yet another revamp

 I don't know what to do with my personal web presence anymore. However, I suddenly find an overtly depressive presentation incredibly boring. I'm bored. You're boring me Zoidberg. The new banner is one of my first attempts at astrophotography that I was proud of. Not great, but a fine first attempt. I am pleased with it regardless. 

It's embarrassing to admit at 45, but I still do not know what I am about. So I guess the idea is, maybe instead of leaning into "hey, I'm depressed" I'll lean into "hey, I'm still figuring it out." 

I like space. I like contexts removed from this cruel society. I like the idea of leaving here and wandering the stars in search of nicer people. That said, keenly aware that the actual necessity here is to somehow make peace with this place and find where I fit and what I'm about.

So there you go. I may have another go at the title, but it's good for now. I"m straight up stealing it from my friend's post-apocalyptic micro-fiction twitter account which I enjoy (@apocalypse_txt).

launching the baby into orbit

 One thing that frustrates me about the age we live in is the dogged insistence on the supremacy of personal taste. It is an argument for stagnation and/or decline. I get that previous generations tried to pigeon-hole everyone based on the circumstances of their birth, or superficial characteristics into overly rigid social roles and absolutely agree that the freedom to self-determination and freedom from abuse or oppression is very important for everyone, but I'm not entirely sure we needed to run away from conflict entirely.

"Let people enjoy things" is the spirit of the age, but it also leads directly into anti-vax lunacy or delusional beliefs in deep state conspiracies if we're not careful. And looking around at the state of things, I'm not sure we can say we've been careful, exactly. You can see it in the way people can't have their entertainment choices questioned, or their personal beliefs stemming from infotainment telling them horse paste is a better medical therapy choice than a vaccine. 

The good and righteous rebellion against biology or the circumstances of one's birth as destiny has been smoothly and utterly co-opted by consumerism, to our collective detriment. We came out of the closet and into the streets and right into Walmart. It is no longer a matter of reason and evidence, experience and study, it is simply a matter of marketing demographics and the products tailored to meet their needs, sold with flattery that matches their biases and confirms their prior beliefs. Every product is good, it's just that some are not for you. If you are a purveyor of fine products this is surely a golden age, but for the rest of us the results seem, ah, mixed. 

In order for this to work, it must be true that it is simply too hard to determine matters of fact or craft. Everyone has a right to their opinion, so who is to say whose is ever correct? We are! We have the tools to establish standards,  collect evidence, establish chains of evidence, admit error, and correct course as necessary. The fact that these processes have been historically abused by sexists and egotists and all kinds of other ists does not mean they are also not some of the most powerful tools we've ever developed to shape our societies, ourselves, and our future. 

We can critique and reason well, with empathy and a priority on human dignity, even if that means disagreeing with someone's taste, or choices, or realizing we were embarrassingly wrong, or any other number of frankly uncomfortable situations. And while I wouldn't say all discomfort leads to growth, I would say you rarely grow without discomfort. With that in mind, a society dedicated to eliminating discomfort in the name of maximizing sales and personal freedom should have alarm klaxons blaring in our collecting consciousness.

I'm not proposing a regression to mean-spirited rationalizations for how things have to be out of some misguided nostalgia for past glories that never were, but I AM suggesting we are capable of distinguishing being mean for the sake of being mean, and pointed, well-reasoned critiques that hurt our feelings, or even well-reasoned critiques from an irritating source. Our parents and grandparents were frequently jerks that fetishized dealing out and surviving discomfort to the point of actual trauma, but the right kind of discomfort leads to stronger ideas, stronger minds, and stronger bodies and therefore we should be wary of arguments that emphasize comfort over growth just as much as we should be wary of arguments that glorify misery in the name of growth.

