I’m not joining Comrade Hornbeck’s FreethoughBlogs-flavored Mastodon Instance myself for a few reasons, most notably that I didn’t have a Twitter to replace, never found that school of social media-ing appealing. But if you want to join, you can comment here with the handle you’d prefer. I can see your email in my admin panel and pass along word to HJ within 24 hours or so, and help him vet entrants with the relevant info.
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That’s a Björk reference in the title to this post. And she had an album called Post, so you know, approps. I’m getting little episodes of mania, not necessarily rising to the level of needing treatment, but they give me glimpses of a worse life. Insights. I think this is a good example of the way mania messes with artistic types: I have a novel to be writing. So far it’s gone well, I was feeling the character and the action was compelling. But as I have time to write on it this morning, I just want to listen to wild music, daydream about being a rock star. Or at least doing cronchy electro-goth covers of The Go-gos, Danzig, Van Halen, and Madonna, doing videos for yewchoob where I act like a freak. That’s what I’ll do with my life, yeah… Fucken useless.
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Another night during my battles with insomnia I had a vivid dream with cinematic scope. Kyle MacLachlan in Dale Cooper mode played a government bureaucrat who by twist of fate was put in charge of a British industrial ship, during a time when a weather crisis had messed up global trade. Most of the ship’s crew had been allowed to go home with a generous buyout, so the skeleton crew that remained was able to just maintain the boat in a lazy mode.
The plot of the movie revolved around a decision by Kyle to have the crew do something positive with their idle time. This was treated feel-good and uplifting. He got them to build a floating city to help with homelessness. It was originally going to be in a foreign country – they got the parts somewhere like Indonesia or the Philippines – but they negotiated to have it parked outside San Francisco instead. The city charged $100 rent to floating city tenants.
Years later Kyle was married to somebody from that crew and looking at retirement. The couple were toodling around the ocean on a personal craft, and by talking to some aquatic hobo, found out the floating city was then moored in the neighborhood of Long Island. They went to visit and found various people of limited means living there. The landlord types had complaints about the students being rowdy and polluting. They also talked about other issues in the community, like finding a humane solution for pest control, since feral hamsters had become the city’s rats.
Despite not being a class of people who would ever need income restricted housing, the couple settled there, for poetic reasons. At this point in the dream the couple became my boyfriend and myself, and my brother was hanging around as well. I had to take care of my cats, which included the late Momo. For some kind of basic care, I had to routinely cut off all of Hecubus‘s legs. It’s OK; they would grow back. I was pondering to myself that maybe I could get away with not cutting off those legs this time around, or only cutting off one of them, and my brother was finding it bizarre that I ever had to do it in the first place.
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I’ve been having the insomnias, and with only 2 days of sick leave in tha bank, I needed to get it under control. I’ve been doing Zzzquil and melatonin every night. Well, until last night. I was so tired, I felt like, maybe I can do this with just a lil’ help. So I only did the melatonin. I woke up at 5:30 and it took a while to sleep again.
When I finally did get to the land of nod, it was a furious mash of dream waste. Stock BS in elaborate detail. I was at some kind of christmas event in the gold-drenched lobby of a hotel that was grading into a mall. Looking for a place to sit I found some show for kids was the best spot, and took a seat there. Conscious of the possibility I’d be seen as a pedo, I avoided looking at anything but the show. I had a ziploc bag full of melty holiday cookies to eat. The show was live entertainment at first but became a montage of celebs in holiday specials. Charles Bronson was in the mix, with a grotesquely squishy face and surprisingly high singing voice.
At some point the dream switched to being about FreethoughtBlogs and the administration thereof. One of the bloggers that posts less often was on a tear. This wasn’t a real FtBer, but was something of a median persona as a middle-aged dude. He had a regular enough post about politics or computer programming or something, but randomly at the end of it and without warning, he embedded a video of himself fully naked, masturbating to completion.
Seeing a chubby middle-aged dude masturbate to completion is not a turn-off for me when I’m awake, so in the dream I was copacetic with it, the full ethical ramifications beyond my sleeping mind. I did, however, consider the possibility other people may be bothered, and wondered if I’d have to go in the back channel to reconvene an FtB ethics committee about it. I think he was starting to attract comments from people wondering what the hell he was thinking by the time the alarm got me.
Possibly something in waking life put the kernel of that dream in my mind. Who can say?
