Diminishing America

Saw another random grandma with some bullshit-ass “USA love it or leave it” t-shirt, but punchier than usual.  She has to feel surrounded and backed up against a wall by libs, here in a very blue state.  Good.  But it got me reflecting on the ways tvfkp is Making America Tiny Again – and that nazis like this lady actually want to see this happen.  Weirdly, we are somewhat in agreement about that?  Allow me to explain…

Her vision of this is in the Try That in a Small Town song, and similar sentiments.  The USA would be better off if no big cities existed, if it was an endless string of farms and little white houses with small-minded white people in them.  All the messicans and faggots and queers and hindus and mooslims and jews and natives and chinamen and darkies can be forcibly relocated to canada or mexico or hell ASAP.  This will by definition be a country with less power in the world, a place defined by smallness, surrounded by machinegun turrets and razorwire.  Speak English or die.  This vision is of course impossible, and maybe she recognizes that, viewing it as aspirational.  Any atrocities committed in pursuit of the dream are noble.

My vision is of a place where conservative beliefs are shamed for the nazism they are, back into the muttered shit-talk of the worst white people you know instead of the broad coalition of screaming freaks you see in charge of everything now, mainstream society as some kinda blando liberal mush that isn’t good enough but at least isn’t actively smoking the biosphere like a cigarette and ensuring we are all as miserable, hateful, and petty as possible on the way down.  I know, I dream small.  Like to keep my hopes in the dimension of what feels possible, so I am not too disappointed.  This doesn’t feel super likely, but does feel at least sorta remotely like.. maybe?  In my vision, one aspect of the damage caused by shitler persists – we are no longer the economy on which the world depends, because they learned we are not dependable.  The USA is forced by this humbling to play ball, to negotiate on equal footing with other nations and power blocs – to become less belligerent than it has ever been in its existence.

From this inferior place, the second rate status we so clearly deserve, we can’t help but acknowledge the reality that we are only one nation out of many, that we are part of the world and that part isn’t the axis.  (deathlol)  And this would open the door to other places coming into their own – the so-called third world, the global south, finally having a shot at setting their own terms and protecting themselves from the depredations of colonial powers and empires like ours.

Basically, an end to the USA as an empire.  And that is something she’d genuinely agree with.  She doesn’t want us to be trading with foreign powers.  She really would prefer to buy garbage manufactured in the USA.  She really won’t like what that costs, at first, but she could get used to it, especially if it helps maintain the integrity of the fortress.  Nobody in and, once the purges are done, nobody out.  Every activity our nation engages in overseas seems so pointless to her.  Charity, trade, diplomacy.  Why you gotta be out talkin’ to undesirables like that?  Take care of yer own!

I had no idea shitler was going to do something I agree with.  And he’s not going about it in a way I’d ever like to see.  But the end state, where the empire has properly imploded?  Where we’re stuck on our own shitbird equivalent of Brexit Island?  Where nobody in any other nation looks upon us as something to aspire toward?  A world in which the harm we do can never be so terrible that it threatens everybody else?

I’m into that.  I care about other people in the world too much to want us large and in charge.  Make America Smol Again, with your tiny tiny hands.  God damn, I would love to see a peaceful and prosperous Africa so much it makes my soul hurt.

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Mellifluosity

Do you ever read some fancy old writing and wish you could express yourself in more lofty ways?  This feeling could as easily apply to reading old polemics by political activists and philosophers as to the art, the overly complex asides, the amusing constructions of somebody like Edgar Allen Poe or Henry James or Lord Byron.  On the other hand, I do suspect I lose some readers to such indulgences – and I barely dip my toe into those deep waters.

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I bore as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.  You, who know so well the depth of my character shall not suppose that I gave utterance to a threat, or …   … That’s all I have memorized.  I should really get the rest in my dome.  It’s such a fun piece of literary spite.  But also.  I’d like to talk like that.  Sometimes, a little bit, and sometimes.

