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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Slices of You

Things are easier to cook when they’re thin.  You don’t have to cook them as long, so there’s less risk of overcooking if you watch what you’re doing.  And more importantly, less risk of some shit being burnt on the outside and raw or cold on the inside, which is an absolutely vile result.  I’m willing to bake or nuke something that comes with simple instructions, but otherwise it’s slicin’ and using a frying pan.

It’s also cool because you can get more of that crisp element of frying.  The outer edges and surface get crisp, and the thinner what you’re cooking is, the more of each bite that will posses that quality.  If it’s a vegetable I’m cooking, thin slices.  I don’t like the crunch of veggies, and thin veggies get soft faster in the pan.  Soft veggies for flavor, crisp meat or cheese… That’s the goods.

Even when cooking isn’t a consideration, I cut thin.  I got the idea from David Lynch.  Not to sound like a freak; feel like I’ve been mentioning him too much recently.  Some years ago I was watching an episode of Twin Peaks where Joan Chen was being tormented by (spoiler), losing her mind in the kitchen.  Her mental state was illustrated by having her slice an apple.  In America we almost always slice apples in wedges of roughly equal dimensions, but she was slicing it thin, like cheese or deli meat.

The scene had a sensuous quality, but maybe I just imagine that because Joan Chen is too beautiful.  Surely, she wasn’t supposed to be seen as erotic or romantic in that moment, not exactly.  But she can thin slice me any day, I tell you whut.

There’s an Electric Six song called Slices of You, and it’s not one of their best.  It’s fine.  But I think of this part from the breakdown, sometimes when I’m joanchenning an apple: “Everywhere I go, people ask me Valentine, what’s your recipe for love?  And I always tell them the same thing.  Cook the hell out of it, and SLICE IT.”

Anyway, I think about this often enough that I wondered if I’d already written a blog post on the subject, and I searched the archive here.  You know how many occurrences of the word “slice” there are on this blog?  I haven’t written about this exact subject before, but I’m starting to wonder if I have a problem here.

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Creativity Feels Like…

Do you know what’s going on in your mind, when you’re doing something creative?  Of course not, like, biologically speaking what’s going on in there is so complex that the best experts on the topic have kind of a glimmer about it, and the rest of us not even that.  But what’s it feel like?  That’s information.  Sometimes we can have a pretty good idea of how our minds are operating.  It’s a kind of data, if one that is inherently very subjective, and can be essential.

Marcus asked, what do you think is going on in your mind, when you’re being creative?  To get at that, we need at least a workable placeholder definition for creativity.  Narrow things down a lot, so we don’t have to write a five hundred page tome on the subject.  In his examples, he was not looking at art.  He was talking about problem solving.  One could look at any human task as a place where creativity can be applied.  Let’s say, it’s generating an idea for how to perform a task, that is at least new to you, in that moment.  You might piece it together from things long ago learned and forgotten, or you might just use observation and reason as a springboard to a novel approach.  The novel approach in that example is the creative act.

Going by this definition, creativity must involve something like originality.  It doesn’t have to be “pure” originality, just new to you at the time you’re resolving your task.  A huge reason this discussion is happening is the advent of “generative AI,” which has motivated a lot of humans to draw lines around what, if anything, could only be achieved by human beings.  I don’t have that emotional motive.

I have a different one, which is to defend humans that want to work with AI from abuse, but I’m going to leave that aside here, just to answer the question.  Because it is a question that has some interest when stripped of that particular argument.  I recently said that I am “throwing myself into creativity” as a way of coping with grim realities, but what does that mean?

I’m writing, doing writing exercises, and using AI art to illustrate ideas.  Some of these things are idle as games, some of them are chasing lofty ambitions.  To keep the controversy out of this post, we’ll ignore the AI art and focus on the writing.  And because the AI art has influenced my process for writing MonsterHearts and Spooktobers, I’m going to ignore those too.  Let’s just contemplate the long form prose.