Important Star Trek Thoughts

 I guess what bums me out specifically about the direction star trek has headed is the overt pessimism for the future. The creators act like we've spent 40 years cringing away from Roddenberry's vision as unbearably naive. But part of the point of framing TOS from a utopian point of view, imo, is these stories are going to feel WRONG to us. These are supposed to be the stories of people who have left at least some of the counter-productive impulses and unhelpful behavior and ways of thinking behind them. Of course that seems weird to us. If we give up our darkest impulses and our ceaseless primate bickering, what stories could we possibly have left to tell? 

These are the stories of the starship Enterprise! The point is to tell a story from the point of view from a radically different frame of reference from our own jaded cynicism and then imagine it as a wild adventure instead of utterly boring utopian tedium. This is difficult! It is daring! To imagine utopia and then brazenly assert it would interesting. 

Unfortunately, over time, Star Trek seems less and less able to imagine utopia at all, having already abandoned the idea that anything but gritty ferengi realism is hopelessly naive. It has turned from a high-minded vision of what civilization could be, to a pessimistic review of what western civilization IS. High minded ideals undercut by corrupt politicians, greed, and our basest impulses for war and profit. There is benefit to writing Star Trek this way, you can certainly reflect the fall of the US in the fall of the federation if you like, but there are also plenty of other grimdark properties fully capable of completing that particular assignment.

The point of Star Trek is you can be better, but you have to try. And keep trying. And the first step to creating it is imagining it could exist at all, and that it would, against all our conflict-loving primate instincts, actually be fun and interesting and a far greater adventure than we can currently imagine. 

Utopianism has its own pitfalls, so maybe the project was fatally flawed from the start. Either it's impossible or any utopianism that rings true would feel wrong to less socially evolved creatures such as ourselves. Regardless, I miss the days when watching Star Trek didn't leave me feeling bummed out because the future tastes like ash.

thematically speaking

 I'm probably going to change the theme again to something that isn't so blatantly shouting "I suffer from depression"

perfectly normal times

 You can isolate yourself and get deeply weird and no one will really stop you. You are an adult! It is your right.  

You can swipe left or right on the dating apps and not talk to anyone who matches with you. 

You can refuse to have even a five hour plan, let alone days/weeks/years. 

You can stop trying after your last serious relationship and just watch your cats die of old age. 

You can sleep late, eat cookies for dinner, and slowly fade out of your so-called social life like collateral damage from careless, joyriding time travelers who have just oopsed your chances of ever existing. You can let it slide so far that the most socialization you get on any given day is 10 seconds of chit chat with the baristas who sling your coffee. They say they admire your translucence, the way the light refracts through you, but you suspect it makes them dizzy. You understand, the light you refract seems wrong somehow, plagued beams on an unholy spectrum. "time travelers..." you say with a shrug. They smile uncertainly in your sickly glow. You appreciate the effort they take to be kind.

You can just drop anchor, and survey the lifeless seas around you. No wind in your sail, no refuge on the horizon, no compass to speak of and no place you were going to. You can be lost at sea because you're lost on land. You can just do that. You are protected by law.

You can assume you can end your isolation at any time, that there are any number of access points to the social web all around you. You will be tragically wrong, but you could be forgiven for assuming that, given that it is true for long stretches of time. You will notice you have left yourself completely vulnerable in any public emergency, which you naively assume is never going to happen. In the unlikely event of a pandemic, picking an example out of thin air, you will be utterly fucked. Truly boned beyond all imagining, socially speaking. You will make no one's "pandemic bubble." because you have not been there for anyone. You will be grateful not to have coughed yourself to death, though. That part is nice. But you are allowed to leave yourself stubbornly flat-footed in the face of literally any eventuality. You are an adult. It is your right! It's remarkably stupid, but you can do that to yourself.

You can decide this society is so appalling you'd rather just not participate. It's childish, but you can decide that too. You're not wrong exactly. Living in a society of angry primates who hurt people for money and like to condescendingly tell you why hurting people for money is GOOD, actually, at every happy opportunity: funerals, grocery stores, online message boards where everyone agreed that guy had it coming. In fact, maximizing misery is the only thing that can happen in this or any universe, you naive child, you utter fool. But still. Apathy? That's NOT productive. 

