No Thoughts, Head Empty

there’s this trend among youths on social media to speak in memes that self-deprecate the intelligence.  “no thoughts, head empty”  “two brain cells to rub together”  “smooth brain”  etc.  i dun’t cotton to it, son.  save it for your sons of superwholock discord.

but i genuinely am running out of shit to post – an experience kin to running out of thoughts.  the obvious solution would be to react to news, but fuck that noise.

probably within a week you’ll see my tap out post, then I’ll be back to my old ways – still more productive than 90% of the sidebar here, heh.

let’s see how much longer this baloney rolls…

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Wassup

I have nothing queued for today.  Pretty close to the end of my sauce for daily posting.  I will just mention some random biz that is on my mind or that I have going on.  Feel free to do the same in comments.

I’ve gone up a mountain for the second time in as many years, after a long-ass streak of doing no such thing.  Mount Rainier.  Pretty cool but I’m finna learn mad science so I can genetically engineer voracious diurnal high altitude bats, before I do that again.  Death to mosquitoes.

Have you seen that tiny bed they have at ikea?  About cat-sized, but shaped like human bed?  We got one.  Our cat initially said no, but finally got up on it for a nap a few hours ago.  Purchase justified.

Not getting enough sleep.  Got enough last night then immediately set to ruining that good work by staying up past one AM to write this and do a few chores.  Ugh.

Walked around the peat bog park in Federal Way yesterday.  Not nearly as many mosquitoes.  Barely saw any birds, but the birdy app caught a moderate assortment of characters.  Nothing out of the norm.  Also notable what it missed.  And where were the douglas squirrels?  I saw a few on one trip years ago and never since.  Kinda creepy.

Had a shitty phone conversation recently with a racist 80 year old named Virgil.  Are there any decent virgils out there anymore?

I think I’m gonna go back to Hurricane Ridge in a few months here, have a cold weather picnic with chipmunks and canada jays and doctor seuss trees.  Hope I can.

Anyway, how’s your dog?  How about them Bulls?  Was yer band inspired by The Velvet Underground?  Say hi to your mother for me.

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Hey Greydies

Some time ago I saw a lady with sort of purple-grey-blue skin, likely argyria.  Maybe she was exposed to silver as part of an industrial job, or pollution in an area she had lived, or because she had whack-ass beliefs and was drinking that shit for medical woo.  I saw her a few times in the Crown Hill neighborhood of Seattle, and a few years after that at a malwart in Federal Way.  Had to be the same lady, tho it’s not like I had her face memorized.  How many people in her demographic have that color in my neck of the world?  This time she was decked out in clothes that advertised her fealty to shitler, so I’m thinking it was the medical woo.

I’ve seen some other grey ladies.  One time when I was working in that same malwart, very early in the morning a short old white lady bought something at my counter.  She was probably done up for church, but she was so fashionable looking.  She was in a suit jacket and dress, with a blouse and pearls and silver jewelry on her wrists and fingers, all silver-grey like her hair, but in different sheens and patterns to strike a balance of contrast and harmony.  I don’t remember what her face looked like, just that fashion, which is probably the kind of impression most old ladies are hoping to leave on people.  So cool.

More recently I saw a pretty dark-skinned black woman with perfectly formed thin locs in a striking blend of black white and grey, like shining rocks in a river.  Her skin was kind of grey, so what one would call ashy?  That’s usually bad news, but for some reason it was more an even tone over her limbs, rather than whitish stuff some people get in areas of thicker skin.  Maybe it was a temporary effect from some kind of lotion; it didn’t look unhealthy.  Still, that was another grey lady, and I believe she was wearing grey as well.

Hey greydies.  Sorry to notice you.  I know a lot of ladies would rather not be noticed.  Just to say, that’s a legit color.  Ya cool, except maybe that first fool.  Have a nice day.

