For some reason, I’ve found myself with a skin condition similar to what Michael Jackson suffered from. My version is not nearly as bad and, in fact, after I scraped off a huge chunk of skin it now is invisible.
Then, today, I was scrolling through Tik-Tok and…there was a couple doing something in a video and the woman obviously was suffering from the same condition, although hers was far more obvious.
It’s very, very spooky. I’ve told absolutely no one about what happened to my skin until now. The only person who knew it was happening to me, was me. Why would I be pushed that specific video so soon after the idea of having that condition myself had filled my mind? And, what’s more, the woman had the condition on her face in a conspicuous manner — something I was really worried about when I first noticed what was going on.
Very, very strange.
And, yet, it can’t possibly be digital telepathy, right? That’s just crazy talk? I mean, if Tik-Tok was reading American minds, then that means the Chinese government probably has access to that information, as well. So, that can’t be happening. I need to cool it with such talk before people think I’m even more bonkers than they already do.
Well, if Tik-Tok really can read my mind, then I guess my old joke about being a “male lesbian” has some validity — Tik-Tok has come to believe I’m lesbian. I get pushed all these ads for lesbian friendly products and some very interesting gynecological videos that as a man are rather eye opening. Oh boy.
But this does make me think about how much heart the novels I’m working on have. I’m not saying that I have any particular insight into the female experience as man — holy shit, no — but I do think it’s at least possible I’m not going to embarrass myself TOO much.
I’m trying to be as empathetic to the female experience as is possible for a man to be. But, I have very low expectations on that front. I just don’t want to embarrass myself, that’s it. My dad, who is a man of few words, told me growing up, “Son, there’s one thing in this world you can never understand and that’s a woman.”
So, I’ve taken that to heart writing these novels. But these first few novels in the series owe lot to Mare of Easttown. Writing something as good as that limited series is my goal, that’s my aspiration. The first two books in the series are very much an homage to Mare of Easttown’s take on the life of an older woman in a small town.
All of this is because I find writing women far more interesting than writing me. Men are pretty simplistic compared to women. It’s a huge challenge for me, a man, to write believable female characters.
Absolutely no one listens to me, so all of this is more about me struggling to figure out for myself how likely it is that the United States will have a Second Civil War. As I keep saying, I vacillate wildly between assuming that of course we’re going to have a civil war to thinking we’re just going to slip peacefully into autocracy.
The issue is — all the conditions are there for a civil war, the question is, will we finally reach the breaking point where one starts? And, that, at the moment is a known unknown. I just don’t know. It really could go either way. In the end, ultimately, the difference between civil war and a peaceful transition to autocracy probably will depend on some very specific tactical events that simply can’t be predicted.
Right now, it’s just as easy to imagine people just shrugging when Bannon’s “administrative coup” works in conjunction with Republicans playing the more obscure elements of the Constitution like a xylophone. And, honestly, as long as there’s no violence on their side, this particular coup will work. Remember, for Traditionalists, the issue was the violence associated with January 6th. If Peter Navarro’s peaceful coup had worked, then Traditionalists would have waved away my angry rants about a coup because it was don’t within the context of the “system working.”
So, I dunno. I will note that the United States is far less politically stable than you might think. I’m so busy assuming that 2024 – 2025 will be lit, I may be totally oblivious to some unexpected event happening between now and 2024. I mean, if, God forbid, Biden were to shuffle off this mortal coil, it’s very easy to imagine severe political instability if Speaker Trump impeached President Harris while she lacked a veep.
Trump is so fucking lazy and stupid, he could very well start a civil war early simply by ranting about how the Senate needs to convict President Harris so he can become POTUS again early. He could finally go transactional and then we would really be fucked. That would be a recipe for civil war.
And, yet, still, I don’t know. I think there’s a 50 / 50 chance at the moment of a civil war no later than 2025. The other option is autocracy. Though military junta is a potential factor as well. But everything is up in the air. I just don’t know.
For the time being, we’re all just going to have to wait until we’re a little closer to 2024 to have a better sense of which scenario is more viable. But, regardless, you need to gird your loin. Study up on the rise of Hitler and the beginnings of the first American Civil War. Knowledge of those two historical events may come in handy in the near future.
But the thing you absolutely need to do is figure out what you believe in the real world. What you’re willing to risk your life and scared honor for in the real world. Things are going to become rather chaotic, no matter which direction the country goes.
I could rant about Yahoo! for way too long and waste a lot of time, but I’ll try to be brief. Yahoo is a real missed opportunity. The reason — it continues to get millions of eyeballs everyday and it’s just there. It just exists. If I won the lottery, and could buy it, here’s what I would do — turn it into a Twitter challenger.