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I sometimes write about characters involved with drugs, but don’t know much from firsthand experience. This is something I just randomly remembered from when I was in high school. Sometimes people would talk about a body high or head high, more often the body high. I feel like it was in reference to LSD. That was in the ’90s. Do any of you remember this, and can you explain to me what it means?
I suppose I could dig up the facebook for my old home boy Try-Anything-Once Todd and ask him, but I might need a facebook account for that, and no thanks.
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Politics, amirite? Hooboy. This will be the last article in my attempt to top all categories of FtB articles, unless some sneaky fucker edges me out of one of the categories I already topped. Get it, I’m a top. I kid, you know I switch. OK I’m probably a pillow princess but you know I got a bad back. LL Cool J would rap about banging my girlfriend if I had one. Remember that line?
OK, so politics, I know I’ve been thinking something about this lately, what was it? Hm… Oh yeah. Last night while I was non-sleeping, I was trying to explain myself to the mute audience in my head, and felt the need to preface my arguments with who I am, politically. I haven’t felt the need to put that into words much, so here it is.
I’m a personal anarchist. I think society should have laws but that all people should be willing to break them, as needed, to suit our personal ethos. Be willing to do the time for your crimes, but be willing to do the crimes you feel are most necessary.
I’m a socialist, maybe even a communist, at the end of the day. No allegiance to the ghost of the USSR, no worries in that Charly. I just know that in a world where every inch is owned by either the government or billionaires, there is no room for any person to truly meet all their own needs.
In the USA we live by that myth. All our laws are constructed around an idea grown more absurd every day, that every person can work, and that the fruit of that labor can be sufficient to care for us through our whole lives. If we, the poor, can’t have one fucking thing that isn’t fragile as hell, can’t have any social safety net to pick us up when getting worked at this rate inevitably breaks us, then the government needs to step up with cradle-to-grave social services, given generously and without stipulation. And as far as the commune goes, that isn’t just breaking your back with a hoe. I think all Hollywood movie-making and corporate art should ultimately be destroyed and replaced with artists working communally to make art for its own sake, profit as incidental rather than the sole motivating factor to make or do anything. And tech and science and education and child-rearing. There are many things that can be done communally.
The rich bore me as much as they oppress me. Their idea of the good life, of what is worthwhile at all, it’s a cosmically bad joke. I’d be OK with them existing, with their cheek implants and lambos, if they could just leave it at that and not suck us dry at every opportunity. They can’t be trusted with what they have. Class war now, babes.
I keed, I keed. Or do I? I do. Unless..? Ahaha, I had you going. Or maybe…
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EDIT – I DID IT!!!! I’M NUMBER ONE!!!! for as long as it lasts.
THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE FtBlogger atop all the main page categories of FtB articles. Gimme the prize!
Anyway, I just flew in from Social Justice and boy are my arms tired. I mean airplane food, amirite? Wocka wocka.
Some of my articles in this series have been quasi-thoughtful, but I’m running out of power. What can I do? Social justice, social justice, what can I say about that?
You know, there’s an idea you would sometimes see come up in comments in the early days of the Deep Rifts 2.0, when many of us were becoming “woke” for the first time. It was a sense of gratitude that women were bringing to light the way they’d been mistreated, that it was opening up all these other conversations, and that this would give us a chance to become better people. To truly realize the equality we’d always just assumed was part of the movement, in contradistinction to the naked sexism of christian fundies. I just want to bring that gratitude back for a moment.
I love that we broke up the atheist movement. The crudlords and fogies are still out there, somewhere, embarrassing themselves in Elon’s Thunderdome. But they forever have to sit there in full awareness that they have been rebuked. That a sizeable chunk of their former bedfellows just said “Fuck Y’all” and never looked back. Everybody said their piece, then went their separate ways.
Can they even understand what we feel? I don’ t think they can. Dawkins can only conceive of this as us being led astray, bewitched by the sorcery of women in glasses and colorful hair. He doesn’t know how good it is to look at society as it really is, the same way he’d look at the physical world as it really is, and know what you’re going to do with that, do with your time here. We’re gonna be good, as good as we can be. We’ll make mistakes but we’ll learn, because yeah, we woke up to the importance of social justice.
I’m still proud to be an SJW. Power on, comrades.
