#497

Prohibiting myself from writing or even thinking about current events--after this one broadside I am allowing for.

• It's fine to destroy Teslas and whatever--anything that hurts any corporation above a certain size and evil-to-utility ratio is fine--but we need to go harder and broader at the same time. Smash our vile, disgusting smartphones with a hammer. Destroy our corporate personal computers and start building our own or supporting local silicon-heads instead of that Ruined, Accurs'd Vale. Why did we never get a garden, boutique economy going around personal computing? We obviously, obviously need local blacksmiths, but for code, and hardware, and cybertronic upgrades. Anyway, stop buying stuff from massive online retailers, stop using paypal, uber, venmo, streaming services, social media--every digital cancer metastasized by a flock of cretinous salesvampires, every pustule on the face and ass of our society, economy, and body politic we have allowed to become an angry and infected pressurized geyser of pus and befoulment in the name of our own ease and convenience, in the name of saving a buck today using slave labor and cheating and lying and bullying and warfighting and pretending tomorrow was going to be ok. It never was. Chickens always, inevitably come home to roost. But if we all stopped all at once the world would change the next day. Prove me wrong.

*

In emulation of the great sand painters of our global cultural heritage, I've been doing chalk art on the sidewalk basically the same afternoon or evening that it's going to rain. It seems to release something in me of its own tone and texture apart from painting or drawing, but akin to both. And I don't have to store it, which, believe me, is a huge plus currently.

*

Last night as I was drifting off to bed I realized that my truest, oldest, most personal and most total ambition, such as the word can be applied to my temperament, is to be like Dick Van Dyke in the old Mary Poppins movie.

Bert and Ian Malcolm. Them, and Madmartigan from Willow, who is played by Val Kilmer. My protean, formative masculine ideals. The drifting, indefatigable workingman artist, the cynical, analytical trickster-intellect with a side of strong ethics and jokes, and the wild, diamond-in-the-rough fighter who is not the protagonist. All men queered in interesting ways by their characterizations and roles in their narrative, just by the by.

Plus, y'know, Batman. Also Val Kilmer! But more Mask of the Phantasm Batman, with the miserable, guilty, weeping, basically insane Bruce.

Wow, it really is all very complete and turnkey! Sometimes it can swing around to seem that we as individuals are not really very complicated phenomena after all. 

*

PAX EGRESS

PAX EXEGESIS

PAX EMESIS

--JL