern when a cascade of consequence was accelerating into being and when a cavalcade of ghost-shirted warriors gathered into an aggregate and scattered into a stream.

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If you are growing tired of this strict hierarchy and the abstracted flow of adjacent money-functions, knock “a shave and a haircut . . . . All types of experiences come with shibboleths. It is legitimate to gripe and scratch at the wood floors until the bones in your fingers are but splinters.

It is also legitimate to run at a placating pace until the blisters pop and the thoughts slow down.

But here’s the thing - zombies aren’t passive. Hobbes was not born into this world until the lightning strike broke his mother’s water. Pol Pot is not just a character in a song by the Dead Kennedys. Figuratively speaking, there is no rhetorical sleight of hand.

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It seemed necessary at the time because we have been trafficking in impoverished concepts of both “seeming” and “necessity” for what feels like forever. Amor fati, agape fati and it is the fattened calf which will end up as your last friend. This isn’t abstract wordplay. No dog, no goat, and the ships’s masts have been full the whole time.

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Just So

If you want me again, look for me under your bootsoles.

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Having wonderful dreams, telling wonderful lies, was a temptation Whitman could never resist; but telling the truth was a temptation he could never resist, either. When you buy him you know what you are buying. And only an innocent and solemn and systematic mind will condemn him for his contradictions: Whitman's catalogues of evils represent realities, and his denials of their reality represent other realities, of feeling and intuition and desire. If he is faithless to logic, to Reality As It Is -- whatever that is -- he is faithful to the feel of things, to reality as it seems; this is all that a poet has to be faithful to, and philosophers have been known to leave logic and Reality for it.

Foraging and Gorging and then Slipping into a Bureaucratic Dream

MYTHOS:

The tax collector, having assumed that a dinner of broth and bread would permit it possible to bid adieu the nightly gnashing and thrashing about and to aggregate an uninterrupted cache of sleep, blew out the candle, turned on the sound machine, and did his level best not to be distracted by the steady pulse of his beating heart.

In the dream, he and others gathered around a glass atrium partitioned into three sections. On one side a scorpion was deposited and entrapped. On the other a long slinking centipede. The inner walls were lifted and it was expected that a duel would end in at least one death. Instead each combatant retreated to a corner and attempted time after time to clamber up the walls. The tax collector woke with a start, lying in sheets damp with sweat, and fumbled for his phone to see that one hour and thirty seven minutes had passed. It did not go much better from there.

PATHOS:

A would-be scholar of Hemingway, neither shower nor grower, had decided to place on Craig’s list an ad that read: “one pair toddler’s shoes, never worn,” and record what response came in. This was ostensibly for the purpose of adding an empirical touch to a desultory thesis that his committee of Americanists had swatted away repeatedly, as if his offering were rancid garbage from a mediocre Chinese restaurant. He received three responses - two asking if they were free and one asking if they were pink.

ETHOS:

If, as a grown ass adult, you reach for a platter of ham intending to spear a slice or two with the fork from your table setting, before you have eaten anything with it, of course, and are rapped on the knuckle with cutlery wielded by the guest sitting next to you, whom you do not know and whose affiliation with the bride or groom is unclear, is it (a) always permissible, (b) sometimes permissible, or (c) never permissible to, with malice aforethought but apparent inadvertence, spill freshly poured hot coffee onto the neighbor’s lap once the plates are cleared and before the first speech is given?

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A kind of metaphysical autopsy (a mode in aping of Harold Ramis)

So, what happened?

He died like a week later.

But how?

It wasn’t immediately clear. Some hiker - a middle school math teacher, we found out later - found the body at the bottom of a ravine at the base of Harney Peak.

Was it foul play?

No. It wasn’t necessarily even a surprise. We didn’t know if it was accidental or intentional. Eventually I decided it must have gone down like he slipped and fell while trying to find the right place to jump.

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So it goes . . .

So it goes . . .

Slapdash Organism, or Yes, please, I would appreciate the receipt

It is a trick of magic for works to deny the censorship they promote.  If the reaction to an offensive speaker is to demand that the program at which he appears be cancelled, then the reaction is all there is.  Pardon me for making my narcissism part of the conversation, but . . . 

I like to tell the story of the hanging gardens of Babylon with an asterisk that I know of Babylon only through the work of The Rolling Stones, not beggars banquet either.  

Tristan Tzara suggested that an authentic act might involve running through the street with a gun, shooting indiscriminately.  If only we could presently cancel authenticity . . . I once bought a glock 9 mmfrom a friend as a birthday present for my father.  It was not whatever the opposite of patricidal ambition is.  The gun had a button, when depressed, shone a light that traced wherever the barrel pointed.  If you don’t think that’s cool, even if just at an atavistic level, then you did not grow up on the movies I grew up on.

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The authority figure’s thing was wanting  his honesty to be pungent and to be praised like a pugilist, as though bluntness was a seduction method above and below sophisticated deflection. His exhibitions betrayed this habit of mind and then some.  Straight talk about old people and senescence is far less art-world salient than revolution and the exchange-value of misanthropy. Four white walls yes you could ask for more but let’s start with accepting what’s on offer before we order off menu.  

Staggered elections in Calvinist garb

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The mistake is not in succumbing to the idea that all this (gesturing) is rendered absurd by the idea that all this (gesturing) could be laid low by a virus.  It is in forgetting that absurdity is the baseline, the starting point, at which all this (gesturing) bottoms out in the first place.   Mud not bedrock. Objects, not descriptions, but aleatory objects, at that.

And sentimentalizing that acknowledgment of the absurd with archetypal accessories ( bad acid jazz, gesticulating young males in a smoky room, a mime playing chess on a cutting board with no squares) - keeping at arm’s length the finite parallax view and the kitschy end-times ballads - does not expiate the barren foreign feeling.  Rejoice in the click of the door that locks shut behind, without asking for something more.  Puke your guts out and then go back to hot buffet sizzling under the sneeze guard. Eo nomine ludere, et lux in tenebris lucet. That sort of thing.