The letter and the word are signs equivalent to those used in any of the sciences. They represent a formula unfolding like a string of mathematic equations that will find their answer or allusion to further investigation after the totality is consumed, though it’s possible that the problem will not prove solvable or fully intelligible.

The author of anything is not the creator; they are handing the trace of thoughts and ideas through their pages or speech using archaic elements that have greater meaning than can ever be conveyed by any writer trying to say something unique. We filter and allude to directions that paint unknowable pictures in others’ minds whose interpretation we don’t get to control nor how the thread will be continued. Everything is flowing through us, and the more of that everything we can grasp, the bigger the picture grows, while conversely, the less we know, the lesser a human we devolve into.

The creator joins the lineage of gods, shaping the image of history yet to happen as the contribution of interpretation and alteration dislodges convention and tears us from our moorings.

As Foetus once said, “I can do any goddamn thing I want, anything.” That was back in 1985 with the release of his album Nail, and today, it comes to mind once again. Thirty-seven years ago, I snatched that release up after wearing the groove out of Hole, his album from the prior year. Oh, Foetus was not the full name of the project should you be interested in looking it up, it was Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel.

So why is this being mentioned today? Well, that’s not complicated, but it’s complicated. You see, this guy I know is in a pickle of sorts and is lamenting the stupidity of the situation, all of it really, and I was thinking about his need to make a difficult decision and the fact that Caroline and I are traveling tomorrow. While he and I were at coffee this morning, we were talking about Susan Jacoby, and as one thing leads to another because that’s where those things lead, I was thinking of the lyric from that song I referenced that says, “There must be some kinda romance in bein’ dumb.” As for Susan, she’s the author of books dealing with American anti-intellectualism, see the connection?

From there, but later at home, I was in the bathroom scrubbing the toilet. The wife won’t touch that thing until I become a “Sitzpinkler” (look it up), and I find myself thinking about our trip tomorrow, hence why I’m even cleaning the toilet. To be clear, we DO NOT go on a trip without our place being spic and span, so upon our return, we are not confronted with the chaos we are accustomed to on a day-to-day basis.

I’m hovering over our piss-stained toilet, thinking how good it feels to have the majority of chores out of the way and how, during the past weeks, I posted 11 missives that were only possible because we skipped a trip that was supposed to happen over the weekend of the 24th of June, but we opted to not. This option to not then triggered another part of the lyric from Foetus’s Anything (Viva!) which is the first quote up at the top of this post.

You see, we could skip out on a weekend trip because we’d already indulged on 11 previous trips this year (hmmm, this is the second reference to 11 in one post; there might be some kind of magick arising out of the occult or maybe I shouldn’t be listening to Death in June’s Nada album?)

Do you see what’s going on here? I think about one record from 1985, and all of a sudden, the nostalgia of my edgelord years rears its gloomy dark head, and I’m catapulted off the trebuchet of cheesy 80s music. Not the shitty 80’s music the rest of you listened to like Simple Minds, Tears for Fears, or Duran Duran, I was knee-deep in Current 93, Psychic TV, Einstürzende Neubauten, Mark Stewart, and Cabaret Voltaire, and though I should not admit it, I was that guy jamming on Whitehouse. Yer thinking, NOBODY jammed on Whitehouse? Well, maybe you never listened to I’m Coming Up Your Ass, loudly!

I don’t know what you were doing nearly 40 years ago, but I was not standing still. Sure, I had to stand at parade rest because I was in the U.S. Army (how they had me, I’ll never really know), but in the moments where I was opting to not, I was eating döner kebab, canvassing the red light districts of whatever European city I was in looking for hot whores, reading transgressive shit that was poisoning my mind, spending nights in underground clubs, collecting videos from various artists that I couldn’t share with “normals,” and generally exploring my own narrative.

Countless lifetimes of experience later, I sit in a Starbucks sipping my $4 grande iced tea, looking at assholes who require that I pound my 34db of noise-canceling, in-ear-monitors into my left and right head holes, turning the volume up to block all hints of the insipid soundtrack and equally insipid conversation of those who opted to be those who are not. And while it’s true I’m listening to Douglas P. sing about Klaus Barbie from the C’est Un Rêve track (again on the aforementioned neo-folk Death in June album), I’m pretty chill, haven’t done me a prostitute in more years than I can recollect, don’t seek out those edgelord experiences anymore, and have to be in a seriously different kind of mood to tune in William Bennet and Peter Sotos go on about My Cock’s On Fire or wailing about A Cunt Like You.

Well, well, well, it turns out that Whitehouse has a place in the repertoire of afternoon easy listening, and for the first time ever, I looked up the lyrics to that last song I mentioned and find that the line, “Pull yourself together, you fucking stereotype,” still has resonance with me. I opt to not.

Delving into the perversity of abstract thought, I search for fetishes (writings) that will anchor me in greater isolation as I lose the context of living with others. The challenge of deciphering the obtuse and complex propels me into chasms of other’s thoughts into which I’m ill-equipped to descend. I hang on by fingernails and scratch for fragments but inevitably fall down.

I’m relegated to gathering impressions of textures as words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, and chapters plod by the slow mind of the aging man who can no longer objectively figure out if the density of the subject matter is, in reality, difficult or if my own ability to comprehend is being compromised by my advancing years.

This then asks the question, am I losing my humanity (discernment), and has the bulk of our species ever had much of that at all?

