Saturday, July 31, 2021
Blue, Yonder (story)
Monday, July 26, 2021
Maybe Holding It Barely Together Is OK
It's interesting how there is a message not to panic and break down in grief or terror or rage upon witnessing the galloping collapse of the climate system and its terrestrial effects of floods, heat waves, drought, wildfires and superstorms. This message to "hold it together" comes from deep within ourselves, where the instinct toward survival resides, and from the greater society, which operates on the unthinking imperative to maintain its current trajectory. Personally, I'm going to endeavor not to pressure myself to squelch grief or terror or rage at what is occurring, unless it threatens me with total dysfunction. The stifling of extreme emotion upon witnessing horrors and idiocies is part of what landed us in the soup in the first place.
And so, at this unprecedented moment in human history, as much as I want to avoid suffering and do not want others to suffer, it is crucial to distinguish between natural emotions and notions of "wellness" based in absurd expectations about what terrestrials like us should feel at the prospect of our own species' extirpation and the unthinkable ecocide manifesting in events of mass death, such as the estimated one billion sea creatures who died in the recent Northwestern heatwave. Rage, terror, disbelief, frustration, ultra-heartbreak, and wailing, howling sadness are fine. If, through a variety of methods, including art/music/community/ritual/talking/isolation or through no special method, we can experience these feelings and not fall into total dysfunction, I say: let it rip.
Sunday, July 25, 2021
Laura Sean Tucker The Five Fox & Friends Death Trip
The business model of Fox News is to prey upon, as a sort of vicious parasite, the brains of aging white Americans, to weaken their capacity for critical thought, to lure them further and further into frothing rage, toward the brink of reeling madness, to reduce their vision and range of empathy down to a tightly creviced tunnel into which no light may enter but the pixelated, glib glares of LauraSeanTuckerTheFiveFox&Friends now calling out the orders for a slogging, joyless march toward Death - first of the heart that loves, next of the life spirit and finally of the inert and stupefied body. Kaplunk.
Wednesday, July 21, 2021
DONALD TRUMP REFRIGERATOR MAGNET POETRY
Donny says all of them! Mix & match! Have fun! Melt your brain!
Monday, July 19, 2021
"It Was Worth It" (a monologue)
It was worth it. You know what? Getting Netflix, highways and cars, big houses, grocery stores, a.c., factories, cheap shit from across the world, abundant hamburgers and cold cuts, first person shooter video games, cool personal guns and planet-masticating weapons, streaming porn, cool sneakers, yachts, personal smart phones, and fast planes that can fly you from Milwaukee to Paris for a nice dinner was... worth it... Fuck it. I'm not ashamed to say.
On Paul Kingsnorth's Recent Ideological Turn
The continuing rightward drift of Paul Kingsnorth (cofounder of The Dark Mountain Project, essayist, novelist and self-described "recovering environmental activist") is interesting to observe. On his Facebook page, he posts articles from conservative magazines such as "Unherd" (my nominee for most sanctimonious publication title in recent years), The Spectator (edited by Boris Johnson from 1999-2005) and The American Conservative, co-founded by Pat Buchanan in 2002 and currently edited by Rob Dreher, who also appears to write most of its articles at this time. Rob Dreher is a conservative who focuses a fair amount of his energy on crusades against gay civil rights (writing apoplectic posts about Chick-fil-A when they agreed to stop funding anti-gay campaigns, as one example among an ongoing list of such work) and writing articles bemoaning the "woke-pocalypse" (my term) and what he considers to be out of control and overzealous people working on behalf of misguided notions of "diversity." Kingsnorth is maintains a strong intellectual relationship with Dreher, who recently published an extensive interview with him, as well as a glowing review of his most recent novel, "Alexandria."