You can just be lukewarm so god will spit you out of his mouth. In the happy circumstance that god is not your dad and trying to devour you, you are happy to be god's spit take. You might take some solace in the fact that spit takes are inherently funny, but it's something of a bummer that you have lost your sense of connection to the divine, a sense of place in the daily warp and weft of creation, knit daily, and thanklessly, by the nornir, who have for some reason not formed a union to fight these sweatshop conditions.* 

You can hope for some sort of divine epiphany. that your purpose and your place in the world will just get beamed into your mind from somewhere good by someone kind, but it doesn't seem to work that way too often. It has happened in fits and spurts (that's what HE said!) in your life, blinding moments of clarity, but it's not something you can depend on. God helps those who help themselves and have somehow escaped being devoured by Him. And information wants to be free but it wants you to come get it because information is laaaazy and frankly that's embarrassing for information. Information should assert itself. Look what these primates do to it when they try to grab for it themselves! Mangled beyond recognition by their messy emotional needs. Sad.

You can be tired of this planet and these people and being caught in the endless tangle of their lives, but that's just life in this place and escaping this gravity, well.... Also, you are not blue, you are not all powerful and you are not swinging the biggest blue dick anyone has ever seen on a movie screen and no one wants to "take Manhattan" if you know what they mean. 

You can be okay, regardless. You can just sit with your disconnection, your dissociation, and your apathy and watch it like a curious dog. A curious dog who's been to therapy and is taking notes. "How do you feel about that?" Your inner therapist dog might ask. "I don't know." you say. "Hmmm." says therapist dog. He is taking notes again. You suspect he is not convinced. Also, you suspect he cannot actually write. He is a dog.

You can get a little weird in isolation and no one can stop you. That's okay! It is your right. When you finally figure out what you want and where you belong, you'll remember you like weirdos and it won't be a problem at all.

*"Well, they CAN'T stop or creation ceases to exist!" you might say. Maybe the truth is, time just stops until they resume knitting and 5 15 minute breaks a day with an hour for breakfast/lunch/dinner would affect nothing. Maybe time freezes 8 times a day but we never notice because we are linear beings, who will forever remain blissfully unaware of every little blip and burp in the time stream. Did you ever think about THAT, smart guy?

Parables

 I read the Parable of the Sower and Talents out of order, and finally finished the "prequel" to Parable of the Talents today. It is hard to read about "the pox" after the last year, not because I think that particular situation is imminent, but because it does seem as completely unlikely as it used to. The seeds of that world reside within this one and it's disconcerting to sit with.

In the pox, a slow-burning pseudo-nuclear bomb in the form of economic collapse does not vaporize anyone, but it does slowly atomize society, until all that's left are predatory gangs, increasingly factionalized governments, corporate slavery and a teeming mass of people desperate, starving, and hoping not to be prey. Everyone is desperate, starving, struggling to survive and trust in the inherent goodness of human nature will get you killed.

It's not that I think we're that close to Mad Max, but you can see the seeds of that behavior in our "looking out for #1" society already, and after a year of shocking callous attitudes towards covid deaths it's only gotten worse in some sectors. There is a not so quiet social split happening between people who don't really give a shit who their behavior hurts and those who, frankly, find that appalling (every friend I know has a story of former friends along those lines right now), and the disconcerting premise of the Parable of the Sower is, there's no real reason the "who gives a shit, I got mine" people don't eventually "win," at least for a time. 

As for Earthseed, I find the premise intriguing, and I like the emphasis on radical acceptance when it comes to change, but I'm not sure it's ... sufficient to reform a society lost to desperation, ruled by a callous disregard for human life.

I'm not sure what's sufficient to change our course either. People comfort themselves by saying, "well, when the chips are REALLY down, people will come together." And there certainly is a critical mass of people willing to do that. But after the last year, when the chips have been pretty far down and a surprising amount of people have eagerly performed a callous disregard for death and disease so long as it didn't affect them directly, i'm not longer so sure the current argument for giving a shit, in sum, is sufficient. And what it takes to get there, I don't yet know.