This reminds me of a discussion I had with a chatbot.  Chatbots can “act,” can speak in whatever manner you suggest to them, but they tend to forget or lose their bead on the character.  Before deepseek became too overwhelmed to function most of the time, I managed to tease it into talking like an overly erudite cowboy – think Sam Elliott’s narrator character in Big Lebowski – for a good length of time.  But to keep it in character, I had to speak in the exact same way.  It was too challenging, but I might post it here sometime for amusement.

Every once in a while a post crosses my social media about lexical gaps.  Have you seen these?  There are word constructions in the English language, comprised of prefixes, suffixes, and altered vowels or consonants, that change the meaning of the root word in prescribed ways.  purchase, pre-purchase, purchaser, purchased, etc.  There are many words suggested by these constructions that are never actually used in English, and some may have legitimate use; these are the lexical gaps.  They can also sound very funny.  I have a half-baked ambition to produce ten-thousand of these in an excel spreadsheet (or more likely force my husband to), and pore over them for the kind of usefulness that could go viral.  Like, if I start using those oddball words consistently, I can get others to spread them for me – change language on purpose.

I’m not going anywhere in particular with this, just expressing some related ideas and feelings.  If any of you should take the fancy to parlay in the manner of an over-educated cowboy in the comments, sidle up to the post and suit thyself, pardners.

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Purple Pill Poppers

Red pill, blue pill.  Why so biney, Morpheoose?

I’ve gotten self-righteous about it from time to time, as have most of the people on this network – bloggers and commenters included – but fundamentally I am an atheist because it feels real to me, based on my predilections in combination with my experience of life, and not because I was moved to this position by Reason and Enlightenment.  In the Matrix metaphor, to me, atheism is the blue pill – the world that has been “pulled over my eyes.”  Comforting, tho often a cold comfort.

What then would be the red pill?  Anything that was capable of overthrowing that idea of reality, replacing it with something new.  In The Matrix that would be the Truth.  In my ill-conceived thesis, I’ll just treat the red pill as an alternative view of the world, different from what you’ve previously known and not necessarily true.  With that being the idea, red pills are rare things indeed.

We have a sense of what’s real built on the stuff of our lives.  For some people that’s jesus and paranoia, for others, well, there’s a lot of ways people can be, regardless of how polls aim to simplify it all.  But across the board, we are not easily convinced of anything that falls outside our biases.  Some of those biases are good and fine, even factually correct like atheism, but that doesn’t keep them from being biases.  The bias is the thing you are predisposed to believe.  What can overcome this?

Believers in society as a great discourse between rational minds, they’d say debate and discussion can overcome incorrect beliefs.  The truth will inherently emerge from a true socratic dialogue.  Does it though?  Seems to me we almost never change what we believe to something directly opposite.  Those who went from cookie-baking grandma to goose-stepping Q-creep were building on whatever their baseline was.  The flaw was there, waiting to be nurtured.

The gradual creep of US fascism over the last hundred years, while it involved intentional propaganda by malevolent masterminds, those masterminds themselves were thralls of propaganda they’d been fed, as much subject to manipulation as anyone they sought to manipulate.  We’re all just following a course of social entropy.

Within that, there are ways to bend people, to ourselves get bent.  Like that fascist grandma, take a pre-existing belief or point of view and elaborate on it, build it into something new.  Not a red pill because it’s not a total jailbreak of the original firmware, call it a purple pill.

In The Matrix, Joey tha Rat had the same choice about what to believe that Neo was given, chose red, then changed his mind.  Wouldn’t that be nice?  Change your beliefs on a dime, to whatever felt the best in a given moment?  Not to say I want to change my own beliefs, just using a lil’ reflection on my relationship to those beliefs as a way to understand some people whose thoughts are nigh unimaginable.  Do your own research, as they say.

What I’m interested in, like anybody else living in a society that isn’t living up to their ideals, is how to alter the beliefs of those who seem dead set on ruining everything.  They got purplepilled into that point of view, and maybe we can purplepill them into a point of view that is less ruinous somehow.  It’s not like looking for a “weak spot” to exploit.  Those that indoctrinated them into fascism did not seek to dominate, they fertilized the soil and watered it.  It’s a process of nurturing, I think.

What is left in a fascist that is good enough to build on, to encourage them to become something less bad?  I don’t know, but it could be worth thinking about.

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Is This Going Somewhere?

As I’ve been trying to queue articles in advance, to write at least one article for every day going however far in advance I can, I’ve been writing a lot more than I used to.  And it’s giving me a long view of the boundaries of my thoughts.  I will run out of shit to say at some point, and start sounding like your seventy year old college professor.  Salright, we abide.

But in this, I’m also getting a feeling of my work as a whole, as a very long thesis, as a possibly unified idea.  Almost like I could turn my whole blog history into a book.  Not as is; it would have to be edited and rewritten extensively.  But it’s funny to think I could just write The Big Book of Everything I Think and have it done.

Reminds me of Jenny Nicholson’s criticism of Batman v Superman, that Lex Luthor’s shithouse philosophy took up too much screen time.  Her joke solution was that Snyder could record a podcast of his ramblings as bonus material and whenever the screen character is tempted to go off, he just promotes his podcast and moves on.

If I ever make the big book of all o’ my thunks, I will just publish it as a web version where I can link people to my points whenever I feel tempted to repeat myself.  And they will ignore it and move on with their lives, and I will slouch on my couch in practiced ignorance of my ignominy, smiling to myself about how I told ’em what for.

Take that, kids.

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1000th Post

My 1000th post on this blog network was queued to be a birdpost about an LBB.  Observe it later today.  This is no kind of celebration of my multifarious thunks, my grande historie of letters.  So.  Gotta think of a way to honor myself properly.

Remember when I was Great American Satan?  God, that was so long ago.  What an innocent child I was back then, cavorting in alpine meadows and singing to the little birdies.  Lalalalala.  But seriously, this is a good time to explain again why the name change.  Great American Satan is derived from the words of Ayatollah Khomeini, as mocked by USian propaganda that was intended to depict the muslim world as uniquely backward.

It was islamophobic.  I still proudly stand against almost all of the shit ayatollahs believe in, but can’t disregard the fact my country is the greatest purveyor of evil in the world.  We genuinely fucked Iran for oil, for military adventurism, for capitalism – and most of the countries in the world besides.  The only reason we regard Iran’s nasty theo-fascist ass as an enemy is because they beat us, and refuse to make Nikes like Vietnam does now, or give us sweetheart deals on oil like nasty theo-fascist Saudis.  Now we’ve gone full fash.  How could I mock anybody in the world who has a bone to pick with us, no matter how shit they are?  This bone must get picked.

But back to the real subject at hand:  Beauteous I.

How do I love me?  Let me count the ways.  Didja know Edgar Allan Poe was Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s biggest fanboy?  He had some over-the-top praise for her, at least.  History seems to have validated his opinion; the average fool remembers some of her words, if not her name.  She’s well known and well regarded in her field, I think.  Poets correct me if I’m wrong.

I have to think that blogging will never rise to the level of famous prose and poetry because of the disparity in effort, and this is a good thing.  A blogger might have a bon mot go viral, especially masters of microblogging, but few posts will outlive their moment.  How many can you remember?  PZ’s Grenade, tho that was more about the circumstances than the craft.  Intent! It’s Fucking Magic! by Genderbitch?  Journalists of the dead tree variety, to the extent that exists, suffer a similar impermanence.  I’ve seen journalism described as “writing on running water,” and it’s telling that I don’t remember with certainty who coined the expression or if I got the phrasing right.

Having a thousand posts of a blog, that is something of an achievement.  It takes a special kind of self-regard to keep spitting the contents of your head into The Void, day after day for years on end.  Most FtBers aren’t up to the task.  Before I started using queuing to achieve a post per day, I wasn’t doing daily posts either.  Often I’d miss a week or two, sometimes I’d miss a whole month.

