Friday 6/18/21
I have had to do some very unpleasant things with people in the past twenty-four hours. I hope I don't have to write about those things on here. The shit that the members of my Inner Circle see. I know it changes their views and sense of what evil and corruption people are capable of. They don't experience anything like what I experience every day in their lives, no matter what they do or how old they are. There is nothing like this industry.
There was an essay that ran yesterday in The Smart Set on the BBC's 1970 feminist ecological horror film, Robin Redbreast. I unloaded a piece on Joan Harrison, who was one of the first female film producers in Hollywood. The News, On Air, and Op-eds sections of this site are now up to date. The others are hopelessly out of date, and missing about 1000 links, but it will get done because it has to.
Learned some stunning--but also completely predictable--information about a broken, scheming person I had once been engaged to. Can't say that I was surprised in the least. Was exactly what I would have expected, actually. That would merit its own stand-alone entry on here. Sick, sick, sick people. And a district attorney who wants to keep it a secret.
Wrote three more short stories. One of them is about a French kid going abroad his junior year of college, and his new friends, and what may or may not have happened to him and with him back home, called "Tucking Fingers." Another one, called, "Clean Leap," I guess you'd say is about a priest. Then the third, which I did this AM and need to fix, is about a man and a wife splitting up, with the added wrinkle that she's just a head that he totes around. It's sort of a fable, but it's also real and witty and edgy and strangely stirring. 2000 words long--"Head to Give." I need to fix it.
I got the mail for the first time in like six weeks. I can't even deal with getting my mail. The trauma and terror after all that has happened. All that has been done. The attacks and abuse. There was a copy of JazzTimes with a nice piece of mine on Eric Dolphy as the last page of the magazine. I never read these things after, for the most part. I did take a quick look, though. You won't see any prose like it anywhere in the world. And, frankly, seeing how obvious that is depresses the hell out of me with where things stand right now. I mean, "His attack is all swoops, dives, and bench pressing of geological plates, as if coming from inside the earth and then pushing against a canopy of stars, before raining back down in droplets of of indigo and liquefied rubber." Speaking about Dolphy's solo bass clarinet rendition of "God Bless the Child," that.
Ran three miles yesterday. I asked a park ranger outside of the Bunker Hill Monument if she knew when the Monument might be opening again for climbing, and she had no idea. Open this fucker. This shit is over. It wasn't a thing if you were in shape anyway. I think it could stay closed until next spring. A guess. Hope I'm wrong.
People are simple. Someone won't ask me about what I'm doing, how I'm doing, if I am okay, what I'm facing, what I'm trying to overcome, how that is going, despite being debriefed on all of it, or what I am creating that truly matters. But they'll ask me if I had a reaction to my second vaccine. Basic people asking basic people shit, and ignoring everything else. The more consequence something has, and the more basic their own life is, the more apt they are to act like the mega-tonnage elephant is not in the room.
Then what do you do? Say nothing? Act like that's cool? Just think they're a moron and/or a coward and try to think about them as infrequently as possible? But say that's virtually everyone? Then what? You're just fucked, alone, lonely, forever, until you die, because you have consequence, purpose, complicated things in your life and you create amazing things? So you're intimidating? And your entire existence can't be summarized by a couple Instagram posts identical to a trillion other Instagram posts?
Have been betrayed pretty hard of late as well. Again, it's what I'd expect. Just someone's nature. Can you even be angry then? And when someone meets your low expectations for them, and doesn't cause you to reassess your expectations, can you even be upset? No surprises.
If you say anything, you're a huge asshole to them. So you just have to pretend it's fine, when it's anything but fine. You'll never have a conversation with them on any significant level. It's not possible.
DNA is important to most people. They want things in their image. No one will tell you this, but it matters to them that you're of their flesh. It absolutely does. There is nothing that could make me believe otherwise. I could write a book about it. I probably will. Later. Get through this period first. Somehow, some way. One of the only people whose words have any value to me--because they are smarter than other people--wrote me yesterday saying not to get caught up in what things seem on the surface of the lives of others, people who are twisted, broken, living with no purpose. I'll talk to them about how they "won" or got away with something, and paid no price, and have such an easy life, despite not working, having no talent, and being a truly evil person. And this person was telling me how I'll have real happiness, and that's something these people will never have, and my time is coming. I wish I believed them or agreed with them. I think happiness almost doesn't matter. People are clueless. They can get themselves to believe anything. I think money is the big thing. It makes it possible to buy a tolerable existence. Then it's just a miasma. You have a nice home, a car, fake ass friends who hit the like button for everything you post no matter how stupid it is, and you tell yourself they're real friends. And you can believe that, because you have to. You have companions, you fuck, you go out to eat, you watch Netflix. It's just a cloud. You just live in a fucking cloud. But there's no pain, no hatred, no discrimination, no bigotry, no fear. Each day is the same. It's not like 100 bad things are going to happen to you. Eat, post to Instagram, lie to yourself, have your orgasms with someone else's body, take the selfie, slap it up for all to see, hang out with people exactly like you, never feel alienation, never work 120 hours a week. I think that's the substitute for happiness. And that's enough for people. They don't know what they don't know. They don't know fucking anything. It's a kind of pleasure principle, I guess, but more this nothing-super-super-bad-is-happening-to-me instead principle. More that. Yeah, they're broken and they don't live and there's no purpose and drive and growth. But what do they fucking care? Eat, fuck, sleep, post to Instagram. It's all made possible by never questioning anything, never thinking, and the crucial ability--which people have--to get themselves to more or less believe whatever diseased ass crap they need to believe to just be this and have it be enough. Then they live their life, and I live this fucking hell of hell of hells. And it feels like they get to win. No matter how awful they are as a person.
There is another level. It's not the level of conscious thought. It's the level where someone feels something. They know. They do. But they know in the way of a dim echo through the canyon. They can ignore that echo, or try to. It's still there. Always there. Just not the loudest voice. It's the truest voice for them. So it's paramount that they try and tune it out. What the presence of that voice also means, though, is when they encounter someone who is the opposite of what they are, they want to kill that person. Or have them fail. Or be denied. Or get the fuck out of their face with the reminder of what they are that comes from contrast. That second person is the actual victim so many ways over. And I don't know how to overcome this yet. I don't know how to have the life I want and deserve with this being how the world is, how reality is. Is my life just to be an extended sacrifice, then? To who? To what? To twisted fucking terrible lazy ass talentless people with no character, drive, ethics, self-awareness, knowledge, ability? I'm their forever lamb? Until I'm fucking dead and so they can just do what they do and go on as they go on? And it all gets to work for them? And this is how it has to be for me? So if there's a God, then what the fuck? What kind of sick fucker is doing that? But you'll just make that person so strong and give them more ability than you've given anyone else? Why? To get off all of the harder on their fucking pain?
I should go for a run. This isn't massively cheery. Money changes so much. And it also allows people to think things about themselves and justify how they act in ways that are rooted in total bullshit and have absolutely nothing to do with who and what they really are.
Whatever, man. Do not fucking give in. Total focus, unending strength, matchless art, no fucking mercy when we get there. You will fucking get there. Fuck these people, dude. They do not fucking matter. What matters is what you have for this fucking world and what you are here to do in it. In the meanwhile: more endurance for as many moments as this fucking takes.