I’m a Very Online Twitter user and even thought the Metaverse is sexxy and what everyone is transitioning to, there is still a window of opportunity for a Twitter challenger. What you do is, update the concepts of Usenet news and then figure out a way to poach the 10% of the Twitter user base that actually produces content that people want to read.
If you did this right, you could even disrupt the newspaper industry in such a way that you probably would be hated by many, many newspaper reporters who would write nasty articles about what a dickhead you are. The newspaper industry is ripe for disruption, even though it’s not very sexxy compared to the Metaverse.
You use the Yahoo brand and all those eyeballs to setup a series of sites that would be, like, “nyc.yahoo.com” or “la.yahoo.com” that would have a paid editorial staff. The neat thing is, you would have inline editing of threaded full page posts. You would have to restrict who would have the ability to respond to posts in the service, but I think people would accept that restriction if it made the overall experience a lot more fun than Twitter is at the moment.
A mock up of part of my vision.
But none of this will happen. It’s too late. The window of opportunity has closed 10 or 15 years ago. Everything is about the Metaverse now. Now, if I could only win the lottery….
We’ve reached the point where Red America believes that anything that doesn’t help them politically is, by definition, being used to hurt them politically. Everything is a zero sum political game with them now. You see this a lot today with the anniversary of January 6th.
MAGA New Right people know that what happened January 6th hurts them, so they dismiss the whole thing as just a politized attack against them. In other words, they just don’t want to talk about it. And if you do bring it up, you’re using the existance of what happened January 6th as a political tool against them. It’s a pure post-truth reaction to what happend.
In other words, they’re reaction to something that hurts them politically – the January 6th Insurrection — is fascist.
It’s times like these when I AGAIN have to note that I got blocked by Mueller, She Wrote for simply pointing out that things are not all rainbows and unicorn farts — the system can not, will not work at the moment. Trumplandia is above the law and we’re all very, very fucked.
We all need to gird our loins for a very bumpy 2022 – 2025. What, “Mueller, She Wrote” calls my “doom shit” is just reality. It’s like I looked out the window and said, “there’s a blizzard going on outside” and “Mueller, She Wrote” got so wrapped up in the idea that the snowplow was coming that she totally missed that the lights were out and we were all slowly freezing to death.
Being blocked my Mueller, She Wrote for essentially telling the truth really grates on my nerves for some reason. It hurts my inner child in some way. I want justice! (Wink.) But it’s typical — I get punished for simply stating the obvious and Mueller, She Wrote gets invited to Deep State Radio. It’s the story of my life.
Anyway, fuck Mueller, She wrote.
It’s surreal to me the lengths that the MAGA New Right will go to wrap anything to do with the January 6th Insurrection up in the idea of “it’s just politics.” It’s all so frightening because the next step of course, is for the MAGA New Right to embrace the Insurrection. Why they haven’t already done so is something of a mystery to me.
Jesus, this is a depressing topic. But here goes. We’ve all learned a lot about our fellow Americans over the last year. The key take away I’ve gotten from how our political system has — or hasn’t — processed January 6th is how shocking it is to me that even American democracy is seen through the lends of Blue and Red.
My Traditionalists relatives weren’t upset with the objects of Trump’s coup, they were upset with the violence. That’s it. They would have been fine if the coup was bloodless and simply a fucking with the law. Then they would shrug and say “the system worked” and shut up, libtard about “democracy,” the United States is a “constitutional republic.”
But they couldn’t stomach the violence. The actual goal of the event was a lulz to them.
In a way, I’m at peace now. I now know that for my Traditionalists relatives there is only one “red line” for Republicans that would make them sit up and take notice — if I, personally, ran afoul of the autocrat. That’s it, that’s the only red line they have. They’re willing to burn 240 years of American democratic tradition to the ground as long as they don’t have to worry about being “canceled” for being conservative.
And only if their center-Left relative is snatched off the street and “vanished” will they do anything about the United States becoming an autocracy. And, even then, it would be only for my specific instance. It’s not like they would become Molotov cocktail lobbing radicals. They just would want me safe. (Which is commendable, given how much of a clusterfuck everything else would be at that time.)
AS such, I know that there’s nothing I can possibly say to change my relatives minds. They have that one red line and that’s it. The end of American democracy will be barely a speed bump to them. Not until we’re a full fledged Russian-style autocracy and I get rounded by ICE will they notice or care. So, I’m wasting my breath to even talk politics with them.
It’s self-evident that not enough people remember how much war really is hell. Over two generations of Americans have gone without the fear of a draft. As such, we’ve grown too fat and sassy.
We quibble about the stupidest shit. The Left, rather than making common cause with Liberals and NeverTrumpers to defeat the rise of fascism in America are willing to die on the hill of TERFs, pronouns and transgender kids. (Not that those aren’t all valid things to be concerned about in the modern world, but we do have honest-to-God fascists to deal with at the moment.)
