Moderates United

4 beers, I think, a whiskey, then a bottle of champagne, and a six pack of 6.7% beer.  I forgot to set my alarm, but I woke up anyway.  Got to hit the road at 6am.

Woke up thinking about Gallagher and smashing watermelons.

Edit: I did remember.  I will mention as well that I don’t get hangovers.  It would likely be better for me if I did.  I am foggy for an hour, then I’m good.  I get a bad cough sometimes when drinking hard liquor–the liver and the lungs are connected–but that too disappears pretty quickly.  As a practical alcoholic, I’ve figured out methods of dealing with it.

Still, I can’t help but feeling this morning that good things are on the way.  I don’t know why.  Perhaps because I am right.  That’s always one of the options.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CdY1DQWh08

Can I nostalge (that’s a useful word, is it not?) about times when the “meaning of life” was a thing?  Can I not ask the same questions Burke asks?

We all have these questions in us, do we not?  There’s nothing unique about me.  My questions, I think, are questions everyone would ask if they took the time to be silent long enough.

My life, my soul: they are not exceptional.  I’m just a guy who says what everyone should be saying, who barks when all the other dogs should be barking.

Yeah, so I broke.  My work today left substantially every muscle in my body hurting, and I went to one of my watering holes, and uh, watered myself.  They charged me for 2 beers and a whiskey, but I’m pretty sure it was 3-4, and I stopped at the liquor store on the way home (after getting the drift and leaving a 30-35% tip, after which I think management gets suspicious).

So I was going to talk about mystical stuff, which I could, but I feel vaguely ashamed, so I won’t.

I am a fish.  I am an aquatic animal.  I do live in many directions and angles and depths in a typical day.  I see things you cannot see in an ordinary sunlit world.  I lay on my back sometimes and watch the sun from 15′ down.  I feel the currents around me.

But I’m not talking at the moment.  I’m going to listen to something loud and cool on Spotify, watch Jeopardy, then go pass out on my futon.  Good times.

I will have more to report in a day or two.  Progress is being made, outward self reported appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.

I realize, as I slowly try to build a behavioral line for myself, that it is quite possible, through will and habit, to constrain the expression of traumatic residue to certain contexts and times.

People like me, we learn to do 8 to 5, more or less, or 6am to 6pm, or whatever is needed. We mostly seem normal. I am a bit rigid but I have a good sense of humor (on most accounts).

But it is EXHAUSTING acting normal. Once I done playing my role, I want to numb all that tension and grief into oblivion.  The day is act 1. The night is act 2, and this can be repeated across s lifetime.

“He was so quiet”, we hear of the latest mass murderer, or guy who had someone locked in a closet, or whatever. Two lives. Two segmented lives. Act 1 and Act 2, the second hidden.

Often soldiers are like this. Keep them in a container of duty and they function fine. When leave the service though, they may just want to buy a shipping container and 40 acres in back of the back 40, and hide from the world. Some of our best soldiers do this, I am told, by someone in a position to know. The long term accumulation of fear, based on first hand knowledge of what is possible, just adds up and sinks them. Maybe they are happy, but I think happier is the better word, relative to all other options.

I think most casual readers in the field of psychology will know about the marshmallow experiment: one now, or 2 or more if you wait fifteen minutes, at age 4 or so. 

I’m listening to an OK but not great book, called something like “Can you learn to be more lucky?”.  My rule on things like this is I finish all books I start, because you never know what small detail you might pick up which might make a difference.  This is the same reason I like going to even the smallest, worst funded and built museums: you just never know.  My brain is building patterns continually, and it will pick up, I think, sometimes on things most people miss.

In any event, in some respects she is building the case for the prosecution socially of microaggressions, and for the concept of privilege.  For my part, I have never denied that, for example, the child of a two parent home, and particularly a prosperous two parent home, is intrinsically luckier than the child of a single parent home on the other side of the proverbial tracks.  My point is simply that the goal is to build up the latter, not denigrate the former.  We want everyone high, not low.

Be all that as it may, she made the interesting observation/twist on the marshmallow experiment, that it depends not just on self control, but on how much the child TRUSTS the experimenter, and this, in turn, is highly correlated with the childs life experience.  Children from poorer homes are significantly more likely to take the one marshmallow now.  They get what they can get, when they can get it.  Big dreams and long term plans are not a part of their daily experience.  A marshmallow in hand is worth two in the bush.

And our communal life as a whole is a giant marshmallow experiment.  Are you willing to play by “the rules”, to get educated, and work hard for a long time, in exchange for a long term reward, such as a nice retirement?  Does your answer not depend in large measure on how much you trust the system?

When you look at, say, Neil Cassady and Jack Kerouac, their answer was that we are most likely all going to die in a nuclear war, and that no, the rewards of conformity to a system which requires one to suppress all natural instincts for fun, for adventure, for change, for sex sex sex, is NOT worth the sacrifice.  If this life, this marshmallow, is all we get, then why not devote what small time we have to short term pleasures?

As Weezer put it:

Cuz I can’t work a job like any other slobPunchin’ in and punchin’ out and suckin’ up to Bob

Marryin’ a beeyotch, havin’ seven keeyods

Givin’ up and growin’ old and hopin’ there’s a God.

A sane, well organized society provides those two marshmallows reliably.  Perhaps it consists in part in punishment for NOT waiting.  But it also consists in pointing out that there is a place for the person who waits, a place they belong, where they will be valued and loved and recognized. 

To put it mildly, our society in general does a poor job of this.  Do your job faithfully for thirty years, and you get a pen.  The pension is gone, and you will be forgotten within three weeks.  You have your spouse, but they are a poor consolation in a desolate world.  The kids are gone, most likely, and you ARE left wondering if there is a God, if you are typical American.  You may go to church–you have may gone all your life–but you know it’s hard to know for sure.