Random thoughts

 I should probably put more words here. While I'm at it, I should probably try to put more interesting in that I usually do. 

My thinking is so scattered today. Other than the sum total of my atrocious habits, I'm not sure what to blame specifically. I think I need to go off caffeine again. Of all the things that are probably contributing, the fuzzy head I get when I have too much caffeine seems too consistent to ignore. Your mileage probably varies, I'm just ready to believe that I'm one of those people who processes caffeine so poorly it does more harm than good at this point. Whether I'm willing to give up mochas is the real question. Although I could stand to consume far less dairy too, so two birds I guess.

Scattered or not, the urge has once again arisen to figure something, anything out in my life. I am begging myself. The current state of things is intolerable. Honestly, one big reason for the misery of my life is the simple ability to shrug off quite a bit of self-inflicted misery. Occasionally it gets to be too much, even for me. I would like to be touched by another human being again, and feel comfortable in my skin around other human beings again, and I think it's okay to admit that. To do that, I need to make myself someone capable of doing that again and start living a life that has room for other people in it.

I have been consumed lately by my romantic failures. "Was I a fool?" I ask myself. "Probably," I answer. Dalton, Chris, Charles, several Matts, a Josh, and others. I worry I do the seinfeld equivalent of breaking it off because they eat their peas with a fork. Although, I am contemplating the notion that my judgement in some of these cases was actually decent, and I accurately noticed a fair deal-breaker and acted accordingly. It frustrates my relentlessly negative inner monologue to consider such heresies, but I must admit the possibility. 

Still, I miss all of them for one reason or another. Regret chances not taken. Wonder about what might have been if I'd been capable of summoning a better version of myself at the time. It's covid isolation and I can only game so much before the Life Review pops up as an intrusive thought. 

I've at least been reading more, which is some kind of small victory. It's ranged from fantasy pulp to thoughtful essays I can barely summon the attention span to finish and make some minimal sense of. But I'll take it. I like the version of myself that reads a lot, it's nice to see him even in a cameo role. Bizarrely what may be my biggest motivation here is my constant dissatisfaction with most SF/F I've been seeing on TV and movies lately. I just...don't like the large swathes of the current crop. The new Star Trek shows are too over-wrought to be fun and the rest seems similarly uninspired. There are a couple gems here and there, but still. I think the stories I'm missing are best realized in novels. Or maybe I just miss the experience of reading high concept novels. 

 Maybe I just miss reading novels. It is a very particular activity that fires the ol' neurons in the ol' grey matter in a particular way and I miss that specific sensation. My mouth is watering just thinking about it, which is very strange, but seems to happen these days when I'm doing anything edifying, be it music, language, or simply reading something other than an endless feed.

Is it possible we're not on this earth to monitor various feeds for some reason? Oh well, I'm sure if we scroll long enough the reason will become apparent. Yup, any day now.

Deep

 Over time, I've begun to abandon an overt search for "depth," even if thinking well and clearly and deeply, whatever that means, remains the goal. It's clear to me now in the fullness of overweight middle-age that the search for depth and "deep conversations" was a form of youthful vanity. The unspoken self-flattery, of course, that I was capable of such depths, that we could come together and improve our thinking and that we would congratulate ourselves and each other about how well and how deeply we could now think, now that we were very 21 and so wonderfully mature.

Amidst the wreckage of my life, youthful aspirations long since cast aside once seen as lies I told myself and/or lies I was told by others, I am more inclined to seek out shallow conversations. I still wish to reason well and think clearly but the tone I seek is much more the genuine humility of "isn't wonderful that we can come together and reason and isn't it a tragedy that we do so so poorly, even after all these years?" Which is to say, at some point in your life-long learning, both the vastness of the universe and the hard limits of excitable, hierarchical primates should make SOME impact on your consciousness, hopefully provoking some moderate sense modesty and humility about the quality of your thinking and the idea that perhaps learning to think well is a life-long journey of trial and error in thought and deed that will at some point be rudely interrupted by death, well before you have finished learning what you want to learn.