And yet I was always more of a presence here than most of those sidebar characters.  This I recognize as well in my writing group: I often do the writing activities, far more often than anyone else but my husband.  He succeeds at noveling months more often than I do, but I have more morale for seeing the writing prompt events through.  Everybody else?  They try, sometimes, but it doesn’t even come close.

I am the champions, my friends.  I don’t mean to denigrate my colleagues; I am simply wondering aloud, why is this so hard to do for so many?  Why is regular blogging such a challenge?  Since it’s the majority of aspiring writers that have this issue, I can’t regard it as something to be ashamed of.  The freaks that post all the time, there’s probably something wrong with us.  But I dig being that kind of freak.

So raise a glass for your humble Bébé Mélange.  Life is indeed a gas, powered in part by satan and america and some flavor of greatness, as much as I’m trying to move past those things, generally.  And read the next post for some bullshit about birds.  You enjoy life.  I’m watching you, and if you do not, there will be consequences.  Everything is coercion now, it’s cool.  Compulsory fun for you.

Take your medicine!

This is just random crapola.  But then, that is the essence of blogging.  I hope other people get something out of it, but I would definitely be doing it for myself alone, if I had to.  The world needs my opinions, obviously.  One day, in circling the trashfire like a confused turkey and poking at the mess, I will accidentally into the answer for Lasting World Peace, or otherwise solve the big intractable questions that have dogged us since time immemorial.

Be here for it.  Thank you.

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Death Magic

See my previous couple of posts for some thoughts and feelings on magic and death.  Continuing my most recent thoughts and building on them, welcome to this post.  Although it’s being written pretty stream-of-consciousness, so if anything coherent comes of it, that’s just luck.

I had a brief moment watching a playthrough of Elden Ring wherein I genuinely felt the magic of spooky weirdos in the service of death sorceries.  Reminded me of when I feel tha magic in other media, like the weirding way from Dune, like Jim Morrison bullshit in that Oliver Stone Doors movie, like… I dunno.  The part in Lord of Illusions when the ground is crumbling away from Nyx’s feet and he’s still levitating like it’s no biggy.

So this has me wondering how I might use that inspiration to write better magic in my own stories.

Y’know I still don’t have a good strong idea of just what Josefina in J&B is capable of and how it works.  It would be super useful to have that figured out before I write the last half of that book.  The last scene of my first big chonk of that book has her teleporting short distances and anchoring a spirit creature to the ground so Blasfemia can finish it off.  I do know at least one big impressive thing I want her to do at the end of the story.  What can build toward that?

A bit off topic but related and I may double back to it before I’m done here.  In this one I was thinking about my thinking about my notions on Death Magic.  Previously I said that magic in this context is less about exerting one’s will over reality than interacting in a more profound way with the big important concepts in life – love sex chaos death etc.  It’s about emotion.  Surrealism is not much without feeling behind it.  It helps surrealism hit right if the feeling is one of the big ones; magic too, I think.  Maybe.  Like I said, working off the top of my head here.

How do I feel about death?  What is it?  I don’t like it.  Like, I don’t wanna die.  Really don’t.  There’s a goofy song by Depeche Mode called Flies on the Windscreen which states its case with the opening lyrics:  “Death is everywhere!  There are flies on the windscreen for a start, Reminding us!  We could be torn apart.”  This is real as shit.  Death and dying are everywhere you look in this world.  Part of life, of course, but if you’re feeling it, it’s sure easy to let that turn you into a goth.

The further I get from the moment that inspired this, the more the feeling is faded, like a dream.  I may have been drifting toward sleep in that moment.  God I feel like I could sleep any damn time.  When I retire, I’m gonna sleep six hours, wake up for two, then sleep another three.  And it’s gonna feel awesome.

Anyway, how can I get back to that moment, remember what it’s like?  Gotta focus on my feelings.  How do I feel about death, really?  If I strip away the bullshit and the philosophy, but don’t go so simple as to say “it sux and be scary.”  What is death, to me?  It’s so hard to focus.  I closed my eyes and felt it out.

