Another Thing

Night before last I dreamed I was doing lethal kung fu against Amazon PR assassin clones, like these 10 foot tall Bloodborne-looking dudes and some Ghost in the Shell ladies.  I could fly kinda badly.  It wasn’t a cakewalk but it made me feel like a badass in my lil scenario.  This morning I dreamed I was involved in a mob fight and when the dust cleared the room had been stripped to a concrete floor and random plastic sheets.  Muppets that had been partially embedded in the concrete stirred.  As Kermit stood up, plastic sheets stuck to his back and were dragged behind him, looking like angel wings.  It was very poetic.  Also I had a reason I was trying to make sandals out of string cheese.

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What About Pillowfort?

Pillowfort was conceived, whatever else they say, as a tumblr knockoff that was supposed to be distinguished by having effective blocking to prevent people from having to catch nazi URLs on their dash every day.  They finally opened the gates – you don’t need an invite to get a Pillowfort account now.

But who’s using this?  Let alone the thing which it was meant to replace.  Tumblr has withered on the vine.  It’s still my only social media because sweet hell FB and Twitter are you kidding?  But there’s literally one tenth the traffic on my dash that there used to be.  Everyone is off to Instagram or Pinterest or who knows.

I tried to find something to follow on Pillowfort and it’s been a total waste of time so far.  Good for the tumblr sex worker accounts to have a new platform I guess, but that’s not what I’m on social media for.  Where are people hanging out now?  What’s happenin’ with the kids these days?

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Mortal Jelly

Humans are just piles of jibbly meat, highly derived structures propping up a primordial worm / digestive tract.  Our overdeveloped sensory processing node/brain wants something more.  In their earliest form, brains would have more basic info to process – dark/light, pain/satiation, things like that.  Is the human desire for a transcendant experience a misguided version of some kinda worm drive, wanting to move into the light inside the light?

Sometimes experiences feel like they’re touching on an abstract higher realm, like getting closer to god or transcendance or nirvana, whatever.  When I’ve felt this it’s usually from music or film, more rarely from physical experience.  It’s kind of like buzzing.  Like if your thoughts are all wave forms and they’re peaking.  Maybe transcendance is just your mind’s wave form hitting a ceiling, like a mistake in audio editing that causes a loud part of a song to turn into an obnoxious rattle.  We don’t like hearing that audio track, but if it had a sense of self, maybe it would feel pretty cool.

Anyway, listening to The Doors veers between wondering why you’re listening to this clownish nonsense and feeling like true magick is about more than just casting spells, maaaan.  I put my finger on the veins of the cosmos and find the pulse uncanny, retract.  Back to work.

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A Bad Dream

Content Warning: Gore, COVID

In my waking hours, I’m not concerned about COVID.  My household is fortunate to be able to isolate well, we live in a state doing better than most (though one of the worse cities in our part of it), and there’s very promising vaccine news floating about lately.  I think we can hold out ’til the stuff comes available, and while I can feel bad for victims, it’s not a very deep sorrow for me.

But apparently when I’m asleep it’s a different story.  I had a dream where COVID symptoms included hemorrhagic sores, open wounds, and plague-like swelling.  For unclear reasons the bodies of victims were in chopped-up chunks.  Still-living victims were burying the dead in mass graves at the sides of the road while the rest of us drove by.  There was blood soaking the ground in large patches.

India was having some success training animals like monkeys and wombats to help care for children with the disease, which was heart-warming.  I wondered in my dream if I should pay money to that charity, or if it would be better spent in helping research a cure.  I somehow ended up in an isolation cell with one of those plague children, which was sad and horrid, but I half-realized I was dreaming and was able to logic myself out – not fully awake, but to a previous area from the dream.

Somebody wondered on a previous post what a bad dream looks like to me.  This wasn’t the worst, but it was bad.

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Random Thoughts on Ethnic Stereotypes

The title of this post probably makes it sound like it will be more substantial.  No, this a Random Thoughts from Satan post, and not that deep.  I was just looking at the search “Hayden Christensen Movie Trailer” on youtube for laughs, and laugh I did.  But it occurred to me that in “Little Italy” he was essentially doing brownface.

As many people have pointed out, across the world there are varying definitions of white.  To a Persian guy in Iran, he’s white.  To a Berber in Egypt, she’s white.  It’s defined by having somebody darker than you, and usually further south.  So to some Germans, I expect, Italians are not white.  And by that definition, a Scandinavian Canadian with his hair darkened rocking a tan to flip pizzas would be doing brownface…  Although I found out he’s like 1/4 Italian, so *chef’s kiss* mama mia!  Uncancelled.

In all this I caught myself being amused at the cute ethnic stereotypes of the world, which is, I expect, not SJW kosher.  And yet, how can you not automatically be charmed by people with funny accents?  So cute.  One time I was in a basic English class at the community college, while I was reading aloud some depressing stuff I wrote, it prompted my teacher to say “My God man, are you a drinka?”

It was one of the highlights of my life, honestly.  He was so Jewish his name was Murray and he was from Brooklyn, where in the summers it was like a foinace, oy vay.  Freaking delightful.  I wonder, in places less mainstream blando Anglo-American, would my accent charm and amuse?

As an exemplar of the most over-represented culture on the planet, I kinda doubt it.  C’est lavie.  I’ll have to be cute in some other way.  Maybe my taste in shoes…

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Not a Bad Dream

Content Warnings: Surreal Violence, Death, Drugs, Prostitution, Deformity.

I had a dream I was Blixa Bargeld of Einstürzende Neubauten fame, though the rest of the band didn’t enter into it.  Me and some artist / drug friends were living in some kind of underground ruin over the course of a few decades.  In later years it also became a brothel and I was arguing with my best friend about allowing caning in the S&M action.  I don’t remember why I opposed it, but my friend the art pimp said we needed it to stay competitive.  The main points of action in the dream were when cops tried to raid us and it turned into big siege situations.  I killed a few cops in self defense and the defense of others, and somehow legally got away with it both times.  Those parts of the dream weren’t bad.  Later in the dream a sad prostitute with a elephant man-like skin condition and semi-liquid flesh started chasing me around and dividing like an amoeba, which wasn’t cool, but not as scary as it should have been.  I woke up to a day off from work, so not a bad time.

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Content Warning: Led Zeppelin

Given that the dudes from Zepp were most likely rapists, and given that even if they weren’t, they literally have songs about impregnating teenage children, it’s fair for anyone to disregard their music, avoid them like the plague.  Certainly I don’t advocate giving them money.  But I would like, if I may, to make a puerile observation about one of their puerile songs, and if possible, keep the tenor of the discourse puerile as well.  That is to say, don’t read this if you don’t want to speak with light-hearted amusement at the horndogging foolery that is Led Zeppelin’s catalog.  Proceeding thusly…

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“Wie ein Hund” – Murder Imitates Art

Spoiler Warning: I reveal the end of a Franz Kafka story
Content Warning: Murder

In Franz Kafka’s The Trial, as Josef K is being murdered by a couple of state goons just doing their jobs, he says “Wie ein Hund” before his throat is cut. “Like a dog,” that’s how he’s dying. Not allowed human dignity. There’s a transcript of George Floyd’s last words over at Mano’s, I can’t testify to the veracity of it because I’m not going to watch somebody get murdered and scrutinize the poor audio. But it’s believable. No human dignity allowed, no mercy from the thugs in blue, the state goons just doing their job.

I’m really glad that a big swath of people around the world aren’t buying the simplistic narrative of “riots bad.” Thank you for giving me a glimmer of hope. To all the “tough on crime” politicians and pundits pushing curfews and lockdowns and state violence, eat shit.

If I was a mayor, I would make a deal with my people. I order every cop in the city to go eat donuts in a suburb for a day, in exchange for a request that the protest be as minimally destructive as possible. Then I’d pick up the tab for whatever happened after that. Something tells me when you don’t bring militarized bullies in blue to a protest, they might not end in as much property damage.
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–Again, I don’t feel up to moderating comments on this topic, so they’re closed–

The Mysterious Allure of Spider Sauce

This is one of my main mans, Hecubus. He is a cat. Looks kind of oily in this picture, maybe he needs a bath. Anyhow, the point: He has a wet nose. It’s the perfect amount of wetness for a cat. See a cat trailing snot? Might be sick. See a cat with a nose that’s bone dry? That’s not what a cat nose is supposed to be like. I suspect this optimal cat nose wetness gives him a better sense of smell than other cats I’ve had in the past because he likes to sniff things more than the others.

The other day I killed a spider on my wall, apologies to our FtB thought control overlord. It left a barely perceptible smear on the wall. I flicked off the pieces of exoskeleton with the corner of my murder weapon. Hecubus did not bear witness to this event.

But later he found the spot on the wall, not even convenient to get to up behind a lamp. He found it with his sniffer, and came back to it later to sniff some more. I’ve seen him eat a spider once in his youth, but that was a few years ago. Does he remember the taste and smell on some level, and is therefore drawn to it? Or does spider sauce have a distinctive and potent smell to the right mammals, and just draw interest on the level of curiosity?

Without experimentation we can never know. I guess I’ll leave this one to science wizards. It’s gotta be in the list of things they’ll get to eventually. What is the allure of spider sauce?
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