Clicky ankle when toes rotate, sharp pain in shoulder when reaching, compound fracture of the soul when betrothed turns out to be able to love others deeply but no longer the capacity to deeply love you: Some injuries and aches are different than others, but all injuries and aches are signals. Signals of mortality, sure, although not uniformly. Signals that sloth and acedia are catching up to you. Yes that too. But also how much time you now think about, and terrorize yourself about, the breakdown or attempted recuperation of your body, which maybe is what your self is, even though you may not have thought of body-self in that particular way before. Let’s inflect the concept that way to tease out what kind of account can be given of how the day to day texture of embddedness is roarinfky disconnected from the day to day completion of mundane tasks. Like how I had a stroke just now, if you even noticed.

Tame pathologies, which are like the cilia of a cell. Tickle, tickle, and they spring into action and upset the equilibrium of the organism. Perhaps originally for the blind purpose of advancing some atavistic function, and at times they secure a good end by accident and then repeat and repeat and repeat until the consequence of the stockpiled good ends registers and instead of being repeated it is remembered. Remembered and remembered remembered and conquered.

But only if the organism’s original reproductive source (sometimes a mother, sometimes mitosis) was good enough and repetition becomes habit and secured goods become arete, or excellence.

Striving to be someone who, when googled, remains an anonymous mask with only some small trail of breadcrumbs to munch on and follow until an intractable dead end is reached. You can’t succumb to believing the hype is there is none.

This ethos might be a reaction formation to the idea that we no longer need paranoia in the fringes of the populace or hard-boiled amoralism in our crime solvers. Both types, as a blend of phenomological and aesthetic attributes, are not outside the circle of conformity but just here, in the everyday detritus and cultural flotsam floating by. Being paranoid can’t cash in on the sui generic chic, because now we have fads and crazes in the willowed wisps of conspiracies. The paranoid (unless having pursued commerce as an influencer huckster) cannot mobilize traction anymore than the modern equivalent of the drug-positive Beat can maintain that jive or the mystical seeker who has the Tao Ching in the bedside table can become attuned to . . . whatever it is that shows up when uninterrupted humming and flattening goes on for long enough.

in the commercial nominalism of the postmodern, everything unique and interesting tends towards the proper name. Indeed, within the brand name the whole contradictory dialectic of universality and particularity is played out as a tug of war between visual recognition and what we may call the work of consumption (as Freud spoke of the work of mourning).

Fred the Flintstone Name of Whiskey

I will see your commodity bulimia and raise you a digital artifact of an ape.