i want to lick ur souls

Tuesday 3/3/26

How seriously are you really about the thing you say you do or are?

I've learned that very few people have any idea what a hero is. A real hero.

Operation Epic Fury sounds cartoonish, or like a rejected idea from a Star Wars script. You know, Death Star, Luke Starkiller (original name). If this were another regime you'd think that wasn't real, but given the powers that be you shrug at most given how well it tracks. Sounds so over-compensatory, too. Operation My Penis Is Really Big Despite What You May Have Heard.

I'm convinced that people who tell others to read the Bible do not do so themselves. In the rare instances when they've cracked it open and looked over a passage, I can practically guarantee that they didn't understand what they were "reading." They weren't reading--they were looking at words and reading them in the sense that they could say them aloud as they went. That's what reading now is for the most part; it isn't things going in, if you will. That is, being comprehended.

I think, too, about what priests said when I was in church. I paid very close attention to the readings. As literature. As stories. As parables. Metaphor. I know everything in that book. As a reader. The priests would give their homily, and I can recall now all the things they said that were false. How poorly they so often understood the texts themselves. The basics.

For instance: Jesus as king of the Jews. Wait...Jesus was Jewish?! He was so great that he got king status everywhere! I remember that line being touted, like not one of these priests understood that it was used mockingly. It was meant to be mean. A term of derision. It was sarcastic. And I wonder now how many people of the cloth know that. It's so rare that people know things, let alone things they have to parse from a text.

In terms of everything that is potentially in your control, it always comes back to you. "I couldn't respond because I've been so busy." No. You can control whether you respond or not, in this example. If you didn't respond, the reason was you, nothing else. Everything else would have been what it was if you had responded. Doing so wouldn't have stopped you from this or that. Same deal either way. If you can control it, and you choose not to do it, the only reason why you didn't is you. One might cite extenuating circumstances. But run this little experiment: Imagine if you'd done the thing you said you couldn't do because of X, Y, Z. What would have changed? Would you be more tired? Would you not have picked up your kid? Probably not, right? Would have been the same. No loss anywhere.

But this is how we are, this is how we treat people. Then we think an injustice has been done to us on account of the world being what it is which causes us to not have friends, or be alone. Whatever. This is why the world is what it is, though. People point there, there, everywhere, but where they rarely ever point is right back at themselves. Funny how our fingers can only point in the outward direction.

One of my grandmothers was a famously awful cook, and survived on butterscotch schnapps, bananas, and Mars Bars. The other grew her own fruits, veg, and herbs, and died from about 8 cancers because she hadn't been told her land was too close to a zinc plant. Just eat whatever the fuck you want.

Damn are people dumb. "Just eat whatever the fuck you want." You see the complete inability to think critically here. Because a grandmother died of causes pertaining to this very specific scientific thing, that means that science isn't a think and if you want to eat McDonald's every day, then you should do that because good choices, bad choices, unhealthy, healthy, it's all the same.

People can't think. We talk about how they can't read. Ironically, people who can't read talk about people who can't read like they're not in that group. It's not just that people can't read; they can't even think basic sound thoughts. They can't think through anything. They can't apply logic. Any logic. They can't reason. Parse. Extrapolate. They can't realize, "Wait, if I'm saying this, then that all means this thing..." They can't do it.

The above person, by the way, looked exactly like I knew they would. Rarely am I wrong with that. It's like an unofficial science.

When the face is less of a face and what I would call a mug.

How do people not feel ridiculous and ashamed to do nothing but post photos of themselves? Like there's nothing in their heads. Not a thought for anything else. Not another person. Just themselves. Another dozen photos of themselves each week. Week after week after week. Men don't do this nearly as much. It's a woman thing. What are you trying to do? I know, get that attention. The building blocks of self. These blocks of empty, meaningless, objectifying attention. Because look who it comes from. Some gap-toothed monstrous hillbilly who is exactly the kind of guy who comments on Pornhub, "i want to lick ur souls."