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Pathetic Little Bluesmen

I’ve had a few posts over time that touch on the subject of Dark Sexual Majesty™, which is the thing some blues men do – later co-opted by hard rock and rap – where they claim to have outrageous sexual powers, with overtones of supernatural evil.  See “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man,” “I’m the One” (Danzig), “I’m the One” (DJ Khaled et al), “I’m the One” (Van Halen), “I’m the One” (Van Halen covered by 4 Non Blondes), and “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” for a few.  There might have been a few jokes in there, watch out.  Point stands, because I say it does, justified only by my own satanic powers of Dark Sexual Majesty™.

But here’s the thing.  We know these boasts are untrue, because they include impossible things.  A little exaggeration to heighten the feeling of exultation?  Or does it undercut the entire theme?  Is it possible the whole thing is meant to be ironic affect, hinting thereby that the singers in question are ineffectual lovers?  Losers who cannot get with tha babes, get sand kicked in their face on the beach?

Of course not, but the idea crossed my mind and I thought it was worth a laugh.  One solitary laugh.

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Birthday Foolery

The weekend of my forty-ninth birthday, my brother brought his young daughters to visit.  They have very high energy and we have degenerative disc disease, so they get away from us.  How do you yell at them to prevent reckless injury without sounding too angry?  I pulled it off, but was on the whole much less successful at reining them in than other adults with similar aged children in their charge.

It was bad enough that the morning after they left I had a dream about failing to keep up with one of them.  Don’t get squished, kids.  Don’t get squished.

As Whitney’s songwriter said, I believe the children are the future.  Teach them jeezis and tell them don’t be gay.  Er, however that went.  But srsly, having children at this spectacular turn for the worse in politics, in the environment, in human rights…  That’s a fuckin’ mess.  The only way I’m going to have to care for a child again is if a freak accident kills my brother and sister in law both before their children turn eighteen.

I think about love and obligation.  My family was black sheep plus black sheep, and love was far from our experience of family.  What does it mean to love those children?  To even love my brother?  It feels so remote, like the sort of feeling you won’t understand until it’s tested – and then you better hope you pass.  I probably will?  I feel bad about that question mark, like, to what extent did I inherit the Antisocial Personality Disorder from mom?  But I don’t feel very bad about it, so don’t cry for me.  Just puzzling out my feelings.

I went to the beach where they filmed Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike,” but those tall beach grasses that Eddie Vedder was standing around in were nowhere in sight.  I think they got choked out by invasive blackberries.  Terns screamed and dove for fish, herons waded and spearfished.  The closest heron was surprisingly fussy, walking around with a fish, washing it in the water, waiting minutes before swallowing.  I saw the largest crabs I’d ever seen alive in the wild.  Not remarkably large, but still nice for me.

My husband made a very good cake.  My homeboy brought his kid around and he helped keep the wild girls occupied.  My brother didn’t have a breakdown.  Coulda been worse.

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A Moment of Bothsiderism

The gnu-flavored atheist movement was founded in part by people who favored military adventurism against muslim-majority countries, chiefly Christopher Hitchens.  That movement quickly morphed into a broad liberalism which appealed to less bloodthirsty people like you and I.  That was revealed to be paper thin cover for a reactionary mindset during Elevatorgate, which is why FtB is so much smaller than SciBlogs had been before the schism.

Elevatorgate’s queen was Abby ERV, who basically abandoned pro-vax activism in favor of a 24-7 misogyny campaign.  Together with Gamergate and the MRA and incel movements, these were the foundational kernel of the neo-nazism that has taken over the USA.  If you meet a rethuglican bro under fifty, he probably spent some time in one or more of these online communities, or their descendants.

If we take that piece of shit ERV as being an icon of atheo-skepticism who contributed to fascism, what of her opposite number in the anti-vax movement, Jenny McCarthy?  Anti-vaxxing (and medical woo in general) used to be strongly associated with liberals, with left of center people.  When conservatives embraced anti-vaxxing, those people swung hard.  I’ve had the misfortune of talking to some of them.  Maybe they have a left belief or two among the gallery of monsters in their skulls, but they are ardent supporters of shitler, and many are Qanon as well.  Both pro- and anti-vaxxing contributed to fascism.

