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Every couple of years I feel like I should comment on my goal with this blog.  I want talented thoughtful people to read it, think about it, then riff on the themes I discuss that resonate with them.

I want creative theft.  I want you to take my ideas and do with them, but do in YOUR way.

The CEO of a company you have likely heard of offered to help me monetize this blog, but that just feels a bit gross to me.  It was a generous offer, for which I was grateful, but I turned him down.  I have no objections to money, but no matter what I might have been selling, it would change the feeling.  It is pure, as it is.  I have no strings, no limits, no considerations other than what I myself think and feel.  There is no one’s opinion I need pay attention to.  I am completely free, and that feels good to me.

This blog really is therapeutic for me.  As I have said before, it is mostly the talking itself that helps, not the being heard.

The following is a bit rambling.  I chose not to fix it.

I actually liked this movie.  I didn’t want to watch it, since I had the vague sense he wound up shooting up his school–and certainly they played with that fear in the movie, with him carrying the axe and playing with the slasher movie knife and then the gun–but was pleasantly surprised.

If I understood it correctly, the plane engine that killed him came from a future which he was able to prevent with his sacrifice, making it a bit like Tarkovsky’s film The Sacrifice.  His “schizophrenia” was heightened awareness.  This is the view, in my understanding, of many traditional cultures.  Most of their shamans would be medicated and hospitalized in our own culture.

And I watched this since I had read it is a “cult” film.  Like most cult films I think it is popular since it is very different.  It doesn’t follow the rules of most films.  I had no idea where any of that was going.

And Donnie, of course, is emblematic of many people who don’t fit in in one way or another.  I myself saw plenty of shrinks in my teens and early twenties.  That was a familiar scene to me, although I have found I am a very poor hypnotic candidate.  You need a little trust somewhere to relax enough to put yourself in someone else’s control.  I don’t have that trust.  I suppose my parents were both trying in their own ways to hypnotize me to overlook and even embrace their patent pathologies, and I developed the ability to resist it continually.

That is perhaps why it is relatively easy for me to look at something that is red, that everyone else is calling green, and call it red.  I have practice in asserting my own reality in the midst of those calling me crazy.

My niece used to say “if you’re not weird you’re boring”, and that fits with all this.

Here is what I will assert: we might perhaps invert the emotional wealth of what I have decided to start calling the Poor World with the physical wealth of the Rich World.  Their kids, playing in garbage strewn streets with human feces on them, feel loved, valued and understood.  They don’t need to be weird to stand out from a lonely crowd.  They just need to be themselves.

And of course our own young, playing in their rooms on video games with the door closed, often feel disconnected, alone, ununderstood, and sad.  And they become adults.  And the adults continue all this.  They don’t like it, but they don’t know what the alternative is, and most of them are afraid of sticking out.  This is where the permission to be weird helps, but is far from offering a coherent, much less a comprehensive, answer.  But it’s a start.  If you are afraid of being different, then you have to face that fear, or you will never be different; and if you are never different, you are never going to be who you were born to be.  You have sold your birthright cheaply.

Me, I’ve reached an age when most saner folks are starting to think about retirement.  It’s still over the hill, but it’s not far.  I don’t have a house, I don’t have a retirement account, I don’t have shit.  I’m a terrible failure by that metric.  All you have to do is put two beans in the pot every time you walk by, and start when you are 18, and by my age you have many many pots full.  Simple, right?

But for me, just LIVING to this age has been the miracle.  The rest is added.

And all of this is something.  All of this is stuff I won’t leave behind when I leave this world.  It will come with me.

And I hope I am not too irrational when I hope this blog does others good too.  That is the intent.  I dislove the word, because it usually means someone is lying to you, but this really is an offering that comes from a place of love and caring.

I want to see the world succeed.  I haven’t been able to figure out how best to help that happen, but I continue to try daily.

Communism is sticking a lit cigarette in your arm, to make the other pain go away.

For what it’s worth, I’m doing well.  Sometimes the possibility of horror in life just strikes me with its full weight.

Cubans are being locked in dog cages right now, where they may be left for months or even years.  They are being tortured in less “soft” ways.  Their families are being rounded up into dank filthy jails they may never get out of.  Children.  Sickly grandparents.  Some of them are being shot.

And people in this country are lauding it.  They are not just excusing it: they are praising it.

What should one make of such a world?  What I make of it is one where there is a lot of work to do, and at the moment, seemingly, not enough people willing and able to do it, or even to see its necessity.