First thing that came to mind was the inevitability of it.  It’s looming there like a monolith… more like the walls of a prison and I’m inside.  Second thing, the absurdity of it.  More specifically, of people’s responses to it.  There are the religious faithful, which we can scorn or pity in our own ways.  More absurd tho are the things people do with their lives.  The fact death looms large in front of orngdolf shitler renders the way he’s choosing to live his life profoundly absurd.  But that’s true of most of us as well.  When you consider that you could die at any moment but you’re still going to work and living like a human being, instead of wilding out, doing anything you love and that you’re capable of…  It’s depressing, appropriately.

It’s a joke and we’re all the punchline.  It’s meaningless.  It’s the return to zero.  Even the Universe is ultimately going to die.  When I’m having trouble focusing, it’s the quiet in between the notes of the static.  It’s the low point on the brainwave graph.  Again, it’s all around and looming and cannot be escaped.  So what was the feeling that intrigued me there, in something I normally avoid the contemplation of?

Maybe it’s the way I’m horny on goths.  In my cowardice, when I see somebody who does not look away from death, they become powerful to me, magnetic.  Was I just being horny on the concept of this character?  Doesn’t feel like it.

Truth.  The fictional depictions of magic that move me are the ones where a character knows something about reality and it confers on them a kind of power.  Fia the Deathbed Companion doesn’t look away from death.  She intentionally focuses herself on it fully, and though she has some magic powers from that awareness, the most magical thing about it is the awareness itself.  Drink a big glass of poison and in the moment before it kills, live forever.  Live the thing that others fear.  Don’t fear the reaper.

I don’t think killers are cool.  The cool assassin man from movies, nay.  It’s fun to watch the action as no-names go flyin’ from the paired pistolas of Chow Yun-fat, but he’s gotta have a good reason to do it, and they gotta genuinely not be human in any way.  Chaff, or Snidely Whiplash’d.  Killing people sucks and the extent to which it happens IRL makes the fiction less appealing to me these days.  But the mortified character, whether dying saintly or transcending life more grotesquely, cenobite style – that’s an interesting character.  Powerful.

I dunno i dunno.  Probably feel different about that tomorrow.  I’ve thought before that when I die, I wanna look like that bog mummy.  You know, the one that looks so peaceful, like he laid down to take a nap and crumpled into the earth just a bit, to lay there forever.  That guy died violently, of course.  Nice to imagine otherwise.  Let my sleep be peaceful and dignified – not that I’ll be there to care about it.   Still.

The death wizard is already dead and not dead yet, fully aware of and in communion with the walls of this prison, a part of the Universe in a way most are not.  That’s power enough.  I don’t know what it means.  Still haven’t figured that biz out.  Still can’t conceive of ways to express this idea on the page that don’t feel like aping what’s come before, or worse just come off like some dungeons & dragons.  This’ll have to do for now.

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These Gay Antics

Hey, what’s the deal with the gay antics out here?  Lookit that guy up on the stage, kissin’ the other guy on the stage, and nobody says nothin’ about it like we all get it, big joke, they get the no-homo pass because they’re rocksters.  That ain’t fair.

I’m thinkin’ about the boys in Nirvana back when they were all alive, makin’ out on Sunday Night Live and whatnot.  But also about Bruce Springsteen kissin’ that one guy from his band, and didn’t some of those hairbandmans do it too?  Like Bon Chovies or David van der lee Rothe or Motley Poisons?  Why does nobody think any of them suck wieners?  That’s kinda weird.

Rap guys can’t get away with it.  Every time they wanna say something nice about gay people they gotta backpedal into the depths of hell to keep their street cred.  I feel like one of those Mobb Deep dudes had to do it.  It’s kinda interesting tho, some rap bands are cocksucker this faggot that, and others don’t use those slurs at all, like, mysteriously absent from their vocabulary.

