‘Rona poasting

Anyways so I finally got vaccinated/microchiped/marked with the number of beast.

Took awhile mostly because I wanted the J&J one, as the Moderna one put several family members on their ass for several days, and I have some qualms about the mRNA tech being used (mostly revolving around possible auto-immune reactions down the line)

.So far, not much in the way of side effects. Sore arm, mild headache and tiredness. Honestly a hangover feels worse.

Part of my general withdrawal from the internet and politics in general is over how fucking retarded the politicization of this has become. Both sides, left and right, literally hurt my fucking brain with how stupid, shrill and violently tribal this has become, with the common strain being that if somehow the other side was forced/coerced to act a certain way, all this would be over.

Of course, a guy like me who has reservations, but got vaxxed anyways is “evil” to both sides. What can I say? Yeah, I don’t trust rushed novel technologies, but having my lungs permanently fucked up by the flu three years back put the fear of God in me regarding nasty respiratory viruses (not enough to stop smoking, though).

Anyways, forcing vaccinations and masking or just letting it all rip in a re-opened society isn’t going to fix a thing. Look at India, look at Brazil. Those two variants are just ones that we know now. This novel disease is going to keep on mutating and evolving. Sooner or later it will elude the current vaccines available. Means of transmission may change. Some variants will likely be worse, some more mild. Pandora’s Box has been opened.

This is with us now for the foreseeable future. No, it is not smallpox or the bubonic plague. But it is a disease which will occasionally go through the elderly and infirm like the reaper’s scythe, and weaken a portion of healthy, perhaps a week for most, but much longer to permanently for others.

I remember an article I posted back at the start of this. I wish I could find it again. It was by an older British writer who took this as a call against the hubris of modernity. We will again learn to mourn the dead and contemplate our own ephemeral mortality. If this is anything, it’s a clarion call for humility and acceptance of both what is feasible and what is inevitable.

I fear that after a year, most have not learned that lesson.

 

…

It’s amazing how banal shocking things can become if you’re inured to them.

Today at work we had to call the cops to arrest someone. This homeless transgender keeps setting up camp on our property after being served trespass and warned repeatedly about violating it. No real danger or anything, she’s just a mouthy pain in the ass. Anyways, like always she takes her sweet time, so we end up having to clean up her encampment with the cops. Her weed and her meth stash goes straight in the trash, because damned if anyone is going to be arsed going through that disgusting mess to stack charges.

While we’re doing that, another old homeless dude comes in from the bushes of the park across the street. His skin, clothes and old rolling suitcase is fucking caked in dried blood. Luckily he’s just here to bitch to the cops about another homeless dude that robbed and stabbed him last night. I have no idea how the geezer is still ambulant. I’m just glad it didn’t happen on our side of the property line, otherwise more work. The cops note that the old guy already made a report last night, and the old guy seems pissed that they’re not going to comb through the bush to find the guy who knifed him, and he walks off saying “If I find that haole motherfucker, he’s done!” All the cops do is yell at him for jaywalking back to the park side of the street.Later a nice toyota passes by on the street, and the driver slows down to roll open the window and yell “You guys suck!” before driving off.

All in all pretty boring day seeing people doing people things in this fine land of ours.

 

Hey.

It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?
Not even commenter spambots read these things anymore, so I guess it’s useful for what I need at the moment.

That last post? It was in my drafts. I don’t even remember writing it or when.

My memory is starting to go along with everything else. Aging… it’s pieces of you just going away bit by bit, isn’t it?

Things… have changed since the last time I’ve posted… and they haven’t changed at all.

I really haven’t written anything personal in years. Haven’t really wanted to, to be honest. The older I get, the less important it seems. Besides, I went back and read most of it. Man, I was pretty good at turning a phrase and evoking an image, but as the kids nowadays say “that’s so cringe”. So pompous, so pretentious, and most importantly, so unoriginal. Really embarrassing, y’know?

Now, I’m not doing so well. Not dying or anything. Well, no more than we all are, I suppose. It’s just I’m aging like milk. Yeah, who knew decades of poverty and bad habits would catch up to you, right? All the bad things in my life are still there, and now there’s a heap of new ones too! But hey, at least *real* *actual* physical health problems cured me of my hypochondria!

Some nice cold comfort is that the rest of the world seems hellbent on tearing itself apart right now. Crazy motherfucking times.

So anyways, I just needed a place and time to air out my demons. It helped in the past, doing this sort of thing. Only now, I don’t really need or expect an audience. All these old blogs are ghost towns, the rust belt of social media 1.0. Honestly, I’d rather have a more effective outlet. I had a really good one for awhile.

Chickens.

