#8

People make much of the news cycle, but a long time ago I read that the best indicator of what is actually happening in real-time is the very simple Fire Index: If you look around, and nothing is on fire, it is a good news day. If there are fires, and you can see them, the news day is bad. There is no other worthwhile metric. Credit to one Mr. J. Wigu--once a purveyor of the finest available graphic idea-vehicles, now a wretched and spineless chief executive officer for a perfectly self-sufficient materiel generator.

Another hero of mine now sells high-quality soda that left coast scumyups mix with nettle vodka some dude I went to high school with who squats in Detroit now makes in a row of oil drums and siphons into freecycled bongs decorated with factory-irregular hologram stickers, "subcutaneously" "marketed" by nomadic teenagers as "kaleidoscope notka". Another is sitting in an unpaid-for room on a pile of unsold books, completely out of their fucking minds, convinced they are some sort of Impeccable Thought Emperor. Yet another straight-up died of health complications, and no one ever said a single solitary word about it that I could find.

Of course, death is inevitable, and it is a cold hard fact that you are free to seek whatever happiness you can snatch from life, so a tip of the flask for the pavement and a burning salute to everybody in this blog post.


Successful or not, everyone merely gets older and worse before the common end. This is why I secretly bury copies of everything I write on private property in the dead of night, disguising the coordinates as fragments of riddles squirreled away in ancient English abbeys, crediting everything to various imaginary rappers, known collectively as the Ghost Hands Crew.

In the amnesiac maelstrom of human history, the key aftereffect of a notable life is to have irrevocably messed with the generally accepted data.


--JL