Deep feeling is not a crime: it is the only way of connecting back to our true Home.

I think it was Epictetus who said it takes a lifetime to learn how to live.  I think he also added that learning how to die is a logical extension of learning how to live.

The point and purpose of culture is to provide a sort of guidebook, something that describes at least some good solutions to the problems of meaning and purpose that occur to all thoughtful people, which over some time horizon is at least momentarily all of us.  No one is so stupid that they do not at least occasionally think of death, or wonder if they are on the right path in life.

In a traditional culture the elderly are the BTDT’s, the Been There Done That’s.  That is why the wise young look to them for guidance.  They have tested life’s hypotheses, to varying extents.  A leads reliably to B, and C to D.  They have seen it.

Nothing could be stupider than honoring the opinions of young people who have done nothing, and seen nothing, PARTICULARLY when they have been as sheltered and overprotected as most of America’s children have been.  They have not even seen, at 22, what an average child in Africa has seen by age 10.

The point of culture is to save time, to provide good starting points, so the wheel doesn’t have to be fully reinvented with each generation.  Because every hypothesis advanced that was falsified long ago is a waste of time.

Almost nothing that the kids nowadays are proposing was not millennia old a thousand years ago.  Communism is nothing new: it is the ideal of the Perfect King and the Consummate Order, wrought by Divine Competence as manifested in the Divine Ruler.  It is the society happy because governed perfectly.

And this whole Trans thing is really, to me, just next level childishness.  It is a neurotic desire to escape adult responsibilities through what amounts to next level consumerism.  You get to dabble in this identity and that identity, like tasting so many ice cream flavors, none of them contributing to a mature sense of life, and none of them manifesting anything approaching a stable and responsible sense of self.  If this sort of thing is new, it is only because only in the richest world ever seen can people afford to be so ludicrous.

We have everything, so we invent things to pursue that are not on the menu, and not for sale at Amazon.

It’s hard for me to foresee things getting sane again within my lifetime.  But life is change.  Perhaps my children or their children will be able to rebuild something worth a damn.

I read the Air Force is being indoctrinated.  Small wonder little Milley is more or less willingly and even eagerly pushing Communist racism.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/how-air-force-academy-makes-disloyal-military-daniel-greenfield/

Here is the thing: I don’t think white people can stop this.  It is too well funded by power elites, and too well supported by nearly all our institutions.  If the Chinese were funding this, I am sure they would find it money well spent, since the freedom of ALL, black and white, comes much more easily into question, and their eventual global dominance becomes more likely.

But you know who can and should push back?  Black people.  After all, they are the topic of conversation, even if they themselves are not often allowed to speak.  Indeed, the people pushing it don’t WANT black people to speak, because they will talk about things like crime, bad schools, crap economies, lack of jobs and the like.

And who is creating more crime in black neighborhoods?  Leftists, by releasing violent people (because all black people are alike, so if a black person is held captive, he must be innocent and a victim of racism, not the crime of killing another black man or woman or child), and by denigrating and defunding the police make all this worse.

Who is responsible for the crap schools?  Leftists, who in an atrocity to decency and common sense have relentlessly and aggressively opposed Charter Schools, which are the only thing SHOWN to improve educational outcomes–often by a LOT–in inner city neighborhoods.  These schools seem to work even for kids from unstable homes and bad backgrounds.

And people say that Teacher’s Unions are responsible for this.  I don’t buy it.  I think the Left wants blacks uneducated because if they ever get ACTUALLY woke, or–horror of horrors–start thriving WITHOUT DEMOCRATS, then an important power base will be lost, along with all the money and power and ego gratification that go with it.  Can’t have that, so crap schools it MUST be.

Who is torpedoing our economy?  The Left.  It is no accident that unemployment rates among the black community were the best under Trump they ever have been.  He wasn’t trying to help them, specifically, but NEITHER WAS HE TRYING TO KEEP THEM DOWN.

Just give us a chance, Frederick Douglass said.  The Democrats, STILL, are not willing to do that.  Too much possibility of losing their negroes.

CRT is just a deranged abuse of language.  It does not describe anything real, and is intended mainly as a facilitator of injustice and cruelty.  It is mainly a conversation between white people about black people.  It is, in practice and principle, the adults sitting at the table discussing what should be done about the kids.  It is that bad, in my view.

Nowhere is anyone asking: HOW CAN WE IMPROVE THE LIVES OF PEOPLE WE CAN NAME AND TALK TO AND GET FEEDBACK FROM?