Yup. I had bunches of ’em. Raised orphan ferals too. Then the ‘Rona came, and I got evicted and now I live above the carport of a hoarders house. No yard, no chickens. I know a lot of people mock those people who replace the hole in their lives a family and kids would fill with pets, but really, if you’re broken, then they’re really good for healing that greivous wound inside you. Better than writing, better than career success, whatever the fuck that is. Every day I miss my chickens. Every day I feel less alive and more tired. The internet isn’t helping, but then I think everyone is kind of waking up to that poisoned chalice, but can’t do much more than some guy on the rez who knows how bad booze is for him, but is surrounded by a physical reality that is just too shitty to handle sober.

Yeah, so this is what I do now I guess. Vent online to no one. Maybe by accident, someday I will write something someone would actually want to read, but I doubt it. I was never that talented, and I what I did have, instead of practicing, I let rot.

 

Interlude 1: Kuromori tells the Parable of the Hacker

One fine sunny day in some odd time, Kuromori decided to walk to Torrance Beach, in order to feel the sand between his toes and see vistas once seen by Pio Pico. He departed his tiny apartment in the old pink stucco building and walked the long distance to the sea. Along the way, he came across the gutterpunk Adam Meteortrain, the failed graduate student Michael Park, and the unemployed tax accountant called Flyspeck.

 

A House on Diamond Head Way.

I confess, I read books late at night far in excess of my chronological age. There is one I have loved who never loved me back. It is a refutation of those who I’ve stood with.
There are times late at night, I dream drunkenly of beaches and of palm trees at night, artifacts of the past. I live on my idealistic youth alone. It’s long past it’s expiration date. But years have passed and years will come before I give my final gasp; I still love her.
I haven’t seen her but for glimpse in five years. Likely I won’t see a glimpse again. I’m a coward…. I’m a realist! There’s no hope but in idle dreams.
I don’t want reality.
I want the poetic verses that never existed, I want sublime feelings that only exist in sheltered people yearning to break through, I want what only can be found in books no longer read, and the bottoms of bottles still yet to drink.
Days ago I passed a house I will never live in, except in my fantasies. There was a soundtrack played, as I imagined myself in the gardens, my fingers running through the ironworks, painted white, but rust showing through. Of grass and eroded concrete. It was as real as the guitar strummings in my mind! White linen suits and gatherings of people I’ll never know! I’m too poor for such follies.
I want a grand home. She’ll be there. I want sensations of things passing, of things not meant for people with calloused hands and minds like mine! It’s as a simple as a bossa nova. The sun burns my face because I work under it, not sigh on a lounge chair.
But that’s it, isn’t it? To live second hand in dreams? I’m not a corpse yet. I can still feel my hands, my feet, my heart… It’s stupid for one my age to be how I am. But it is what it is.
I love hopelessly. I age inevitably. The years pass by. I hear its slow music and I choose not to weep, but to dance.
There will be no one to respond. That’s life.

 

Prelude to Tradewinds

The picture you see at the top of this blog is of the Shinkansen pulling into Nagoya Station. It was taken in my first week of Japan during my teacher’s training. It seems so long ago. Years, but a blink of the eye in any way you look upon it.

Memories, I am deluged by memories.
No, not memories. That bespeaks of stories. Maybe they are stories. But above all else they are sensations. Impressions. I float through life living impression by impression. It doesn’t matter if it’s a picture of a train on a humid summer’s day, far away in time and place (and what is time and place anyways?) or the bubbles that trail through a freshly poured glass of beer. It all builds and folds into each other.

That’s what I want to tell you. That’s why I can’t keep putting things into boxes. The train, the beer, the opening bars of a song, the silk cravat around the neck…

The winds have picked up tonight and gust strongly. They blow within and without.

 

I have imagined countless future vistas that I did not write. I have visited the past on sleepless nights that were gone the next morning. Life is short, and that is reason enough not to do anything.

I drive daily to work. The same highway, the same time. I crave regularity, the tedium of rattling air conditioners and idle chitchat. It dulls the senses. But that’s not such a bad thing.

I live between tall green mountains I never climb and a blue ocean I rarely enter. On the other side of the mountains is a city I hardly visit. The idea of even traveling that far makes me anxious. Of all three I have memories, retold time and time again in my head. What need is there for new experiences?

To do nothing, nothing at all, is good practice. Just sitting, untold things spin out of my head; my self bifurcates and fractures, bits walking off to lead their own lives. The world outside and the world inside fold against each other, an endlessly moving tesseract. There’s no need to explain it to anyone, no point at all.

 

Notes on the Neoreaction; Prologue

My intestines hurt. What is it about visceral pain that makes one turn their mind to all sorts of crankish social philosophy? It’s enough to stir even someone sunken into the deepest lassitude. Pain makes you not care that what you’re doing is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. It makes you relish your blatant thievery and your celebratory lack of originality. It’s all part of being a thoroughly bad person. Why am I bad? Because it’s the only recourse in a world where everyone is just so damn holy!

