#438

Today's post might have been one of those posts that begin like "Here I am again, about to yell about how crap the news is at doing its job. God damn what the fuck kind of analysis and priorities etc etc etc" but then it struck that it's a shitty part of the hobby. Kind of like if I wrote occasional but fairly evenly distributed posts about how assholes fucked with me while I was driving.

In the time that I've been writing this blog, let alone beforehand, people have been unbelievable pricks to me thousands of times using the way they drive their cars, and thousands more than that have risked my life or fucked with my temper simply by being idiotic or fallible. A few have come close to killing me. But even though this is direct and real, reportable and an actual set of memories involving actual unique circumstances, I never bitch about it on factually pointless. I bitch about liars lying and occluding using tools designed to help them lie and misdirect on a grand scale, as though they would do anything else. It's their jobs. There's a whole infrastructure around bullshit production. Who am I to tell anyone to shut up?

I never bitch about that other stuff because who cares, right? I've forgotten about it by the time I'm stepping out of the car, though the event gets filed away with he rest for recall purposes, presumably. And who cares also in the sense that it happens to every single one of us. It's how impersonal contact with physical bodies is. By extension, getting fucked with by the powers that be and suffering disaster and upheavals is merely the human condition. Everybody knows this flavor. So the running commentary of a bunch of chittering mynocks only sours the experience, frankly, and running a commentary on that commentary may be asinine. Knowing what politicians are up to has never helped me personally or helped me help anyone else. Maybe I should concentrate on my own monkeysphere and quit thinking about geopolitics.

Think about it. Is it more useful to spend time getting to know people in my neighborhood and striving to contribute to my city and community, or learning the timeline and general sense of the diplomatic interrelations of the Eurasian theater? I mean if knowing about stuff like that isn't your job, you probably might not care to put a lot of effort into the latter. You would probably naturally gravitate towards the former, and you'd be right. That perverse imp astride my shoulders has kept my nose too much in the book. Knowing things feels good, but is perhaps less than utile if not consistently put into some form of praxis beyond doing the least harm and surviving on my own terms.

The cultivation of a perspective that I can respect myself for has come at something of a cost.

Whatever. Perhaps the answer is to double down on my policy of trying my best to only read real websites. Stop with the mass media too. Soon I will have to quit streaming, when it's literally just tv again. A return to a more intentional curation of a more limited and difficult-to-obtain culture, both to experience and to possess. Should quit the news entirely, make use of the Fire Index, and figure out what is happening from context and casual commentary. Who cares if it's accurate or real? It's perceptions and lies and impressions all swirling around and what it will come down to in life is just the choices you made while everything was happening, which are valid no matter what you know or don't know because how could you possibly know enough ever to make a properly informed decision?

No one can. One of the reasons we are all guilty before one another, and can therefore let go.

*

One of the points in this book I'm reading now is that for behavior to change, structures need to change. It is the single greatest point of contention I have found within the text: I could not disagree more. It is precisely in the change of our behaviors based on a revaluation of our values that our lives beyond and around those structures exist. It is in the discipline and will to behave as we please, and not as we are incentivized, that our future lies.

--JL