The whole thing stems from psychological laziness and the inflated sense of self importance useless academics crave precisely because no one likes them, because they have no personalities, and because they are incurable naive about nearly all aspects of the world outside the gates of their high towered, stubborn, fortressed ignorance.  They view that as a reason they are superior: they are gladly dumb.

No nation can endure long when guided by elitists who are functional Know Nothings.  If I might append William F. Buckley Junior, I feel reasonably confident that we would do better nationally if we put the first 100 people coming through the door at a Monster Truck Rally in charge of the Senate, and the next 435 in charge of the House, and if we let all of them vote on a President and Vice President.  I am two thirds serious.  Certain forms of stupidity need to be TRAINED, and we would improve things immediately putting people in charge not trained to be stupid.

It’s interesting to speculate what sort of person he was in person.  I could see him being kind and emotionally open, but I could equally–and with perhaps more justice–see him as cold and distant and emotionally uninvolved.  You can easily accommodate the THOUGHT of loving your neighbors without offering the emotional reality in a visible way.  All thoughts are invisible.  We can only see the emotions which follow them.  And he, like many overly analytical, hiding, souls may have been an emotional Invisible Man.

I have enough of that in me to suspect this.  And I will note that what you know about me is only what I write.  I could be anyone.

In fact, I am a bit of a voluptuary (without sex, but everything else legal), and patent enthusiast.  I get excited easily at times, but other times I am often mistaken for a cop or soldier.  This has happened often.  I am a mix of many things, which is perhaps why I see many things.

Aurelius’ son Commodus, though, was a disaster.  He brought an era to an end.  He was a megalomaniac–in a still useful term one does not often see anymore–and you have to wonder if this was perhaps a reaction to his fathers distance and coldness.  The smaller you are made to feel, the larger you become when freed to do as you please.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodus

I will stipulate as a principle that all philosophers and psychologists–and indeed writers of all sorts–should be taken with a grain of salt.  What if Ted Bundy had been a gifted poet?  What if Hitler had IN FACT possessed artistic talent?

Never take things as they seem to be on the outside.  Take them inside yourself, and marinate and digest them, and see what perhaps hidden realities emerge.  It is also always useful to read the biographies of writers of all sorts, to see how well their reality matched their portrayals of themselves through their ideas and images.

Marx, for example, was a complete asshole in every possible way.  He was the grumpy old (and young, and middle aged) man who shouted at everyone who disagreed with the slightest details of his ideas or personal conduct (and held long term grudges), felt entitled to criticize ruthlessly the smallest flaws in others, was emotionally abusive to everyone, lazy, smelled like he hadn’t bathed in a long time most of the time (usually since he hadn’t), and who was controlling of everyone around him.  Small wonder his political children are such ugly monstrosities.

Where are the people of good will, living in that world, capable of telling the difference between shit and a rose?

Until you resolve underlying trauma, relaxation will always be the enemy.  Because when you relax, you MEET the enemy.

And obviously, this is one reason to be combative: if you are always in conflict, there is never any danger of meeting the REAL enemy.  This is almost certainly my own problem.

As I say, when I heal, I won’t walk back anything I’ve said, in terms of content.  There will no doubt be MUCH that I will regret in terms of tone, personal attack, and the like.  I have often been much too much like the people I have been fighting.  They are, by and large, wrong in most of what they contend, and I have argued why at length and over time.  For their part, they are UNABLE to articulate the reasons for nearly everything they shout to the world–I saw this multiple times daily across perhaps 15 years–and rely instead on violence and censorship to create the illusion of an option-less world.

Still, if it is still possible to live in a genuinely good world, one characterized by genuine tolerance, goodwill, hope, charity and love, then my methods need to improve.  And they have, to be sure, and I expect that to continue.

Placing a burden of guilt and shame and pain on little white boys and girls, making them cry and hurt and grieve, does NOTHING to lighten the burdens of guilt and shame and pain which little black boys and girls feel.

Indeed, by leaving them OUT OF THE PICTURE COMPLETELY, nothing is done but make it harder to help them.

Again, the people pushing this are emotionally inferior to normal human beings, and it is to our collective detriment that IQ-wise they are perhaps a bit smarter than average.  They are ugly, mean people with chips on their shoulders, and NO LOVE at all in their hearts, for humanity as a whole, or even for the people on whose behalf they claim to be working.

The whole thing is appalling nonsense that should be readily seen through by ALL decent human beings with normal IQ’s and basic educations.

