No Such Thing

You got too high on the hog. You got used to the idea that you could cry-bully your world-views into existence (or at least orchestrate sufficient psychodrama to satisfy your need to think things are a certain way). You started to create word-puzzles and change the meaning of words just so people who didn’t care about your bullshit could fall into your word traps.

I was recently brought up to speed on a video that went viral in 2016, a year that I was so down on my luck that I missed almost all of the good memes. You’ve probably heard of it, given how many views and commentaries I was able to find on it.

I have not read anything on Civil War. I intentionally kept myself ignorant of the dialogue surrounding this movie so that my reaction to it could be untainted by the rabble of the unwashed A24-boot-licking masses. I wanted to give a reaction that was pure, and I sit here now writing this unaware of anything but my own impressions.

Even if you are correct, Even if they see the truth, Even if they march us into ruin, Every if we pull us from the brink, Even if your “logic is sound,” Even if they use our blood for ink, Even if the pendulum swings, Even if the pendulum swings back, and falls upon you, like the edge of the guillotine’s blade… The crowd will not cheer. You will not be thanked. You will not be vindicated. You will not be apologized to. You will not even be remembered.

I. A friend recently reminded me that “cope” does not exist. This is a good reminder. II. Cope either does not exist, or it does exist but is some sort of essential human function of meaning-making, self-soothing, and retroactive narrative assignation that we all participate in, and is therefore meaningless to point out and even more meaningless to mock.

You will never win the argument, they will never change, you will never get the apology you hope for. Depart. Yes, the inmates are running the asylum. Yes, everyone has lost their mind. Yes, the falcon can no longer hear the falconer. Depart. My politics is departure. Like the politics of my opponent, it is quasi-religious. However, it is more aligned with the Eastern tradition.

An excellent piece from , brought to my attention from the equally venerable (subscribe to both) has been hamster-wheeling through my mind for most hours of the last 24.

Eventually it is coming. Eventually the levies will break, the horns will blow, the oceans will boil into mist. Eventually the tally will show and the future will arrive. There is a truth coming; it is not something I claim to have access to, only something I can see out on the horizon, kicking up dust and swallowing the future whole. This egregore barrels toward us, and nothing seems to stop it or even slow it down.

What if there was no way to make the truth palatable? When I say “truth,” I mean the ultimate, objective, cosmically, mathematically perfect truth. The platonic Truth, the ultimate form that we cannot fully gaze upon but only peek in oblique glimpses from the corner of our eye? What if the truth was not something that conformed to our many frameworks and paradigms that have been haughtily scrabbled together by intrepid humans since the dawn of language?

I reject efficiency. Not in full; I do not reject a little efficiency. I do not reject a waiter checking in to top off my ice water or a mechanic remembering to put the cap back on after an oil change. I like that degree of efficiency, as I like an onion ring in my Burger King fries, looking at my receipt in the car and finding out they didn’t charge me for the Ranch Dressing, or sneaking forward from the cheap seats into the empty seats along the third base line.