Tired and disgusted

Some days, today for example, I am too tired and disgusted to write anything of use to anyone, myself included.   These days are part of every life, days when the accumulated weight of psychopathic demands (corporations have feelings too, and millions to pay lobbyists to protect their tender feelings) is just too fucking heavy to shrug off.

On such days, just a few taps, to keep the fingers limber and your mind in the game.  When the library closes in a few minutes I go back to my apartment, now an internet dead zone, on Verizon as it was on T-Mobile, and try not to think of the next step I will have to take to get the service we are paying for.  After some sleep, and the rehab exercises for my replaced knee, I’ll get back on the fucking horse.

“Hello, FCC?  This is Eliot, yes, complaint number blah blah blah”

Thank God there is always some kind of robot to listen.

Every inch a Congresswoman

MAGA Representative Lauren Boebert, who outraged a few squeamish, stuffy, unfun audience members at a musical she was attending in Colorado by innocent behavior that included letting her date innocently pet her lovely breasts before reciprocating by rubbing the right place in his slacks, was eventually kicked out of the theatre. She downplayed the whole incident, laughing about her animated personality, but, bad for her, there was some unconstitutional video of her so-called public sex play, probably shot by a RINO or Democrat (disguised as the theatre’s CCTV). Here she is being escorted out. Wait, escorted?

And definitely not an escort, not the other day, not ever. USA! USA!!!

Boebert apologized for her behavior in a Friday evening statement.

“The past few days have been difficult and humbling, and I’m truly sorry for the unwanted attention my Sunday evening in Denver has brought to the community,” Boebert, as reported by the Colorado Sun.

Boebert added that her “public and difficult divorce” has created a “challenging personal time for me and my entire family”.

source

Neat paragraph on Elon Musk bio

from Jennifer Szalai, in a recent NYT book review

By “we,” Musk presumably meant Tesla in that instance. But Musk likes to speak of his business interests in superhero terms, so it’s sometimes hard to be sure. Isaacson, whose previous biographical subjects include Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs, is a patient chronicler of obsession; in the case of Musk, he can occasionally seem too patient — a hazard for any biographer who is given extraordinary access. At one point, Isaacson asks why Musk is so offended by anything he deems politically correct, and Musk, as usual, has to dial it up to 11. “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit and anti-human in general, is stopped,” he declares, “civilization will never become multiplanetary.” There are a number of curious assertions in that sentence, but it would have been nice if Isaacson had pushed him to answer a basic question: What on earth does any of it even mean?

Elon Musk Wants to Save Humanity. The Only Problem: People. https://nyti.ms/3sTPLUX

Note timestamps on January 6th tweets by Chrump

Below is an example of how Twitter tried to police itself before a superior, empathy-free, insanely acquisitive, fascist-friendly billionaire disrupter freak bought the public forum, fired the moderators, made it hate-friendly, invited Chrumpie back on and renamed it X.

Note the timestamps on these January 6. 2021 tweets by the former president for a sense of how well the old company, with its full team of moderators, was able to vet thinly veiled calls to an active mob to lynch public officials. The real time response was underwhelming, in light of the American carnage that was going on between the provocative tweet and when it was marked “disputed.”

2:24 PM as thousands of deluded patriots broke through police lines and overran the Capitol looking for enemies to lynch

7:24 pm, Twitter leaps to flag Chrumpie’s wink, wink call to lynch Pence! Eh, stolen election claim “disputed”…

Those who believe in moral norms, in basic decency, often become food for the most determined predators, who use their immense size to devour everything in their path and will wipe their mouths with your norms long after your last screams have died out.

There are five hundred thousand times more of us than of them, so let’s go fuck ’em up, eh?

A little vacation time for me

I needed to get away to my fortress of solitude, it’s been too long.  The 3D multidirectional stress I am under is exhausting, to me and to poor Seedj.  We both need some time apart once in a while, and we’ve been getting in each other’s way the last few days.

I’ve plunged into a new round of working on the manuscript, producing many pages, with an eye toward an important insight:  every member of the intimate lynch mob must be as sympathetic, fully human, even lovable, as I can make them.   Writing it this way is crucial to the story making sense and for the lessons I hope the story will succeed in conveying.   

It is a cautionary tale intended as a wakeup call to anyone who finds herself (or himself, you priggish pussy) in painful conflict with those who can never be wrong and will kill you to prove it. 