My point is — woke culture is a luxury provided by decades of living in a stable, peaceful liberal democratic nation. The moment things grow existential for people in the center-Left, be it because we turn into a civil war or we transition into autocracy, all of the more annoying elements of being woke will simply burn off.
I keep thinking about how we seem to be at the end of an era. While I’m still not convinced that the Fourth Turning is a real thing — seems like a reversed engineered pseudoscience to me — we definitely are running on fumes as a nation. And that sense of running on fumes applies to both culture and politics. We’re at the end of one era (Turning?) and just about to begin another.
As such, it would make a lot of sense for everything to change one way or another between now and January 2025. If we turn into an autocracy, then there’s a good chance that Hollywood will decamp, en masse to Great Britain or Australia. I keep saying — Perth would be perfect for New Hollywood. It is in the middle of nowhere, but everyone I’ve ever met from Perth was extremely creative and interesting, just the type of creative pool of people that a moved Hollywood want to tap into.
And, God forbid we have a Second American Civil War, everything really would be thrown into the air. The nightmare endgame is the country doesn’t re-unite and we just bomb ourselves into the Stone Age for no damn reason other than Traditionalists are afraid of losing political power to secularists, scary brown people and economically liberated women.
Anyway. I just don’t see the Woke Era lasting beyond 2025. Something’s gotta give. When you’re worried about ICE blowing your head off or a race war because a civil war has broken out and WMD are being used, then, well, the issue of pronouns won’t be QUITE so urgent.
After struggling the last few days, I’ve finally hopefully gotten the hang of this latest draft of the novel. I still hope to bounce back and forth between reading, working on this novel and developing the other four novels in the series.
But I’m pleased with what I’ve managed to come up with. I think what I might do is just do whatever is necessary to wrap this draft (be it considered a first draft or a second draft) then turn around and start working really, really hard on the other four novels.
Fuck this test.
I love the huge, vast nature of this project. It’s exactly what I wanted when I came up with this idea several years ago. One thing that is giving me something of a deadline is I hope to save up the money to buy a really nice camera. Men with money buy vets at my age, I want to buy a camera.
I love photography with all my heart and the plan is, should the next Insurrection happen, I can go up there and make some history-making level shots of the events. That’s the dream, at least.
Anyway, wish me luck. Everything could fall apart at any moment, but for the time being, I’m moving along a pretty nice clip.
This is so dumb, but I have an opinion so here you go. As we all know, Pete Davidson is kind of bonkers (note: so am I). The case could be made that Davidson is Kim’s type because, well, compared to Ye, Davidson is pretty fucking normal and centered.
Kim and Pete.
So, in a sense, Kim marrying a bonkers, well meaning dingus (note: I could call myself the same thing) like Davidson makes total sense in the context of her dating past.
I say this only in the context that apparently the two are “getting really serious.” Now, Kim is 41 at the moment, but could probably squeeze out one more kid because she’s famous and rich. So, lulz, it’s very easy to imagine the two getting married, having a kid, then getting divorced. They would be the entertainment power couple of the 2020s.
But there is a huge wildcard — Miley Cyrus. A Pete Davidson – Miley Cyrus union makes far, far more sense than a Davidson – Kardashian one. And, I think if Pete and Kim did get married, Miley would be waiting in the wings to pounce the moment they broke up.
Given the chaotic energy both of them exude, their union probably would be a long-term one we could all pin our hopes on while we curse the bread.
I do my best writing when I have a perceived enemy to rant about. I’m not saying the fine folks of “Mueller, She Wrote” are my enemies, per say, but I do have beef. They blocked me for simply stating the obvious — no one is going to save us. No amount of Twitter threads with lookie lookie eye emojis or “booms” is going to change that the United States faces a systemic collapse at the moment with no ready endgame.
Anyway, the point is — lulz, I don’t really care. Whatever. I do like having a running gag where I harp on something over and over and over again for comic effect. At the moment, it’s Mueller, She Wrote because before they blocked me they seemed so…stuck in 2017? Like, when we thought Mueller was going to save us all from Trumplandia?
BOY, were we all naïve.
Anyway, I seem to recall from a Deep State Radio episode recently that Mueller, She Wrote is based out of Sacramento. And, I’ve started to get a weird uptick of hits from….someone in Sacramento.
I have no idea if it’s them or not, but it if it was it would be HILARIOUS. I just hate that I’m being pushed for stating the obvious — maybe no one is going to save us and we’re fucked? Maybe instead of pinning our hopes on a collapsing political system, we start to game out what we’re going to do when we either have a civil war, an autocracy or a military junta?
Anyway, it’s not personal, it’s more of a personal writing trope than anything else. Just like the guy who wrote Midnight Cowboy said when asked how he wrote screenplays, “I hate, A LOT.”
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