So here’s my moment of bothsiderism.  Who contributed more to our present political ruination, gnu atheists or antivaxxers?  Abby ERV or Jenny McCarthy?  Even tho the actor was much more famous, I honestly do not know the answer to this question.  Both movements had some amount of access to the halls of power via lobbyists or cultural prestige.

In composing this post, I found myself reflecting on the strange political moments and movements that added up to Nazi USA.  That broad tent is wild as hell.  It’s so much easier to take the world apart than to make it better.  The locust swarms flow into and out of each other, devouring hope and love.

I do not fault anyone for feeling doomed and destroyed, but I still have hope for all of you, that you keep it together, that you enjoy the things you can, and you don’t feel too overwhelmed by the overwhelming circumstances.  We’ve got each other and we’re still alive, baby.

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How Racist Were These Candies?

You’re a baby, then you’re a kid, then you’re a teenager.  My kid years were mostly in Seattle, especially toward the end, and there was a window of time when we started to go places without adult supervision back then.  This was unusual for us.  Our parents always told us to stay indoors when we were alone.  If my father got back to find the door unlocked, he would say the same refrain, “Well, you’re all raped and murdered.”

But his ass left town to try and sober up from the drugs and alcohol, leaving our mom alone with us, and slouching on her responsibilities as much as she could get away with.  It led to some really bad situations, but at least when we got out and started roving Beacon Hill, none of us did get raped or murdered.  I’m not sure how we had some pocket change to work with, but we had some pocket change, and used it to buy candies in the one to twenty-five cent range.  If I recall this right, individually wrapped atomic fireballs, jawbreakers, and now&laters would run one to five cents, later a dime.  Laffy taffies more like a dime, and a tiny box of candies would be a quarter.

Those boxes were cool.  Cute designs that probably remained unchanged between the 1960s and 1980s, a half-handful of candy versus those single bites you’d get for a nickel.  There were boston baked beans, cinnamon imperials, jawbreakers (smaller than the individually sold ones), lemonheads, alexander the grape, and cherry clan.

Those last three were all made on the same idea.  Sweet and sour, waxy color shell around a chewy white core.  Of course, they had artificial lemon grape and cherry flavor and the corresponding colors.  Let’s see what those cute little boxes looked like, shall we?

The fight against racism is a long and winding road, and sometimes it seems like the work will never, ever end.  The way things unfold is sometimes surprising.  As I reflect, it feels really weird this particular flavor of racism lasted so long.  A few decades ago, people were calling attention to the trope of Asian girls in cartoons always having a stripe of dyed hair, like, what’s this shit about?  Seems like small potatoes compared to things that were happening a decade before that.

Remember the big advertising push from the Dick Tracy movie in 1990?  How merch and tie-ins were omnipresent in a nearly unprecedented way?  They were aiming for a repeat of what Batman had achieved the year before, but failed big.  I don’t know if it was part of that campaign or just some local programmers trying to capitalize on that hype, but a 1960s era Dick Tracy cartoon started rerunning on my local channel 13, KCPQ.  I’m not sure what was wrong with my young brain, but I watched that shit.

By that shit, I mean this shit:

That show featured Dick Tracy sitting behind a desk calling henchcops on an anachronistic wrist video phone.  His henchcops, who did all the work for him, were racist stereotypes, like Joe Jitsu up there.  Maybe because they were good guys and always won, the fact they were racist cartoons didn’t register the same way it did when Bugs Bunny was clowning on a racist stereotype of a black person.  Maybe I was just racist?  I don’t remember being like that, but so very many people are blind to their own shit.

I was a teenager by then, fourteen!