And yet our highest military officer is inflicting it on our troops, who are a captive audience if ever there was one.  It is an atrocity to common sense and common decency.

I don’t care how many merit badges some officer has.  If he or she is an idiot they are an asshole, and calling that out is the POINT of freedom, which they have always claimed to want to defend.  I look at someone like Milley, and it is ego, obviously and always.  He would have been the same person in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or the Cuban or North Korean Army of today.  He is a type.  All militaries have them.  He does whatever he has to to stay out in front of whatever direction the crowd appears to be heading.

If you ask him what is more important, principle or politics, he will use political considerations to give you an answer, which may well be principle.  But he won’t actually ever hear the question.  That ship sailed long, long ago, if it was ever christened in the first place.

You know, it is true that all our actions are under our voluntary control, within broad limits.  I can decide that absolutely I am going to do x, y, or z and such and such a time and DO IT.  I don’t dispute this.

But what is CLEARLY not within our conscious control are the emotional storms that in some of us fly up and seek to thwart us.  This is the thing with some, perhaps all, forms of trauma: success and consistency conjure forth past terrors and emotions beyond naming which are horribly unpleasant.

I live in a cage, in many respects.  Many of us do.  I have struggled relentlessly against this cage all my life.  It is a sort of Escape Room that requires ingenuity, tenacity, audacity to get out of, and which gives way only and always in small increments.

I spent all day yesterday in bed with terrible pain in my solar plexus.  I may have eaten some bad chicken–it was my chicken and I know how long it was in the refrigerator, but it didn’t smell bad and it was well cooked–but I think it was a decision I reached to stop negotiating with my belly.

Food is one of my comforts.  It is an alcohol until I can get my alcohol.  I need to give up the booze of course too.

And this pain in my solar plexus was something I used to get as a child when I would go too long without eating.  I think it amounted to going too long without soothing.  My mother never soothed me, but food did.  Food for most of us is a comfort.  After all, we need it to live, and it does many of the same things to us drugs do.  Ice cream, to take one obvious example, with its high fat and sugar content, is more or less clinically a drug which reduces high levels of cortisol.  Women who eat it for whatever reason are, arguably, self medicating with a drug.  Men who eat it are of course being manly, since only women get really upset about things.  No, we get drunk.  That’s obviously MUCH better.

But in all cases, these substances, used outside of their proper context of providing life, are substitutes for human warmth and companionship.  If you look at it that way, is it any wonder our world is fat?

But I decided yesterday I am sick of failing at my diet.  And something EMOTIONAL shifted.  And that emotional something said “FUCK YOU” and I got that terrible pain, which is only now easing after a full day.

What I feel, though–and me being the relentless over-sharer that I am, I will likely provide updates–is that that was a bookend to when I was 17.  Back then I had a healthy relationship to food, or at least healthier.  I was not using it as a drug.

That is a big gap in the middle.  I am no longer young.  But willpower has limits.  We know this, from the work of Roy Baumeister and others.

Here is the thing: you cannot go far on willpower alone.  You have to be able to form HABITS which reduce the need for willpower.  And some shrieking part of me has never been willing to allow that to happen.  I would go a week, two weeks, three weeks, then something would intrude–that is the word–and DEMAND, more or less at the pain of spending days in bed with a stomach ache, that I cease and desist.

Well, I just spend a day in bed, and I think I may have altered something for the good.  We will see.  I have immense willpower.  Just getting through every day of my life has required it in large quantities.  I think part of the reason I shake at night is that every day is a battle for me.  Just as soldiers often shake after battle, I shake after every day.

Imagine feeling deep terror everywhere at all times every day, and wanting to run away, knowing that there was nowhere to run to; knowing that the fear would harry me everywhere, so that standing my ground as well as possible was the only logical and viable option.

But there is reason for hope.  I have seen the sun in my dreams twice in the last week.

And I am not complaining.  All of this is practice.  For what, we shall see.

I take a bunch of pills every morning.  I also read Marcus Aurelius with my coffee.  What is funny about that, is I find myself not wanting to read him, like a child who does not want to take medicine.  I know he speaks the truth, but the truth he speaks is different from the life I have lived, in many ways, although I am perhaps closer than many.

So this morning I decided to consider him part of my morning nutritional regimen.  He is part of my morning medicine.

A short quote, which actually can go many ways without his further context: “The business of a healthy eye is to see everything that is visible, not to demand no color but green. . .”

He is slowly working his magic with me, I think, although I am kicking and screaming all the way.