People are rarely interested in anything outside of themselves. What they purport to be interested in is done with the intention that that will make them look interesting. The one thing they are interested in--themselves--has nothing to do with that thing being interesting. It's simply because that's the skin they are in. That's the home team--the most home-est of teams, if you will. The only team in the league. That person just happened to end up in that skin and be given that name. It has nothing to do with them or who they are. Most people aren't anyone, really. They just have a different number on the back of the proverbial jersey.

Life itself now is just like and click farming, even off-screen, though the cues comes from the screen and screen-based behavior has leeched into life such that it's the dominant mode. Almost the only mode. For all intents and purposes, it is. There's no substance. People don't understand substance. It's lost on them. They don't even know it when it's right in front of them. Anything good here loses; what's bad wins.

The engagement farming: I'll see a post like, "Do you think a 30-min workout is enough to get in shape?" People are so incapable of understanding anything they read, that many took this to mean a single thirty-minute workout. But leaving those people aside, what do you think the answers were like? They were all given as if each of the people providing that answer was the ultimate expert in this matter, with a lifetime of dedicated experience. Gospel. Gospel times gospel. Same as with people who think they're experts on, say, the Beatles, but can't spell Paul McCartney's name correctly. They think they're me. In their own minds. The foremost authority.

Most people said, No, it wouldn't be enough.

It takes thirty minutes to run five circuits of stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument or 3000 stairs at City Hall. Of course, these people think they're in shape. They think they do workouts that they aren't actually doing. Reality rides in the backseat nearly every time in our society/culture. Or the trunk.

I can promise you that if you did five circuits of stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument a bunch of times a week, you wouldn't say that thirty-minute workouts don't cut it. I'd love to see any of these people try and do five of those circuits the once.

Running stairs for a half hour isn't dipping your toes in the old exercise pool. You wouldn't feel that way. You'd be drenched. Your clothes completely soaked through. Sweat would be streaming off your face. If you run stairs for a half hour, you won't think you didn't do much. You are likely to question how much longer you could go if you wanted to. Funny thing, though, about all these years that I've been running stairs: There's never a line out there. It's just me. It's free. If there's a better workout, I don't know what it is. And it's just me. Unless you go to Harvard Stadium, to be fair. A lot of Bostonians have seen me running stairs at City Hall. But not one has ever thought, "I should try that!" and gotten out there. The people who see me in the Bunker Hill Monument tend to be tourists. They're just passing through.

You can't underestimate the "Now it's my turn!" aspect of life right now. People just want to talk. To go as hard and long as they can with the spotlight on them. In essence, most people are like that person at the party who boxes you into a corner, rarely gets to say their piece elsewhere in life, thinks they're this under-utilized resource/oracle, and they just start firing away at you, barely pausing to breath.

They have nothing to say. They can't even use their own words. People don't have their own words. "Prove me wrong." "Literally." "Not gonna lie." they just use the same three dozen stock phrases. They can't speak with any specificity, true purpose, integrity. There's nothing personal to their words. There isn't even anything human. Nothing real comes out; they're just trying to get that light on them, or keep it there; but there's nothing to see. Just one more interchangeable person who could be a billion other people and it'd just be more of the same.

But the light is finally on them--or so they think. Their chance has come at last. Fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire away. It takes so little to get someone to go into "Now it's my turn!" mode. An AI bot can do it. A prompt from an AI bot on social media. People don't even care that it's really a bot that they have cornered in that room at the metaphorical party. Often, they're too stupid to even know, because feeling like the spotlight is finally on them cancels out everything else. Discretion, awareness, the ability to process anything, no matter how obvious it should be if they had any remnant of a brain.

It's been a long time since I've seen anything intelligent online. That I've encountered a single thought that was worth someone sharing. That had value for someone else. Even in the, "Huh, that's a good point" minimal sort of way. Or, "Hmmm, now that you've mentioned it..." fashion. It's just the same person, in effect, with a different name, same the same stupid type of things the same stupid type of ways.