Again, I’m just thinking about how cool and progressive we all felt about ourselves in 1990.  Jim Crow was in a history book, vanquished by saintly MLK.  And yet, here this was, on TV, in front of my young eyeballs.  It ain’t funny.  I wonder if some Rupert Murdoch affiliate is going to bring the show back for a third go now…

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Imposterous

It seems Kurt Cobain had a touch of the “Impostor Syndrome” that has been semi-popular for people to yak about on social media o’er the last few years, and it was possibly an influence on the verbiage of his suicide note.*  It probably didn’t help that a number of his famous tunes were well-known for similarity to other people’s works, but anybody who can appreciate the kind of art our late lamented fella was laying down would agree that he did it well.  No fakin’.

Something I noticed at that wikipedia link above is that impostor syndrome is not officially recognized by the authorities on psychology, tho not specifically refuted either.  They just haven’t considered it of sufficient life impact to be considered a disorder, or diagnostic enough to be considered a symptom.  Officially.  It does seem to be a real thing, at least, that many people who are smart cool successful etc. feel they are faking it and feel likely to be discovered.  At that point, they must pull a Milli Vanilli and be done with the world.  As Freddie said, don’t do that.

Now to be very clear, I do not have impostor syndrome at all.  I am quite certain that I rule ass, altho I recognize that I am prone to speaking thoughtlessly and embarrassing myself, and am not a genius of the classic conception.  I am a very cool comrade, but sometimes I do feel kinda fake.  Particularly when I’m hustling for meaning.  My day in the life posts, my bird posts both tend to include some attempt at folksy profundity, like, ain’t that just the way?, or to draw connections Connections-style, which may be entirely unjustified, specious, or frivolous.

I’m probably being the most honest on those when I am being the most frivolous.  When I’m hinting around something deep, or spelling that out more bluntly, how legit is that?  My husband is more of a real artist about this stuff (probably no coincidence he has similar health problems to Cobain), gravitating to subjects he cannot express directly, trying to comprehend the incomprehensible.  Art as a struggle.  I just get an idea, or work up an idea, and spit it out.  Blop.  Soup’s on.

I have said many many times that words are bullshit, that everything in our lives and in existence itself has a reality that words can’t even begin to approximate.  As Depeche Mode said, “feelings are intense; words are trivial.”  But where does that leave me, as a person who devotes an inordinate amount of their time to writing?

I once had a teenager tell me that the cool kids “don’t care,” specifically about learning or social order in the school environment, but I believe her ass was very mistaken.  The genuinely cool kids are the ones who know everything is bullshit, so they don’t bother talking about it, because what’s the point?  Not in a thought-terminating cliché or cruel way, just that life isn’t about whatever words we want to layer on it, and none of this is necessarily going anywhere.  That kinda stuff.  I’ve known people like this, loved a few of them.

So by this metric, where yakkin’ about stuff inherently makes you less real, more of an uptight square than the cool guy what doesn’t talk much, is everyone who writes inherently uncool?  No, cool people can make words happen in a conversation or in writing, but the approach to the words is different.  They would effortlessly say only what needs to be said, and if you understand it, that’s the extent to which you are cool, and if you didn’t, not their problem.  That’s them and here’s me, making words for the sake of words.  Writers are not inherently uncool, but I surely am.

OK, that’s me talking out my ass on a sultry summer night.  Did I not say earlier in this post that I am very cool?  I am.  Very cool.  Like, I read some of the shit Cat Valente blogs on a bottle of wine, and I win.  Take that, nerds.  RIP to impostor syndrome sufferers but I’m different.  Most of the time.  I’m good.  I’m good.

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*As I researched the points of this first paragraph I became convinced it doesn’t hold up.  Not quite true; his death and that letter had more to do with anhedonia and old school depression.  I leave it in because it shows my line of thought as I was composing.  Wild that his note mentioned Freddie Mercury and I randomly mentioned him in the article before I went back and did the reading.  Ah, what a dismal thing to be pondering.

