032 A - Do it for the last time (5 weeks left)

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Mike sent me a piece about what it's like living in a failed state. The author said it felt like living here now.

I find that the day to day stresses of life become great excuses to embellish consequences and release existential stress in the form of paranoia. I find any perceived shortcoming in a coworker, friend or family member a great excuse to tell myself that I am the savior and behave like Patton in Apocalypse Now. I find the the capitalist class defense-in-depth via the political class a great excuse to justify narcissism and fear as a political ideology.

I am OCD and I have been losing my goddam mind for months. 

I went to the zoo the other day with the family. We had a wonderful time. All the patrons more or less wore masks and distanced. We had institutional French fries. As we were leaving we decided to buy a yearly family membership using our ticket stubs. If we did it before leaving we could use the cost of our tickets towards the membership. When we got to the membership tiki hut, all of the zoomer (people under 23) employees are busy on their phones and generally not giving a fuck, which I'm down for but I'm becoming my parents so I decide to tap on the glass and plead with young adult who gives me his best acoustic performance of Cage' 4:33 while his companion Godot-s something inside the hut just to the right of the window. Then some old boomer lady asks if she can help us. She's impatient, she hates life. She's in a goddam grey sweat suit so she looks like a mental patient with a zoo lanyard. My partner tries to explain what we want and I get all agro white dude and say we wanna use these tickets and get a discount and she tells us we have to get in line (and its like 30 yards deep with mother and father and adolescent and toddler super-spreaders) and I get angry and storm off and curse the zoo and say we're never going back, or at least I'm not 'cause fuck those motherfuckers if they're not going to save themselves by selling me the fucking membership -- they need the money more than me and if they can't get it together; then fuck it and I guess fuck me and fuck us for going to the fucking zoo and predictably this ruins our ride home and I feel justified til I realize -- like D-FENS -- goddam it, I'm the asshole. 

I've lost my fucking mind. 

And then it dawns on me that maybe I've been acculturated into a violent male-dominated death-cult and I value aggression because they value aggression because they value aggression and we praise and court death because we are desperately afraid of it; and so he who is unafraid must be god. And I realize that I have to stop living like that. And I have to accept that mostly they win and I lose, and I need to be a gracious loser (re: prey animal) if only so they leave me alone long enough to survive. 

Being a rabbit with the best dick still counts for something.

I no longer need anyone in power to affirm that I have done a good job. 

I do not want to duel with every single other man in the world. 

They want us all unaffiliated samurai so that we will not revolt. A priori justification for narcissistic male aggression is an awesome mechanism for keeping dudes from working together. Sis men stay cucked, gays revolt I guess.

But even if I have the excuse of being acculturated, I am still an asshole, as surely as others are assholes and frankly that's fine, that's not really the problem is it. It's not people being curt, or impolite its actual fucking evil and neglect. Assholes are a lot of things, but they are definitely present. 

We're all fucked, but my groceries are getting delivered tomorrow and I need to sign my new lease and schedule movers so I'll have a house next year to read about all the people less privileged than me fighting and dying in the Midwest, and also to have picnics in the park at the end of the street. 

I'm starting to imagine the rust belt like the Sticky Fingers cover, but if it were Dorian Gray for the United States. Hooked on Mexican black tar turning tricks with a half hard sausage roll. Bang it on a desk like a gavel for the freak show of it then just stuff it down the coasts throat like a dog toy. 

Eventually the Apple App Store will simply sell Escape, the comodified unit of escape will be "experiences". They will be sold as DLC, effectively recipes that will combine in your tiny kitchen Apple iScape gadget that generates potions you drink or inhale or whatever. As with the phone, they know we will pay handsomely to not stare into the abyss without sunglasses.

Squeak. Squeak.

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