I read on the news at the gym yesterday that Russell Wilson got $140 million for I think it was 6 years, maybe 4.  $65 million signing bonus. 

Can you imagine if just ten percent of that money was invested in working to document that the afterlife exists?  This is a vitally important question, and methods exist, but it simply isn’t a priority.

Why is this world–specifically the people in it–so fucking stupid?

I suppose I can answer that question, by appealing to psychology and sociology, but in a deeper, more metaphysical sense, I can’t.

All lies would count as counter-hegemonic narratives, would they not? Anything but the present, anything but what is accepted?

I continue to find ways in which Leftist is connected to Satanism.

If you think about it, a lie is in no respect a positive affirmation, when you know you are lying.  You are merely contributing, if we want to use that word, an alternative version of the truth, one which you know to be inaccurate, but also know to be different from the currently accepted, or most obvious, one.

A lie, in other words, is a subversion of the truth.  It is something which serves to obscure the truth.  A lie, in Gramscian terms, might be termed a “counter-hegemonic narrative”, if we understand the dominant “hegemonic narrative” to be everything which a given society has always understood to be true.

And perhaps the most structurally important lie being told nowadays is that there is no truth.  Of course there is truth.  Jim, for example, might reliably be shown to have shot Sally last Tuesday in their apartment after a fight heard by numerous neighbors.  It is always possible to be wrong about the truth, but that something happened is epistemologically a certainty as long as we grant this world exists, which all of these nearly universally atheistic materialists do.

And one can assert that the Notre Dame Cathedral is beautiful and the Centre Georges Pompidou is ugly as well.  By and large, the people who will oppose you are those who oppose everything which was.  And they do this by lying.  They do not lack aesthetic taste, but, rather like the Underground Man, find themselves compelled to embrace everything ugly.

Certain truths are found in silence.  Certain truths emerge from deep waters after long contemplation.  These truths become impossible when people will not stop talking, will not stop lying, will not stop pushing.  This is our current situation.

I am not entirely sure I am thinking clearly here, but perhaps there is something of use to someone.  I have to run.

First, that Marxism–and we are dealing everywhere with Cultural Marxists, irrespective of what name they give themselves–is inherently anti-culture, particularly on the Gramscian account.  What was, must no longer be.  What was, was the power, so the new power must reject what was.

Notre Dame, on this account, is inescapably a symbol of patriarchy, monarchism–indeed, feudalism–theocracy, and more than anything else, white males.

It is, or was, ugly, in other words, by the only criterion allowed left wing radical lunatics. Its burning should be celebrated.

Lost in all this, is that the only beauty is in conformity, and conformity, by any other standard, is mediocrity and ugliness.  As Mark Steyn pointed out on Fox last night, we can look to the Centre Georges Pompidou as the logical expression of anti-culture and anti-beauty, aka a Gramscian ideal. It subverted the dominant paradigm that public buildings should be pleasing, and even inspirational.

The second point I wanted to make is tangential.  I was reading an account of atheism a month or two ago, and they pointed out that atheism was important for radicals in France and Russia particularly, since the Church and the Monarchy were so closely connected.  This was not as true in England, and obviously not America, since the absolute power of the Pope, in the case of France, and I guess the Tsar for the Russian Orthodox Church, had already been subverted.

This led to me wondering if culturally there is a connection between Catholicism and Fascism and other authoritarianisms.  Has this played a role in the many strong men and dictators of Latin America, for example?  Symbolically, political power can be seen as a secular analogue of spiritual/religious power.  There is, in other words, nothing wrong with it, as long as we accept the model of the Pope as an absolute ruler not accountable to the flock.

Then it occurred to me to wonder if it is significant that Hitler first rose to power in Munich, in a Catholic stronghold.

Just thinking out loud, there.

I think I have found a solution to my nightly torture.  As usual, it has required ignoring received wisdom, ignoring the experts, trusting my intuition, and saying “fuck all these people”.  This should not be necessary as often as it manifestly is.  I wish I were an idiot whisperer, that I could get people to listen to me, but most often I antagonize people.  The smarter people are, they think, the less they want to hear how stupid they are being.

I want to make sure.  I will post more in a week or so.

289, I remembered, and I had a large pizza (anchovies, Canadian bacon and olives) but no booze.  Taxes, which I always postpone to the last minutes because I ALWAYS owe (why should I loan my money to this fucking government?), and which stress me out.  If average Americans had to pay the way I do, with full knowledge of how much money I could have kept, and would have kept if we had not been trained like beasts of burden to accept the theft of a third of our income, then I think we would have a much larger tax revolt than we already have.

Let’s say you make $50,000.  $7,500 of that is taken for Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid (you only see 7.5% because your employer pays the other half, but that is money which competition for employees would otherwise cause to go to you, since it is a fixed expense either way), and you have NO RIGHT to that money.  You pay this year after year after year, and when you hit 65, if you die, your wife gets none of it.  Your children get none of it.  Because in reality, all you did was fund current expenditures.  There is no “lock box”, like Al Gore talked about 19 years ago.  You paid out of your sweat for 30-40 years, and none of it is yours.  This by actual court decision.

Then of course you have local and State and regular Federal income taxes on top of that.  If you are a business owner, you might add to this half a dozen more taxes, particularly if you do work regionally.  And of course you pay Sales tax on everything.  You pay property taxes on your home, which continue even after you own it, in most jurisdictions.  It’s crazy.

Most of us are well trained monkeys, incapable of understanding the abusiveness of what is happening around us.