And however hardcore that rapper is, when I notice that about them, I have to wonder, who are they being nice to?  Themselves?  Their friends and relatives?  Some of them even stay sorta vaguely respectful to women.  Can you imagine?  But they can’t make out with other rappers on stage and get a pass.  No permiso.

Gay antics tho.  Dire Straits using the f slur in Money for Nothin’.  Probably about Duran Duran, but he did go on to say Duran man gets his chicks for free.  As opposed to Dire Straits who have to pay for it?  Or do they get their dudes for free?  Reverse reclamation maneouvre?  I don’t get it.

Are these liddle old men trying to appeal to fujoshis?  Scare republicans?  Is it a homophobic joke like “wouldn’t it be funny if we were gay lol u losers”?  I remember high school jocks being on that tip, but doing very overt gay things in pursuit of that “joke” and leaving one wondering.  Or jacking it, depending on how hot you thought their homoerotic display was.  A few of those situations may have entered my “spank bank” as it were…

Rocksters explain it.  I’m at a loss.  How u do these gay shenanigans and get away with it?

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President Cal Worthington

There used to be a legend among used car salesman, and many of you may have remembered him the instant you saw the title of this post, even if you haven’t thought of him in thirty years.  Cal Worthington was the classic disreputable piece of shit motherfucker in that field, which I can reasonably infer from the fact he got ran out of entire states on rails, for burning too many people.

Or maybe some other crime; I don’t know the whole history of the situation.  I just know that’s not the kind of business that normally involves moving every few years and living out of hotels.

He had memorable commercials.  You can probably remember the jingle if you’re old like me and from one of the states where he ran the operation.  Cowboy hat, exotic animals that would all be referred to as “his dog Spot.”  When he was in Washington his dealership was in the last city I lived in, which he called “Federal Way, the only way.”

Anyway, if we’re gonna have a blatant criminal for prez, whose shenanigans were well-known decades ago, why can’t we dig up that guy?  He’d probably get his face ripped off by a chimpanzee before he wore out his welcome too.

Cal Worthington for president.

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Republican Senators Wassup

Hey republican senators, I know most of you don’t like having to worship the floppy anal orifice of gibbering shitgibbon.  Maybe you’re a fascist, maybe you’re so greedy you’d see the world in flames and everything beautiful dead and too poisoned to rot, if you could save a nickel on taxes.  Maybe you want all women in chains, all queers and nonconformists and foreigners flayed and immolated on main street.  But do you want your personal hitler to be quite this embarrassing?  Quite this disastrously incompetent?  Quite this obviously weak, insecure, tiny handed, and internationally humiliating?

Anyway, March 15th is a very special day.  Since we’re all into violent historical reenactment now, you have the opportunity to do something very funny today.  Consider it!  Blame it on antifa.  Everyone will believe you.  I’ll back you up.  C’mon, you know you want to.  Treat yo’ selves.

🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️

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Thinking About Comments

In the past, I’ve put up at least one post with closed comments, where I didn’t even want to see agreement about it, just wanted to get my word out and leave it.  I may take that approach more going forward, depending on the nature of the post.  Most of the time comments will be open, occasionally they may not – if I remember my thinking from this particular morning.

It has to do with why I’m making a post in the first place.  You may have noticed I cover a broader range of post types than some others on the network.  Sometimes it’s a creative exercise I’m making public for fun, sometimes it’s creative writing.  Sometimes it’s art criticism or response.  Sometimes I’m reacting to a shitty news or opinion article, sometimes expressing my view of the world, which is different enough from the mainstream that I feel justified in casting another voice into the void.  I probably have a few more post types I’m forgetting.

In mind of that, which posts would I not want comments on?

Mainly political things.  Not all of them, but some of them.  Sometimes I wonder if I should even discuss politics because it ain’t always great for my health.  I’ve been queuing (jeezis what a spelling on that word) posts so that by the time you read them they are days old, sometimes over a week, and you are about to see a few political posts, but eh…

Man I’m tired.  Woke up too early, no choice about going back to sleep on this particular morning.  I hope I can retire someday.  So tired.

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