Which isn't to say that humility can't be it's own kind of prideful trap, of course. "Isn't it wonderful how humble we are now?" is itself not a terribly humble thought. The question is, am I seeking a self-flattering identity or knowledge? Do I desire to be seen as "deep," and lauded accordingly, or am I still searching for answers to questions I still have a hard time even finding the words for? I'm much more interested in the latter than the former as time goes on, my inner Smart Kid howling in chains notwithstanding.

Frankly BONDiNG

I really enjoyed this dialog from BONDiNG (S2E3). The last paragraph is very relatable.

 -------------

Pete: Frank, what happened?

Frank: You know that movie, where the little boy turns into a man and loses his virginity to a 30-year-old woman ? 

Pete: No... oh, big?

Frank: It's the one where he gets his wish granted by the machine because he's not tall enough to ride the rides with the other kids?

Pete: yeah, big. It's 'cause he's not big enough to ride the rides.

Frank: It'll come to me.

Pete: Jaws?

Frank: Is Jaws the one with Bob Hanks?

Pete: okay, now you're just fucking with me

Frank: Anyway! Sometimes I feel like that's what happened to me. Like I'm this adult person man who's fucking hot chicks on trampolines, but inside, I know that I still have like a 13-year-old dick in my mind.

Pete: Yeah, I don't think that came out the way you wanted it to.

Frank: I can't do anything right! A job, a girlfriend, the pull-out method

Pete: Yeah, but do you want a baby, or ....?

Frank: I mean, it's not up to me, is it? It's her life, her body, you know? I have to like support her. I already fucked her once, right?

Pete: but you were so excited...

Frank: Anything seems exciting when you think it will change who you are. Like, maybe I won't be a total waste of space, if I can find something to fill that space with. But instead, you end up being more sad 'cause that emptiness can never be filled with someone else, 'cause the problem is always you. and how do you fill, how do you fill a space in you that's empty because of you?

Acknowledged New Year

 2021 rolling in like,

It's not just 2020, or 2021 though, is it. We describe it that way to distance ourselves from a harsher reality. What's happening now is the collective result of our choices, with no easy way to convince people to change. People, it must be noted, who seem to have a pronounced tendency to dig in harder and harder, despite the fact that they, and we, are already pretty deep in a goddamn hole. Easier to say, "wow! what a year!" than "Wow! what a colossal, and completely avoidable, clusterfuck we've made of everything!" If it's an act of god, a random permutation of the calendar, it's somehow not our fault and someone else's problem. 

 It reminds me of those people, well me, who avoid opening mail when they suspect a bill is coming due. Doesn't change the nature of the bill, just changes it from a potentially manageable problem into a psychic weight that prevents me from tackling manageable problems. And, let me tell you, America has a lot of psychic baggage dragging it down right now. A host of manageable problems lovingly turned to psychic ether so a few people with a lot can get a little more.

Our task this year is to drag these abstract terrors kicking and screaming into the harsh glare of the real so that we may kill solve them and in doing so perhaps save ourselves. We are running out of time and no longer have the luxury of endless dissociation and prevarication simply so we don't have to clean our rooms. We are hoarders of emotional baggage, we collect it via inaction in the face of solveable problems and it's time to stop.

 Well, after we binge this next series. I hear it's really good. 

I look at the world, my own complacency and depression, and all I can think of is, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." and all I can think in response is, "Yup, that checks out."

I very obviously have not been doing enough. I am a shell of an adult. I am not trying to remove agency from those who behave selfishly and amorally and continue to shred our communities and social safety nets, but I am suggesting the rest of us aren't doing near enough to fight that decay and not near enough to provide a compelling alternative vision for this society.

the numbers on the calendar don't matter, we all simply have to do better and deal with some scary, but manageable shit. That's it.