roachboy

i find that i am driven by despair to some extent. i see the options that are availabe politically in the carefully manicured lawn of versions of the same shit that got us into this wreckage in the first place and i see nothing but disaster following from the visions of what to do they enable.

there is nothing even coherent about supply-side/neo-liberal ideology---nothing. o i see why it's appealing to a kind of sensibility that's also inclined to confuse any rand with a thinker, all of which rests on an adolescent assumption that the ubermenschen that she rattled on about includes them. and this aesthetic identification enables a denial of reality that's tedious to confront when it's written by someone every bit as powerless as the rest of us and genuinely dangerous when it emerges as the frame that enables a gliding over reality in people who hold power. but it's simple and it plays reasonably well on teevee. and questioning it takes time and requires reflexive thinking. and that doesn't sell vital advertising.

insofar as these discussions that go on as if they were of some consequence beyond the therapeutic in spaces like this....it's difficult to manage the consequences of despair. they come across as anger. and maybe those are in fact the consequences.

what's clear to me anyway is that the debates themselves have no value apart from the therapeutic in the sense that they are a way to churn ideas, to work them over and run out the consequences. a way to think them out. but when that value gets broken down, then what's left?

fact is that i live here too. and people around me are affected directly by the actions of the confederacy of dunces that run the show for the one plutocracy which is indivisible and provides justice only for some. i'd rather know of a way to erase them. and this in a fairly direct and uncompromising way. but there isn't one.

i've mentioned the cliche before...may you not live in interesting times. when i was younger i didn't understand it. now i kind of do understand it. interesting times are those of fundamental change. one of the characteristics of times of fundamental change are that people in the main are not able to process that change. and these are the people who get written out of history by those people who make the narratives from a time-space in which the way the story that's underway now is already known, so the narrative has an end point that will eventually emerge and that endpoint will provide a logic for the kind of basically false narratives that history is full of, the type that writes everything around the present of the writer as if all of history leads to that point.

none of what's been happening in terms of the poisoned micro-dynamic that's taken shape between ace and myself in particular is particularly ace's fault--not as a person anyway. he's just an easy target in a situation full of conceptually easy targets who are different from him only because they aren't accessible. the communication channels don't exist. that's all. it's a matter of displacement. and i don't know what, if anything, indulging that displacement advances.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite