In Accordion

Well, it is perhaps somehow a good thing that I am writing here, because Raquel is reading. Or, I should learn to shut up about personal relationship matters. Today she started using the word "we" when asking what was going to happen with the car. Relationships are never fair, but they shouldn't be so unfair as to cause resentment, either. The best relationships I've been in created a natural state of mutual generosity. Many of them are that way for others, also. Though somehow each partner can still be left with that feeling. Everybody deserves more, yet more brings trouble. 

It made me feel good that Raquel reframed the dilemma as being a mutually shared one. Nobody likes to be left alone, during times of trouble most of all, no matter how minor. 

She did ask me if the accident was my fault. I had to explain that, no, when you get hit from behind it means that the other driver was not in control of their car and was not able to to stop in time, which is never your fault. She wanted to still find fault in me for having been hit. Women, etc. 

Onwards and onwards and onwards and upwards. 

"I was sentimental about many things: a woman's shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, 'I'm going to pee...'; hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of drinking and smoking, talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide; eating together and feeling good; arguments; the jokes, the laughter out of nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together; comparing past loves at 3AM; being told you snore, hearing her snore; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes divorce, but always carrying on, always seeing it through." - Bukowski, Women

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Coitus

A car slid across the icy road near Truckee into the back side of my Jeep on Sunday. We were leaving Tahoe. The cars in front of us had stopped suddenly. I braked and saw the car behind me spinning out of control. I pulled into the oncoming lane, trying to get out of the way of the car that was now sliding sideways towards us, but no luck. It smashed into the back of my car and then went off the road into a snow filled ditch. A four wheel drive pickup truck behind that car did the same. Like a good citizen I made sure everybody was okay. Tow trucks were going to be involved, at least one to pull the two of them back onto the road. Though once the unlucky cars were back on the road they were probably both drivable. 

The piece of cracked plastic that constituted the broken part of my car costs $1100, unpainted. I found that out the following day, just before letting my insurance company know. I was going to reach out to the driver and see if he just wanted to pay for my car to be repaired, rather than have me claim it against his insurance. But you know, I didn't feel like calling him and selling him the idea. I didn't exactly like the idea either. 

We talk a lot about the rising costs of healthy care in this country, but that's not the only problem. Something, something, something.... late stage capitalism. 

You learn about the nature of partnership in these moments. When the refrigerator has gone out we needed a new one. Though by all conceivable definitions I am just a renter here. When there were fires roaring through the area and taking out power grids we needed a generator for "the house." Though again I was not sure why a renter would need a generator, even though I like specific use-case machinery. When the car that I pay for exclusively gets hit from behind on a trip that we regularly take to a place with dangerous driving conditions then I will need to decide how I want to handle it. Well, the pronoun "I" was never used. Everything was suddenly couched with a series of "you (will need/want to)...." There was no talk of partnership when my things get damaged doing something for us. 

I have been feeling in some deep inward part of myself that something is over, and has been for a long time now. Facing difficulties alone - not necessarily financial ones - makes me feel this even more pointedly than I might have felt it otherwise. 

What is the point of labeling a relationship a partnership? We are co-parents that sometimes cooperate, and who sometimes conjoin our bodies for the purpose of copulation. Itus means "a going, a departure" in Latin. When you put co in front of itus, you create a departing together. 

Propositus, I. All part of the tinnitus, detritus, and and vomitus of love.

 

 

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The Family...

We leave for Tahoe today. Tahoe City, in fact. It will be our first time on the west shore of the lake. Alpine Meadows, the resort that consumed Squaw Valley (later renamed Palisades, because of the cultural slur), site of the 1960 Winter Olympics. After work and school, we will all pile into the car and head to the snow, a model bourgeoise family. Say what you will, there is something to the pleasure of expensive leisure, it's not at all like the poor kinds of leisure. Not every moment needs to be spent fighting the many online and workplace evils of unanimity, economic injustice, and exclusivity. Sometimes you can just glide down a mountainside on soft snow and achieve the temporary sensation of escaping it all, surrounded by affluent white people, and the resorts' employees. 

I never dreamed that I would live this long. I will stuff my pockets with single dollar bills and tip everybody I see working with a big, generous smile on my face. Things can only get better.

Well, I thought that I was going to have a few free minutes to sit here and satirize my opining, but the car needs to be packed with all the gear, the skis and snowboards locked into the racks on the roof, the checklist checked, the family loaded. 

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Pilfering

I am lifting what few photos I have from my old work computer to use here. The above is above. It's among the first and only medium format images I have ever taken - Kiev 80 camera, Ilford HP5+ 120 film. Everything is everywhere when you get older. Much is lost, some is rediscovered. I need to rearrange my life, but will instead write about it for several years before committing. 

Commit is a funny word.

I am in bed now, hoping for the events of the day to fade into darkness soon. I have listened to two John Fahey albums (Days Have Gone By and America) and next up is Low's Things We Lost In The Fire. If you have any curiosity about music then you should listen to all three of those links. the first two are from a folk fingerpicker, the other is lo-fi dream pop (produced by Steve Albini, of Pixies' Surfer Rosa fame. Mimi Parker, the drummer, just passed away a few months ago). 

All three albums are quality, with fascinating production values. All albums that make so much more sense when listened to in the dark solitude of quiet night. 

I bought a mixer which arrived today (I paid less than what is shown there), so I am trying to remind myself exactly what it is that I love about certain albums' production values. So much comes down to moods that you are able to capture. The best things that I have ever done were never the most well produced things I had done. I've always found that aspect of the listening experience fascinating. It's not always true for the music that I am a fan of, but it is not entirely untrue in that regard, either. I have a reasonable balance between newer, digital toys and some of what are now considered "classic" samplers and effects processors, so hopefully I can utilize those sonic disparities and advantages. I hope not to commit too many recording embarrassments.

I'll have a series of guitar pedals hooked up to the mixer soon - Space Echo Emulators, cheap analog reverbs, dusty and crusty old multi effects, compressors, parametric eqs, gates, a wah-wah pedal, even an old Alesis Quadraverb that I gave to CS but then took back after I found out that one of my favorite ambient-techno albums (Pentamerous Metamorphosis) used it almost exclusively as their fx unit for that mix. I don't think he ever forgave me, though he still has the much more useful and meaningful Tascam 4-Track cassette recorder.  He's letting a raccoon gnaw on it in the attic the last time I asked.  

I am being very link-happy in tonight's post. Perhaps that means this is a good time for me to stop writing. I am referencing the things of which I am writing. That can't be a good thing.

My literalness is meta-literality. I stole that. 

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Captains Crunch, Beefheart, and Kangaroo

I only have a few minutes before the Xanax takes over and pushes towards the darkness of sleep. I will try not to let this devolve into any of the horrors within me. When I ask myself what about my life is worth relaying in writing here I am struck by an odd variety of internal responses. They can loosely be categorized along the lines of satire, humor, and horror. Yet mostly what regularly arrives is a form of plaintive whining. 

An old college friend texted me tonight. He was doing his will. For some reason this made him think of me, so he reached out. He bought a house in Bar Harbor, Maine and is preparing somewhat prematurely for retirement, and presumably death. I talked my way into his will and apparently I may one day live in Bar Harbor, also. Right after he does, circumstances depending. 

Bar Harbor is on the same island where Acadia National Park is. I have always wanted to go there. Several times I meant to drive there from NYC, but never did. It always seemed like more of a drive than it should have been - 8 hours. This was enough to dissuade me, apparently. 

Well, I'll let you know once the house is mine. We'll have a party there. Look it up, it's truly beautiful.

In our chat he told me that it's "the only true fjord in the Unites States..." This didn't sound correct or even possible to me. I looked it up. Apparently the only one true fjord the east coast is the Hudson River. So maybe I was right to stay in Manhattan, surrounded by all that natural sewage and decay. 

What's the line? Something like.... Satire is blind to the forces of decay, which is why decay absorbs the force of satire. 

Remember that one.

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While the worst are full

I have no idea what I thought I was doing by returning to write here. I am having some sort of climacteric failure, though it is difficult to say exactly what the nature of it is, or what its underlying basis is. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. It is all very simple, this foundering: life is short, mine too close to being over. More precisely: I'm going to die. I can feel it for the first time, rather than merely knowing it in some abstract way. Feeling is sometimes a much worse way of knowing. These years have confirmed everything that had been merely make-believe and play. 

How anybody doesn't become consumed with this thought after a certain age is beyond me. Maybe they do, and I'm just the new guy that doesn't know anybody here yet, and that we're not supposed to talk about it, or not in this way. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. We bleat and protest how parts of our bodies hurt, or how things will never be the same again, and we can never agree on how they were then anyway. Yet talk of eternal oblivion and the utter meaninglessness of all existence should be avoided in company. 

If I don't want to spend eternity with any of these people then I should at least have the decency to reflect that in conversation. 

The boy stayed home sick all this week from school and watched some sitcom series - all day; every day. Modern Family. I tried pointing out how dull the writing, acting, and production was, how stale the characters, how they had written themselves into a corner by the later seasons and nobody was inventive enough to script their way out. Their audience, my son, probably doesn't notice or care, and this is why he shouldn't watch shows like this too much. They dull the sensibilities, and make the capacity for humor a mediocre and rote expectation. The blood dimmed tide is loosed. Every show seems to have a subliminal laugh track in it. Some barely audible signal is transmitted where once they paid audiences to sit in a studio and laugh when the light that says to pops on silently for them to see. 

I doubt that the sniffling boy embraced my assessment or saw me as a better person. He probably thinks I'm just a dispirited crank. He's right, of course. All I lack is the obsession with some alternative. 

I tried to let the boy lounge and watch shows he likes while recovering from illness. Not really, not very much. I kept walking into the room, watching the actors half-heartedly trying to pull off stale, predictable punch lines. Each delivered by characters who have not grown but have instead amplified their single marketed dimension. I kept thinking: this is my son, I should do or say something. I took the form of a recurring nuisance, the sounds of mild disappointment that I tell myself are some inverted form of encouragement ... everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned.

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.... all of that out

The thing about working a job and being a parent is that very little happens in your life outside of those two things. So, you look internally and there you find several horrors. Sure, there is happiness, also. What blogger can convey the sensation of that feeling well in writing, or often, without also being nauseous? I scour the past for tales to tell, though telling of the past too often relays the conditions of the present. 

Perhaps one day I'll tell the story here of how Raquel and I met and had a baby, how it all ended then started again. Or, have I written all of that out already?

It all began in Miami. I'd need to check with R, but I'm pretty sure that we don't agree on when and where it was in Miami. There was a cab ride and a nightclub. She remembers the cab ride; I, the other.

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Does life go on?

I found the usb drive that had my previous folders from my work computer on it, yet this is the image I chose to use. I must be out of reach. I started writing here again thinking that it was a new year and that perhaps I needed an outlet, so that the nonsense within me has a place to either live or die in the actual world. But things have changed with my job. For the better, but busier. The next year will be me adjusting to doing more work in the same amount of time. Or, I will spend more time doing more work. There are no alternatives that include me continuing to do this job. It is how I will need to be to succeed in this new role. Well, it is not a new role any more. The role that I was hired to fill suddenly requires me to do so in a way that it had not until very recently. Last Wednesday. 

It's "go time" as some say. 

Well, I won't say much more about it tonight, but my life is set to be more stressful than it had been before. I had hoped to get back into the habit of writing here before any external stressors made it more difficult. C'est la vie.

I go to get a blood test in the morning. They will tell me to reduce my cholesterol, or something similar. I'm at the age, where a trip to a doctor also includes a new restriction or warning of some kind. It becomes obligatory on their part. It is them doing their jobs. 

I can understand why some people do not ever go to see a doctor. I have, I believe, mastered the art of ignoring the medical community while still reaping its benefits. I'll know when they are being serious about something. They are good at communicating severity when the time comes. I trust this. I probably should cut down on visits, though, to be more sure.   

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No Pictures, Please

Good god, I had to take a pot edible and half a Xanax bar to force myself back to sleep around 3am this morning after several hours of tossing and turning and fretting. Then, an early appointment with the eye doctor. I forgot to write a post. Just now I realized, and here we are.

Nobody here knows what has happened to me in the last year. Well, my one and only reader does, but why should that stop me? The Family Q6 went to Europe (Madrid, Ibiza, and London) and Burning Man (Black Rock City) over the summer with the boy. Here he stands in front of Goya's The Naked Maja in Madrid. Goya, I do not believe, gave it that name. This and The Clothed Maja were sold to a private collector. They were unnamed, I believe, though I know they were collected without much interest or faith in their value. They were found in a collection long after the artist's death and became well-known after his death, along with all of the Black Paintings. Yet, there they are, hanging in the Prado.  

The phrase hanging in the Prado makes me think of suicide more than art. Perhaps I have a depressed mind. 

The boy and I have been jamming. I've ordered a special midi conversion box and will try to route the signals from his electronic drum kit to a drum machine, so that he can play from a wider variety of kits, and where I can more easily add effects and apply some production techniques to make us sound cooler and better than we are. Today on the guitar I was really something. I almost plugged a microphone in and started a modest effects loop, just for kicks. I believe the phrase to describe it is shoegaze. 

CS tells me he misses the drink, but I'm not so sure I do. I like sobriety. Once you adjust to the odd differences in time's passing, and learn to accept the cruel clarity of sobriety, it's not so bad after all. Your joy is more diffuse, unrecognizable and spread out more evenly through the day.  I like sobriety and all other prayers of desperation.

This is my personal report for MLK Day, 2023. My, my... how things have changed. 

 

The eye doctor told me that something very unusual is happening. The vision in my left eye keeps improving, and the vision in my right eye keeps getting worse. He explained that degeneration is usually one way, and not towards recovery. He said that perhaps my mind has learned to adjust to the myopia and uses one eye to focus on objects that are further away and the other for objects that are much closer. He encouraged me not to think about it too much, that the mind is a very odd thing, and even more so in how we interact with the world around us. That was at 8am this morning.  

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Sunday Morning Coming Dawn

This is the last image I have on my work computer. I wiped everything recently as part of a personal audit of accumulated digital behavior. There was nothing wrong with all the personal data on my machine. It just might not be easy to explain all ten years' worth of it. CS texts me some pretty crazy stuff, etc. 

Is "years" supposed to have an apostrophe? Seems like it should. What has worth that can be possessed? Years.

The apostrophe is probably the least useful grammatical punctuator. If you remove it from any phrase that is meant show possession the intention of the writer and the meaning of the phrase is still apparent. When used to indicate the omission of letters, there are only a few examples in which its absence might cause some fun and well-deserved confusion. 

To keep in spirit and step with the times I am calling for the abolishment of apostrophes as a hangover from illegitimate colonialist supremacy, though I'm not sure if it's the white-devil British, Egyptian, Spanish, or Portuguese kind. Sounds like it's probably Greek, yet another colonialist monstrosity. What could be more telling than a little dash hanging over a word that is meant to indicate "possession"? These are the very marks of oppression. What you are seeing here is the literal enslavement of one word by another. 

Where I do like to see them used is when a noun needs to be pluralized: Mistake's are liberating. 

To reclaim what is rightfully ours perhaps the oppressed should start adding apostrophes where they do not belong, to show just how much has been taken from us: 

C'a'l'l'i'n'g' i't' y'o'u'r' j'o'b' d'o'e's'n't' m'a'k'e' i't' r'i'g'h't'...'

I took a screenshot to demonstrate the one word that spell-check had a problem with above:

Fixed it: 

Well, moving on. I spent more time than I should have explaining the tyranny of possession, and I didn't even get into the demonic kind, though I covered that in part a few days ago. 

Weeks of rain now, weeks of rain to come. This is what happens to a person's mind when drenched in perpetuity. 

I have part of the day free to myself; the boy has spent the night elsewhere. 

The morning is mine and the rain's. 

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Q6 Family Update

Oh yeah, I forgot to write a post yesterday. I meant to... I thought about it... but then I just went on living my life. 

How do I expect any therapeutic benefits if I'm not going to write every day? To spill my guts, as they say. I'm here because I need some outlet. Or rather, I feel as if I need some outlet. Just agreeing with my gay friends that White Lotus is a great series isn't enough. I need more than just consumable enjoyments. 

This is the part of the post where I break out into song. Anything at all from Mamma Mia. 

I will try to avoid oversharing today. That's something that happens to me at work. Somebody will ask me a simple, innocuous question, a softball is what they're called. I'll begin a monologue that somehow ends up several paragraphs later with me buying amphetamines in the dangerous neighborhood near the stadium back in '94, and that's how I ended up meeting the ex touring guitar-tech for Foghat. Interesting guy with lots of problems. 

Speaking of rock-n-roll.... I bought the birthday boy a monitor for his electronic drum kit. Now we are real rock stars. Becoming a star is pretty easy. Natural, even. Much easier, in fact, than life might otherwise suggest. There are a few elements of being a rock star that one should keep in mind. Like: you deserve this.  

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." - William Blake

Robert Hunter's Ten Commandments of Rock & Roll:

1. Suck up to the top cats

2. Do not express independent opinions.

3. Do not work for common interests, only factional interests.

4. If there’s nothing to complain about, dig up some old gripe.

5. Do not respect property or persons other than band property and personnel.

6. Make devastating judgments about persons and situations without adequate information.

7. Discourage and confound personal, technical, and/or creative projects.

8. Single out absent persons for intense criticism.

9. Remember that anything you don’t understand is trying to fuck with you.

10 Destroy yourself physically and morally and insist that all true brothers do likewise as an expression of unity.

Written by Bob Dylan and Robert Hunter:

I'm not sure if today's post was therapeutic for you or not. You should derive some comfort from knowing that anybody can write better than this. 

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Gargoyle, I

Woke up, the witches were gone, am standing guard against them now. The evil fire-breathing chimeras will have to fight their way back inside today. 

The pic above was taken when Raquel and I went to France. This is from the now partially destroyed roof of Notre Dame, looking north to the hill of Sacré-Couer. Our hotel was right around the corner from the Basilica of Montmartre. Well, it wasn't a hotel, it was like an air-bnb, if I'm remembering it correctly. It was an apartment. I remember having the place to ourselves. At the time it seemed, of course, that we had all of Paris for ourselves. We were on our delayed honeymoon, though we were not getting along very well at the onset. When I look back on our relationship I recognize now that there were a number of key moments that we were not getting along. But have a baby anyway, we sure did. Things sort of worked out. The boy will be an adult soon. Or rather, not soon for him, but pretty soon in 54-year-old years, next year he'll be 2/3rds of the way there. He'll go off to college; I'll retire. Right?

I didn't start today with a subject. I just chose an image and voila!, here we are.  I've used the same image before, many years ago. I'm sure of it. 

Perhaps it is the unceasing rain in Sonoma that has me feeling this way. Remember "acid rain" from the 1970s and 80s? I spent the first few decades of my life playing in it, without shoes. I may have contracted ringworm somewhere along the way. 

 

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Beckoning the Reckoning

I'm having a voiceless breakdown of sorts. I can admit it here; we're all friends. I've been announcing my psyche through crisis actions - erratic in new ways, sentimental in others, teary. I can hardly speak. My throat is clenching up as if my mind is choking me, reminding me that it's choking me. I'm not breathing well, or enough. It started last week, during an important call. Then, it continued over the weekend when talking to friends. My eyes are filled with swirling specters, principalities of the air, the messengers of darkness. This is the witches' sabbath. Some foul thing chants my name in the forest while dreaming. Awake, I hear its breath in the vacant dark. Always far away, I'm afraid of what I've known or become, what I've thought I've known. What had I thought I would  become.

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An imageless world

I told you that I was running out of images. Why would I lie? That would not be in line with the therapeutic nature and intentions of this site.

The rain let up for a few hours yesterday. The sun even came out for a bit. Still, I stayed in bed and read and watched movies all day, humped my pillows, etc. The forecast shows rain every day for the next ten. That's as far as they'll predict. I might start limiting my predictions to the same. The earth is a complex place. Or, that's what the "argument" has been among my conservative friends against the idea of climate change. I regard everybody's opinions as amateur meteorologist predictions now. 

It doesn't matter what they say, it'll probably keep raining. 

I have been thinking a lot lately about political differences. I'm reading a book about the ideological underpinnings and assumptions made by different people. It is yes - gasp! - written by a black libertarian that most of my friends would consider a conservative. I'm not even sure if the word conservative still exists any more. Everybody is either far-right or alt-right now. At least we know which way our enemies are positioned. 

To do my part, I am taking a break from most social media and all of my newsfeeds. I'm ready for the new life, smartphones are built for dopamine hits. News apps are useless. It's news with a condom on. I mostly only scan headlines, though not for the reason that you might think: to stay informed of current events. It is only to mock the phrasing. 

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Driver 8

I only have about six images on this computer, and have used four of them already. Perhaps not writing here is the cause of my slow loss of interest in photography. I have some digital images around here somewhere. 

I became sidetracked with another pos yesterday and never finished this one. I thought that I had figured out what happened with the "lost" post, but a common state of confusion has left me still wondering. Did I tell you that I have a minor case of long covid? I guess that I wouldn't have. All of the symptoms except menstrual, though barely noticeable.  

The boy and mom went to a wrestling camp in Sacramento, so I have been trying to play along with R.E.M. songs from the 80s. And a cover of the same. It's a fun and challenging song to play along with. The riffs and chords are clever, as is Peter Buck's playing.  

Raquel and the boy bought me Dylan's book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, for Christmas. I suppose he is trying once again to buck his current fans again, particularly those that might choose to read him as a result of the Nobel prize. It's not so much a philosophy as an ossifying man talking back to the radio and television of the past. I greatly prefer it when I can intuit his opinions from lyrical suggestions within songs. 

That's my opinion. 

There is some occasional wit and charm, and I haven't read all of the excerpts, or even half of them. But it's not the kind of book in which I necessarily would.  There are some curious selections as well. It's difficult not to get the feeling he was working with the publisher or some advisors of some kind on a few of the pages. 

It is that tone that I wish to avoid, the knowing whine of the aged. 

Okay. Let me publish this post now so I can start working on today's. I relayed to a friend yesterday that if "anybody wants to be a writer" they have to spend a minimum of an hour each day dedicated to writing. These unrelated sections here took me about fifteen minutes. 

If anybody ever asks me what type of writer I am, I'll say: fractional. 

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The Band: Public Hair

These are the only images I have right now. You get what you get. So much has happened in the year since I wrote here last. Where to even start... 

Much has happened but nothing has changed. Perhaps I'll write about it. Odd how that works - if I had been writing about it every day I would care more about it all now. You get what you keep. 

My son turns eleven years old tomorrow. I bought him a monitor for his electronic drum kit. This allows me to free up my guitar amp to use some more electronics - a few pedals and maybe some sampler trickery for loops. The drum machine can run through the below monitor also, and I can use the midi time clock from the drum machine to reset the LFOs on the filter pedal in pulsating rhythmic time. 

There's very little else in the world that's quite like jamming. With a little patience, luck, and grace you can really oversimplify your life. 

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Time for all of that, King Solomon

What next? I simply get back in the habit of writing here every day? Seems easy enough. If I can keep this site from becoming an unintended invitation to correspondence then I should be okay. 

The subtitle of this page is "Emails Without a Home..." Etc.

Sometimes it is nice to know that someone out there in the darkness is reading what you have written. Sometimes it should only be darkness out there. 

This is a time of notorious California rains. We're in the national news again for yet another biblical curse. There has been flooding throughout the state.  I have been using the word deluge to my friends, because I'm a twat. The skies have been gray for more than a week and they will continue to be that way for the foreseeable future. Rain seems better than fire. Any plague, Oh Lord, that these old bones can bear.

I have been building an ark in the back yard, to god's exacting standards. I will stock it with two of every animal that tastes good or has a nice ass, and all together we will ride this out. 

I think I stole stole that from a Beatles song. 

 

What else? Should I catalogue my relationship problems, the difficulties of being a parent, the experience of not drinking after the holidays, my job? Or maybe I could post my favorite recipes. Hopefully there will be time for all of that. 

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My Mandala

It's true. I wrote a post last night, but Google deleted more than half of it and also removed the posted image. Then, they sent me a message telling me that this post was going to be put behind a sensitive content warning banner. I read the post and can not figure out what is sensitive about it. If anything I came across as possibly too unconcerned about my son's bicycle accident. It was terrifying, truly. I'm sorry, Google. I should have been more explicit about that. Or is it less explicit?

I can't tell, and how are we to know. Increasingly, we live by arbitrary standards, imposed by machines, or humans that hide behind machines. Maybe somebody lodged a complaint. Elon Musk is trying to save us from the many tyrannies of technology while also peddling them. He is trying to show us the light of enlightenment. But we are a stubborn yet proud indigenous people.

Maybe it was the imaginary name I used: Mandala Gangbang.  I guess we'll see when I post this one.

I just hope Google doesn't decide to read any more of my blog for the purpose of announcing editorial protocols. There are a few posts in which, well, they very well might have been sensitive, even by my poor and unexacting standards. I was not always as careful as I could have been, you see. I was born a poor blogger, destined to blog the land with my own hands.  

Perhaps we are all cursed, and these little mysteries and inconveniences are the penance we pay for doing business with the universe. 

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