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I won’t say I woke up this morning with a mission because that would imply I slept last night, but now I’m trying to write an article in each of the categories of FtB articles. There are some categories in which I rarely appear. I’m a BFA, I shouldn’t talk about science. But I’m gonna talk about science.
I think Chunderf00l said it best, when he did a video about how Ivory Tower shouldn’t be derogatory for science boyz because ivory towers are cool and shiny and hold up THA TROOF for all to see. Then he switched gears to chortling through his tears about Anita Sarkeesian for a decade. Yewchoob atheism, amirite? Is this thing on?
Science can be real cool. I think my favorite blog ever has to be Tetrapod Zoology. The universe, especially at the very local level of this planet, is chock full of interesting shit. Some of it is beautiful and inspiring, and so there’s a tendency to latch onto that, as the tool to promote a sort of positive atheism. We don’t need the majesty of some false vision of glorious afterlife, we can marvel at the world we inhabit to feel inspired.
But science is always a mixed bag. Darwin knew it. Nature is full of fucked up repugnant shit. There are animals that can only reproduce like the fucken Alien xenomorph, their entire existence predicated on nightmarish cruelty. Not just a species here or there, but clades full of species that do the same nasty nasty. And within our own lives, we can marvel at human beauty and compassion, but are also stuck in a species with fucking millions upon millions of actual fascist motherfuckers. Brains so ugly they can turn you to stone.
I don’t think there is an inspiring or magical or fun version of atheism, frankly. Sorry, Ivory Tower. Sorry, Science. Philosophical materialism has one solitary advantage over all religions. It’s true, and it is brave to look at things as they actually are, to deal with the world you actually live in. That bravery makes it possible to do greater things than any religious person is capable of – to give of yourself fully knowing how precious every second of your brief life is – but it doesn’t guarantee that we will do those great things. Many of us are just unreconstructed shitbirds. But we love us some science!
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I was gradually failing high school in the ’90s and in an effort to make up credits I took some college classes in the summer. My Philosophy 81 course (lol) was kinda influential on me, had me calling myself an agnostic instead of an atheist for like, twenty-five years?
Anyway, that class surveyed the landscape of Western philosophy without getting into a lot of depth on any of it. As part of that, we looked at the recurring themes in the field. There was the search for “substance,” the way to live a “good” life, logicking one’s way to god, and more.
More than one philosopher had ideas that a human life moves through set stages, like we’re all on our own Hero’s Journey. Kierkegaard got a closer look, and the last of his stages was The Religious Stage. I don’t remember particulars, but the idea was something like, when you’ve done all the big things in life and all that’s left is to look upon death, you will inevitably come back to god.
I had my sixteenth birthday in that class, was obnoxiously confident about my own philosophical materialism, and didn’t cotton to being told I would someday fogey into submission to the Invisible Tyrant. What would you do?
At least the professor didn’t act like all these dead white guys had the truth on lock, unlike my Philo 101 teacher at the art school, who – fucking absurdly – found Descartes’ ontological argument completely irrefutable. I rattled off three counter arguments in three minutes and he had the placid, glazed, uncomprehending expression of a true fucking zombie.
But no, I’m closer to fifty than forty. Jeezis here I come…
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Honey, put on that party dress. I don’t suggest looking up the music video that goes with those lyrics on yewchoob. Content Warning: Necrophilia. Not on this post, just that video.
I like Tom Petty’s hot jams tho. But if I make this post about music, it won’t help me top all the categories of FtB articles. I need an article about “Miscellaneous and Meta.” So, um, I dunno… Weed. There’s no weed category. I don’t smoke weed but I like the memes and humor. Some of it. By the last Cheech & Chong movie that shit was tired. Wait, that’s a kind of Art Culture and Humor, just like Tom Petty.
I’ll just say a little about my situation again, today, this morning, 8:52 AM as I type this sentence. I’ve been having occasional insomnia since something like mid- to late-December. My job requires brain power and emotional self-control, both of which are impaired by lack of sleep, so I just called in sick. Awake all night.
I don’t know why this is happening, but both my brother and father are bipolar and this has something like manic features. But the fact it has only happened in the dark part of the year makes me think it’s possible that’s related. And I drank a can of Pepsi close to midnight. But still.
I don’t deserve this, man! Imma get arrested by the motherfucking Dream Police. Cheap Trick were right!
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