Yes, it’s a great world for holiness and the holy! Just showing your tits will get you on the quick list to beatification and canonization, where you can be *Our Lady of the Lantern Jaw* complete with t-shirts and laudatory television show guest appearances. God help you if you present like a baboon in heat; you’ll be the second coming! No, no, no. I am no prude. A prude is disgusted because they are secretly and shamefully aroused by the spectacle. I am disgusted because nothing arouses me anymore. But I digress.

So I come to it: The Neoreaction. It goes by other names, most of them rather juvenile “the Dark Enlightenment” which makes one think of teenaged goths cooking up a philosophy half Schopenhauer, half Bauhaus lyrics  in some suburban basement of Tempe Arizona. Even worse yet, “The Red Pill”, which strikes one as something someone who reads mostly movie novelizations (when they can be arsed to read at all) came up with while popping their pimples. Reheated secular gnosticism from someone who doesn’t even know what Gnosticism *is*.

Hah! Lest you think I’m being far too critical, I am not. I’m a failed academic, a disenchanted intellectual, who cleans toilets and empties dirt to eke out a rather meager and colorless existence in a back end town of a back end province of the Great American Empire. Just a little forgotten nook of their far-flung colonial holdings. Picturesque, but rather expensive and bereft of serious minded people. Let’s be honest: The Neoreaction is a creation of our times. We are an era that educates and provisions talented young men with everything they need to enslave themselves… or set themselves free. If there was enough opportunity, enough chances to carve out a meaningful and satisfying existence, there would be no Neoreaction. The Neoreaction is the creation of a generation of superfluous men who discovered their superfluity. Seeing what they were embedded in, they decided to go another route.

The other route? Well it depends on taste, I suppose. If you could, imagine a city. Not some orderly planned city of square blocks and superhighways, but a city built on cart-paths and only halfway modernized. All the roads squiggle and loop and intersect multiple times. I like to think this city has a certain Central European flair, where you can stand at an intersection and turn one direction and see buildings once looked on by Hapsburgs, turn 90 degrees and see a rotting block of Marxist poured concrete, and then turn once more and see a glistening skyscraper of mirrored glass and steel with a McDonald’s on the ground floor. We are going on a walking tour to find the neoreactionaries in our grand city. For if anything is true, the neoreaction is not seperate from the world but built into it, as an emergent entity. I wish to go through each and every avenue and comment at length at what we find, after all, I am a flâneur first and foremost. I am not a regular at any one spot. I am always just visiting. A word of warning: those looking for some sort rigorous sociological analysis, shall receive none. There’s already countless electrons spilled on that. Expect little in the way of inline citations. This is a dilettante’s impression. Savor it not as you would by going to a library, but as by walking through endless cafes and parks! How you live is far more important than the coherence and complexity of how you *think*.  

So I hope, anyways, my track record is not great for this sort of thing. In fact, one could say I always pick the worst possible time to do such things. But still, It seems like fun, a nice way of passing the time.

 

Untitled, Part 1

In ever more prosaic ways I slip into a torpor. My life is a period of episodes of disquiet, not worth recounting in way, shape or form. My youth a series of illuminations, gone and perhaps never to return. C’est la vie. If it comes, it comes. I can’t wait for it happen, nor conjure them into appearance by mere desire.

I live in a place where there are palms and pandanus. A life slowly being eroded by a global culture of capitalism and consumerism, or pop culture stretching thousands of miles, eroding everything in comes in contact with, annihilating dialects and traditional mores beneath it’s waves. If I can, my last gasp will be to build my own house. Like Mr. Biswas, perhaps. I will record what it is to be born at the end; to come of age just to see the last edifices tumble like sandcastles on the beach. The house will be built of words, constructed of every last memory and image distilled into the most precise concentration. As I sip shochu and taste cigar smoke, so shall I try to choose my words. It’s all nonsense, maybe. But, before I die that death in a rented room, working that pointless job, I will say it. As much as possible, I will try to breath it out of my fingers and head. It’s all I am good for at this point; telling stories. I can’t live in the manner of others. Not anymore. God damned me. I’m a writer. Fuck my life, I’ve got words to say.

 

Waiting

I stand on the edge of the precipice, watching the waves hundreds of feet below. You need silence for stillness, for the emergence of novel ideas, new sounds, glory. Glory? Only the glory that comes with a flower blooming, a moth emerging from a cocoon, a wet rock that appears and reappears with the beating of the waves.

“Do you have it?”

I don’t know. It’s all so much, isn’t it? To want something you can’t put your finger on. I feel like I crawled from the ocean and scaled the cliffs, instead of hiking here from the roadside. There is pain. In my teeth and throat. Real honest to god pain. My teeth are worn and cracking and sometimes I think the coughing is the cancer that will kill me. When I stop moving, when the sensation and the tumult stops it’s still there, humming like the cities, the endless flow of humanity.

“It’s white noise.”

And this is half-baked mysticism. But it will do. It will have to suffice. For now, anyway. I don’t have the words to say it any other way… No, I’m not going to jump. I don’t have it in me to jump off a real cliff, or a metaphorical one. But I can try not to let myself be submerged.