When you’re writing a work of prose, there are many cognitive tasks involved, some disparate and some very intertwined.  How they are performed can vary a lot with the task, so I pretty much have to try and separate and simplify these.  Let’s restrict the scope of my analysis to “Coming up with the Concept,” which a lot of people seem to regard as the “most creative” part of the act.

Coming up with the concept can be that bolt of lightning that hits you out of nowhere, but that’s very unusual.  Most of the time, I’m starting from a desire to write a story, deciding what my goals are, and spitballing how I’m going to achieve them.  Some examples:

A long time ago, I randomly watched a cheap-ass 1970s anime and thought, in a fit of hubris, “I could do that!”  Not having to hand-paint celluloid and use film, animation has gotten a lot more achievable, but no, of course I cannot, as an individual, make a cartoon series.  Not without devoting my life to it, and having a lot more resources.  But in response to this dubious inspiration, I outlined a single season of an anime show, a parody of Star Blazers, Gundam, Macross – that kind of shit.  It was very fun and I haven’t forgotten the idea.  I still poke at it, from time to time.

Cognitively, what was going on there?  See a thing, feel “I could do that,” and then take the first direction with it that popped into my head.  In this case it was parody, which is deceptively easy to write.  Good parody is probably a lot more difficult.  I don’t think Weird Al bats a thousand with it, and he’s the expert.  But parody, like other types of art, is reactive.  I look at what somebody else did, do the same thing, but throw my own flavor on it – in this case, just highlighting whatever I regarded as absurd from those shows.  Plotwise, it was Space Battleship Yamato (1974) but transplanted into American culture in the ’90s – and what I remembered of being a teenager, since all anime characters have to be snot-nosed kids.

So I was consciously crafting a pastiche of previous art I’d consumed, and transforming it by using related experiences and ideas from my own life and culture.

Let’s look at Centennial Hills.  That was conceived when my husband and I first challenged ourselves to do a turbo writing event.  At that time we were aiming for fifty thousand words in three days, which I still have not achieved.  He did make the score, but doesn’t want to hurt his hands like that anymore, and we only turbo when we can line up four days in a row now.

I can no longer remember which of us came up with the idea to both use stereotypical UFO pilots in our stories, but we did.  Mine were grey and his were green.  His greenliens were amusing monsters.  My greyliens were inspired by a very sketchy and legendary youtube short called “E.T. 2,” in which a Communion-type alien comes to earth and gets wasted on alcohol and drugs.

That was classic dudebro humor – take something innocent and make it into the “adult” version, like making cartoons fuck.  I thought, what if I show both sides of that, to express my views about people, the way we really are?  Hence two aliens get split up, one having innocent misadventures with a little girl, and one falling in with crappy scumbags.

Creatively speaking, what was I doing here?  Um…  consciously crafting a pastiche of previous art I’d consumed, and transforming it by using related experiences and ideas from my own life and culture.  Much more elaborately than the anime, but still…  Is this all there is for me?

Let’s take a third idea, one I have not written yet.  In response to the unfortunate passing of David Lynch, and my husband’s aeternal lament that there is no new art for him anymore – that he long ago consumed all the art he was ever going to be interested in and now there’s nothing left – I decided to write “The Best Novel That Ever Existed” for this particular audience of one.  To do this, I’ve been looking at all the things he likes and dislikes about his favorite narrative art ever, seeing if I could derive unifying themes that could be deployed in an original way by yours truly.

But that’s kinda consciously crafting a pastiche of previous art I’d consumed, and transforming it by using related experiences and ideas from my own life and culture, isn’t it?  It’s going to be much more original than the other two, I think, but still… It exists in reaction.

But then, Marcus’s problem-solving creativity existed in reaction to the problem, yes?  Same thing?

I don’t know.  I’d like to bring in one of those “bolt of lightning” stories for comparison, but I easily forget the actual experience of those moments, and could not tell you what I was thinking during any of them.  The only one that comes to mind from recent years is when I wrote the lines, “This rhyme has no composure like a whack-ass thesis, Your boyfriend’s on macaque like a monkey rhesus,” and again, the moment literally happened when I was on the john, leaving no trace of its fundamental path in my memory.

Make of that what you will!  I’m done.