It must be so difficult and demoralizing to be a teacher right now.

The other day I was at the cafe trying to read and make some notes. At the table across from me was this woman with a Revere accent mangling the English language. She was rail-thin, and you could tell that being so and having a tan--she had cooked her skin--was important to her as beauty standards. Making that skin look crinkly at thirty-three. They struck me as people who thought about high school a lot and would like to go back, if possible. Those were the days...

She had a baby in a stroller and a friend, with a Boston accent, with her. Each time they attempted to use some phrase--just a cliched saying--they used it incorrectly. They had no idea what the words actually meant. Neither could go a sentence without saying the word "literally."

Their interests were all surface things. They couldn't discuss, say, an idea, but when someone they knew who'd gotten a haircut came over, they could talk about this guy's haircut, with this undertone of how he'd now fare with women--as in bedding them. This chunky guy who could also hardly talk. The kid was looking at me from out of its stroller, and I thought, "You have no chance. You're going to be like this, and so will your kids." On and on it goes.

We are only able to be products of what's around us now. Sure, that's always been a theme, but in the past, some people could break out and be their own person. That doesn't happen anymore. We're not smart enough, strong enough, secure enough, self-determined enough. We all stare at the same shit. Not I. But someone isn't going to be me. We're so weak. When you're weak, you can't risk, you can't quest. You go with what you feel is the safest option. That's swim in the same direction as everyone else, lest you get called out. People can't recover from that. They're not strong enough. I'm not even saying that takes much strength. But it takes more than just about anyone has. For that kind of thing.

People will have strength in that they go on after they've lost someone, for example. They deserve credit for that. In this instance, though, a choice has been made for them. I'm not saying a subsequent choice isn't made by them. Because they do decide to keep going. With whatever that means for them, and sometimes that's just being alive themselves. Remaining here. Going to work, etc. Parenting. But with that other thing, you're the one who makes the choice. And the choice is just a decision. A decision without follow through loses its meaning. Its purpose.

Then again, when you blunt yourself, kill off your emotions, carrying on can be more a matter of being someone desensitized. We live highly desensitized lives. We condition ourselves to feel less and less. You see it with writing. When does writing ever make you feel anything? I mean in your soul? Deep down inside of who you are? When does writing give of that...deep down-ness, if you will?

📍 Born in Detroit so I’m simply, Better Made ✏️Writer | Poet | Anime Girly | Capricorn ♑️ ✨🫶🏾♥️ All is fair in Love & War ♥️✨🫶🏾

Millions of illiterates calling themselves writers, because that's one of the easiest things to call yourself. Insanity, emptiness, delusion. Enabled by other people doing the same thing, each with their heads up their asses. This is my special thing. Don't you see my badge? Says, "Writer." This is how I get to be special. Can't pretend to be a trumpeter. Look at the comma above. "Girly." Astrology. No idea how capital letters work. The most basic parts of basic grammar. Emojis. Because you know Keats would have used all of those he could have gotten his hands on. That's the writer way. People now believe, by the way, that commas are discretionary. You use them however you wish. It's subjective. Just as most people are too stupid to understand how commas work if they took a "How to use commas" class that taught nothing else for six months. They'd leave that class still unable to use a comma properly, unless they just lucked into it, law of averages and all. But they wouldn't know. I think human brains are no longer capable of learning such a thing in most cases.

Does anyone even try to give of that deep down-ness? I don't believe anyone else does. I don't believe it ever occurs to anyone. They wouldn't think that way. When, to me, it's the way it has to be, or else there's no reason to do it. No real reason. In other words, it is the reason. The one reason. It's the point. If that's not your reason, you're doing it for...other things...there's that phrase again...and often those other things have nothing to do with writing or what writing can be. They'll have to do with...getting attention for example. Wanting someone to say, "You're published! That's literally so amazing!"