Don't know how I've suffered them this long, considering how I despise white and gray walls. The miserable--I had not realized how miserable!--gray kitchen is becoming orange. The back hall and half the living room, pale green. The other half and the stairwell, pale blue. Our bedroom and Ezra's office were already yellow and two deep tones of green, respectively. The spare room needs a color, as does my office, though the dozens of art pieces and stickers I've mounted all around are helpful. I may go with many colors. I know I will, actually.
But that's the last priority. For now, finishing the kitchen is still the thing.
*
Haven't talked about current events for a minute. It's a grim business, and I can do what I want, I know that--but this blog is not merely a humorist's diary or manifold spontaneous rough essay generator--and though the essays may be serious and historical, it is also not fundamentally the same as the blog's final purpose, which is to stand as something of a record of life experienced in the early blush of the twenty-first century's maturity. And that century is fucking batshit right now. The Things are Happening.
Those great, sweeping spasms history is sometimes seen to make are rippling like perhaps never before. Certainly the frequency is unprecedented, the speed of the thing.
Ok, look. Let's keep this simple. I have, in a previous post, commented on the perfect timing of the terrorist attack on Israel which has developed as it has, with every eye on the planet and the thing's gravity warping reality. The domestic side of that was the particular thrust of that comment, and that is what has played out most predictably, though Speaker Johnson's recent actions bucked the trend and are worth honorable notice. Nevertheless, the public demostrations and the reactions they have provoked at every level of our society are the crux of the matter, and that shit is spinning out of control and veering into the kind of unreason that anticipates martial law. With a dictator in the wings literally base at the ready and demonstrated influence over politics as they are happening, nothing could be more dangerous.
Basically, the soft power instruments leveled at the U.S. as early as 2009 and heavily beginning in 2012 are beginning to look as though their long-term efficacy is accomplished fact. The country may devolve and lose its standing in international affairs as well as its domestic stability and even political cohesion. Tech companies will only accelerate these multipolarizations because cooperation with competing interests will guarantee the kinds of influence and privileges they crave. This will cascade globally. Private security of every description will see booms in every sector as paranoia and uncertainty reign amidst increasingly chaotic and unchecked brigandry, governmental overreach, and prisonification. The nomad may once again rise to prominence in global affairs, realizing Deleuzian prophecy. Meanwhile the climate will collapse and the deaths of hundreds of millions will open terrain, change the tenor of migration, colonization, and land use priorities completely.
The crazy part is, some people's lives won't change at all. They'll just keep going to the store, I guess. If we survive in general, it probably won't even slow population growth that long or even noticeably.
Life do go on. No one knows what time has in store for them. All that I have said could well be baloney.
Baloney! I love that corruption.
*
All I can really do is make art and try to survive. It has worked so far. I shall stay the course. And after all, plants grow in the cracks between massive concrete slabs. Always there is hope. Always there are those hundreds and thousands of seeds spread by each step of the sower in the great field, and only one out every so many millions needs to take root and bloom.
--JL