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Are Black People Smarter?

Little bit of a land mine here, but I’m feeling insouciant today, so bear with me…  I’ve talked with thousands and thousands of Americans from all walks of life, and surely my impressions of that experience are tainted by biases.  Racists annoy the fuck out of me and are foolish as all hell; people who live on the receiving end of systemic racism have my sympathy.  I also relate a lot more to poor people than to the middle class.  So are my perceptions accurate?

There are standardized tests for “IQ” other cognitive faculties, and these have problems galore – not the least of which was their origin as a method for justifying racism.  I’m not even gonna bother with links; this shit is common knowledge among those nominally acquainted with the subject and with no delusions about their genetic superiority motivating the shit out of their reasoning.

But on a practical level, numbers aside, some people are just more thoughtful than others.  I characterize this as being willing to take new information on board, genuinely try to understand new things they encounter, and able to learn.

Ability to learn is a funny thing, because as we grow out of childhood, many of us handicap ourselves on purpose.  You mean I’m never gonna need this information again?  Fuck it, I chuck it, will re-learn as-needed.  I can feel that I did this to myself sometime around age 20.  While circumstance has pushed me into trying harder, I still allow myself the luxury of not learning shit, whenever I can.  There are people who either didn’t limit themselves in the first place, or are just more wise in how they apply that limitation, more able to get back into learning mode.

Willingness to try to understand new things is obviously a useful trait to have, but we don’t need it most of the time.  Our lives can be pretty damn simple in most ways, most of the time.  Whatever else is difficult about them, it isn’t the complexity of the problems in front of us.  It can get rusty, same as what I described in previous paragraph.  But I feel like this is a little different from that issue…  That’s about memorizing a new fact, this is about understanding why that fact is so – understanding a process.

The thing the reflexively ignorant don’t get is that understanding the process makes remembering the facts easier.  Like, remembering dates in history is rote, easy to lose.  Understanding what happened in sequence – what led to what – can make the simpler facts, like dates, easier to remember.

This is practical intelligence, not fancy logic or math or knowing big words.  A small child can be thoughtful, an adult can be thoughtless, and vice versa.  By this metric, I’ve spent a vast, unspeakable amount of time talking with thoughtless people, and less speaking with the thoughtful.  Of course, the average person is somewhere in between, but still shades toward the foolish side.

If I’m talking to an 89 year old who is still very sharp, it’s usually an upper class person with an ocean of privilege behind them, who worked in academia, finance, law, etc, on the pointy end of it.  That’s gonna shade white, tho not exclusively.  But stepping back from those rarities to look at people who are still very competent, who can look at a situation involving new information and deal with it, not shut down and get angry or cry about it?

Feels like the median black person is more intelligent than the median white people, in practical ways – which are the only ways that really matter.  I’m not interested in having a conversation with somebody that has advanced knowledge but can’t be fucked to understand anything outside that domain.  I want somebody that can be exposed to new information and understand it enough to have something to say about it.  That’s just conversation, but it’s indicative of the approach to other kinds of information as well.

It’s like white people feel more entitled to not have to think about things, to put that onto other people, and have anything they need sorted out for them with zero thought involved.  Black people are used to a society that is low key hostile to them getting their needs met in every way, cradle to the grave, so they need to be able to understand the shit that comes their way.

I might be remembering the thoughtless white people at outsized rates because of the biases I mentioned above, but also because they make a much more acrid stink about having their right to not have to think impinged upon.  I might be remembering black people who figured out some tangled bullshit at outsized rates because my unconscious bias is to assume them less intelligent, and it comes as a surprise when it should not.  I know there’s no way I haven’t absorbed that poison on a cellular level.

But I dunno.  Maybe black people are just better than us.

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Note:  If my comments are half as foolish as this post itself was, I’m gonna have to shut ’em down.  It could get offensive in a hurry.  For that matter, what I wrote could be pretty offensive to a reasonable person, and they don’t deserve to get upset because I thought it would be funny to upset unreasonable people, right?  In which case, sorry, and let’s just move along tomorrow.  I’ll leave this post up as a monument to my folly.

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