Selection Selection

You can still join the RP by comment, open for two more players.  Catch up from the beginning here, just look at the most recent post, or whatever.

we know natural selection and sexual selection.  it’s pretty clear complex species have a kind of sociological selection, even if it isn’t the darwinism some would imagine.  what other kinds of selection could be happening?  all that’s needed for selection is a variable thing and another variable thing that filters the variety of the first.  what if there’s a kind of selection we haven’t identified yet that drives the cycle of mass extinctions?  people point to certain astronomical and geographical cycles but i’m thinking something more abstract.  i once wondered why diseases hurt and kill, when they could proliferate more if they did not do those things.  maybe what selects for them to cause harm is something we haven’t thought of yet (tho there were other explanations from commenters which seem more likely).

might be that sociological selection is understudied.  i could be using the wrong term and i don’t know the literature, don’t even know for sure that sociology is the field in which study would happen.  the way unregulated capitalism guts itself and ruins the world is actively selected for in some way.  superficially you can look at specific actions like the repeal of glass-steagall, but it’s part of a larger phenomenon which is out of control and strangling democracy.  i guess that one would be studied by radical economists, even tho it shouldn’t be radical because it’s blue-sky obvious from outside the schools that spawn alan greenspan clones.

i dimly recall some scientists believing that sexual selection was just one aspect of fitness selection and didn’t deserve equal footing.  people fond of the fascist version of natural selection would apply it very broadly, but i’m sure there are non-nazi justifications for doing so.  then again, that could just be humans trying to cram the natural world into neat little boxes for ease of understanding, when complexity and chaos are the true way of things.  If sexual selection is just natural selection junior, then natural selection (as fitness to the environment changing rates of mutant gene expression in populations) could itself be a concept nested within a larger framework, and in company with myriad categories of related phenomena.

i’m gonna start with the types of fitness i’ve discussed so far and list any others i can imagine off the top of my head.  feel free to add more in comments, or whatever you please.

type of selection — variable A — variable B / the filter
natural selection — mutation — environmental fitness
sexual selection — costly displays — weird fetishes
sociological selection — cultural behavior — success of the culture
invisible hand shit — supply — demand (lol fake)
political corruption — personal ethics — lobbyist money
sexy water droplet on laura dern’s wrist — goin different directions — chaos

i never did get at what i was feeling, something bigger… but that’s all i got for now.  waking up for work in six hours…

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Surreal Profundity and Philosophical Materialism

I didn’t really get the fact that recognition is a feeling and that feeling can be utterly mistaken, until I witnessed a guy having auras all day, ahead of his first grand mal seizure.  He kept “remembering a dream” in drowsy moments, followed by a rising sense of nausea.  It felt like he was remembering a dream, but he clearly was not.  One of them referred to a piece of media we had consumed together after the last time he had been asleep.

So déjà vu.  Being reflexively materialist, believing in nothing supernatural, I presumed there was an explanation for it that nobody bothered to mention, and this was it.  You can feel like you’re remembering or recognizing something that you have no prior experience with, very easily.  This can be associated with epilepsy, so get yer brain scanned if you have that feeling a lot.

That brings me to the point of the post.  There are other feelings that can be misled, can be a trick of the light.  The sense of the profound, of deep emotional meaning, that one can feel in a dream or in a piece of surreal art – that feeling can be total bullshit.  Yet it moves.  In fact, I’m kind of a junkie for it.  I love surreal art.  Touch the dreamsauce, feel some type of way.  It feels deep, but it almost certainly is not.

Does recognition of this diminish its power?  Perhaps.  Then I have to move onto the hard stuff.  David Lynch not enough, gotta pound Andalusian Dog into my weary veins.  That’s just consumption of the stuff; what about production?  I’d like to make art that feels important the way returning Excalibur to Betty Boop can feel important when you’re asleep.

How can I do that if I don’t genuinely believe it is important?  It’s like writing romance when you feel unromantic, writing comedy when you have cancer.  All I have for this right now is a question.  No answer.  If you have any ideas, hit me up.

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