I have to make it clear to the reader that not one of these torch, pitchfork, gun and rope brandishing motherfuckers are at all abnormal, mean, crazy, violent, dumb or irrational.   It’s just that when people act like a clan, all questions stop.  The deepest comfort of being in a loving group is that everyone agrees about what needs to be done.  They all take the same moral stand, for better or worse.

I compare writing it this way to sitting in a comfortable recliner, with a cool drink, wrestling with a medium sized, hungry constrictor.  You certainly have to watch the head, and you need to untangle it when it grabs you a certain way.   It’s exhausting, but also motivating, although mainly fucking exhausting.  

Of course, then I have to read the fresh poop to poor Seedj, since she’s the only one there.   She’s about ready to break, and I don’t blame her a bit, how many times can she expect to be treated to every queasy detail of this horror story loop?   One or two new insights, no matter how they may momentarily excite me, does little to freshen any of this stinking material.  So I came here, to my longtime bachelor pad, to spend a few days by myself.

Still no phone or internet service here, 34 days and counting, in spite of my complaint to the FCC.  Whoops.   Talk about yer fortress of solitude.   Have to go down two flights of stairs and walk about fifty feet up the street to make a phone call or send a text or email.  A drag. I’ll have to go to my local library, or coffee shop, to post this.   It’s a bit creepy, and disorienting, to be in an electronic dead zone in your own home.

I’ve had $250 of non-service comped by the nice people who work for the lobbyist-rich tech psychopath that has stopped providing a network connection to my building and its immediate environs.   Nice.   Every time I need to be in contact, I simply limp down two flights and walk down the block.  When it’s 93 degrees, which it will be tomorrow, or raining, which it will be the next day.

So I finally get back to my brokedown palace, and  — just to give this story a nice kind of punchline — the ceiling over my bed has collapsed, a twenty-five pound slab of concrete and layers of plaster, and a mass of dusty shrapnel, on the floor.  Revealed in the ceiling above, the dirty wood lathe, nailed up there over 100 years ago.  It will be a job to fix it.   Thankfully, I’ve taken to moving my bed out of the way when I leave here, in consideration of the deeply cracked ceiling above it.

Luckily the slab didn’t land near the head of my bed, while I was in it.  That heavy chunk of ceiling would have killed me with a direct hit — and, now that I think of it, I couldn’t have called anyone if I’d managed to regain consciousness.   Not without crawling down two flights and about fifty feet up the block.  Hmmm, that would have been a long, slow death…  

(What kind of wrongful death case would Seedj have?   Not a very generous one, I’m afraid, calculated on the corpse’s projected life expectancy and earnings.   But she wouldn’t bring the case to start with, thankfully.   Remember those 9/11 widows of young financial executives, so pissed off at the paltry sums they felt they were being paid for their dead husbands lives?)

It’s actually hilarious, in a ten plagues kind of way, the only nearby benches where I can sit comfortably, check the internet and talk on the phone, without having to walk up to the park a few long blocks away, is in front of a lush fringe of vegetation fronting the old Dyckman House.  It’s a museum, the Dyckmans had some slaves, they were rich.  A main thoroughfare is named after them.  And the greenery in front of their onetime home is, I learned last night, a paradise for mosquitos.

These thirsty bitches drank from my forearm, I saw the welts, like track marks, and went home, managing not to scratch (as Seedj teaches) doused them with ammonia and avoided the worst of the itching.  I was not so lucky with the bite on my right tit, just above the nipple, which I didn’t discover until I was in bed trying to sleep.

In addition to the mosquitos there are the rats, largely unseen in the bushes above the benches.  The screams and squeaks of these agitated rats vying for something or other in the plants right over your head are annoying.  Rats are pretty determined to avoid humans, and they’re smart in that determination, so you don’t have to worry much about them.  It’s more the idea that rats are screeching right by your ears that is a little creepy.

Fucking hell, the levels of this fucking infinitely swampy world, rotting layers deep, like the corpse lasagne a clannish mob made of my mother’s family in the ravine northwest of Vishnevitz one airless August 1943 night.  The ability of groups of likeminded souls is sometimes atrocious.  

Then again, each member of that long ago mob of drunken Ukrainians, and their German overseers, has a personal story that makes him or her fully human, kind, unique, even lovable.  

That right there, boys and girls, is the murderous tragedy of human history.