If the purpose of the amoeba is fulfilled by its limited stratagems ordained with its simple life, what is the scale of human failure as we ignore the bigger directives of our own existence? We possess the power of scrutiny and yet see little beyond a primitive desire to decorate ourselves under a cloak of superficiality.

Mind you, the invisible cloth of the masses torn from the king who’d been adorned with a similar wardrobe offers transparency to those able to see the truth but easily tricks others who are mostly unaware into believing that they, too, are humans. Alas, you cannot alter the perception of what you wear without first consuming the pigments that will paint the fabric used in making your garb.

It is at the intersection of words that the fetish of our individuality takes form, and real human transparency starts to be seen instead of standing naked and stupid upon the throne of ignorance. We are not two-legged amoeba, nor should we be subverted into acting as such, but that is where many who form the masses have been banished to.

The heavy-handedness of this judgment weighs upon me as I consider the level of arrogance one must attain when passing these kinds of ideas off as having legitimacy, but this is what my observations of a plurality of those around me suggest. To miss this obvious state of affairs and deny voicing them is an acceptance of banality that ratchets my inner world into turmoil. I do not, adamantly do not, desire conformity to a standard of intellectual equality that might indicate a sameness between people, but just as society is able to have some expectation that we share enough common language so we can communicate with one another. I desperately need the bar to be raised.

You see, I am nowhere I want to be, but I also have very few around me who elevate the conversation and cultural embrace that indicate we are ascending the ladder of progress. On the contrary, obviously, I feel we are descending into not only greater banality but into madness. And just maybe, the division has been materialized by our unhealthy fetishizing of the economy and not giving rightful value to words, ideas, and thoughts that challenge our understanding of knowledge.

A daughter only becomes a mother upon the birth of her child, suggesting that two births happen simultaneously. So, it could also be said that the infant is the mother of its mother. The lineage of my understanding if I was able to comprehend what I was trying to draw from Catherine Malabou and her writing of Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion, in which she was referencing Claude Levi-Strauss’s writing about the poem titled Autumn Crocuses from Guillaume Apollinaire is that each interpretation of knowledge gives rise to a new thought, or as a metaphor, a new child. In this type of “child of the mind,” we might consider the idea of birth and growth of a non-linear intellectual play of things branching from an arbitrary point across the timeline of potentiality or knowledge.

What I’m taking from this is that every time I encounter a new bit of knowledge that resonates long enough with me that it has the chance to impregnate my curiosity and make me want to learn and understand more, I’m giving birth to a new “thought-child” that with enough nurturing will grow up to be something. I become the mother to this child who was the mother of an idea that could grow to maturity.

What, then, is the difference between seeing a compelling character in a movie that I might want to see again and reading a book about science, history, philosophy, or some other work of non-fiction that inspires me to go further? Why do I immediately jump to the idea that entertainment is a mindless bundle of fluff with little in the way of redeeming qualities that, while it might spark a kind of joy, cannot compete with factual narratives that arrive out of the past or with current developments that impact our tomorrows?

Putting that to the side for the moment, I’m just as curious about the idea that well-formed threads of learning where deep contextual information can weave a more immersive tapestry, I’m able to better visualize the branches of where discovery can take me. One thing that comes to mind is the story of Martin Luther. When I arrived in Germany with the U.S. Army back in 1985, I quickly learned about the role of nearby Mainz and Johannes Gutenberg’s work regarding the printing press. On the heels of that revolution in movable type, we see the Gutenberg Bibles. Over time, I was able to visit the Wartburg, where Martin Luther translated the first German bible from Latin, which would benefit from the recently invented printing press. At another time, I found myself in Erfurt, where Martin Luther studied theology at an Augustinian Monastery. With the rise of Protestantism (Lutheranism), history runs headward into World War Zero following the defenestration of Prague, when a return to Catholicism was rejected.

Bach then gets tied into this as he was from Eisenach, Germany, where the Wartburg is located. Bach’s devotional music arises from his Lutheranism, and it was that which brought me to Mühlhausen as I was continuing my journey of building out a construct of devotion, spirituality, revolution, war, and intellectual evolution that could be referred to as the child I hold aloft in my mind created in the image of the influences that share these ties I’ve brought together.

My interest in geology is a wholly other child, which birthed my curiosity to cultivate knowledge about the formation and history of the world I live in. Symbiotically tied to land seen and unseen is the life that emerged in the crevices and small spaces, and while this potential silo of vast history and evolution could stand as a thing of its own, I’ve not really been able to separate them. Yet, intelligent life that branched from those areas has its own vector in my mind, but if I give pause in my thinking, I probably believe there are two vectors in regard to humans: those that evolve and those that do not. Chronologically, I can give parental attribution to the processes of chemistry that not only happen on the cosmic scale but also that have been occurring on the planetary scale. This lineage is only known due to intellectual processes, not because of the order in which I grew my interest.

These, then, are some of the children of whom I’ve become a parent, and it was their incredible potential that allowed them to become parents of nascent thoughts that would need nurturing over time for me to grow with them.

Let’s return for a moment to entertainment and the relative frivolity I see on its stage. Granted, there is a valid domain of aesthetic value and narrative, while those who take inspiration to further their craft have the most to gain, but other than the capitalist artifact of the potential of commerce to validate and create demand for those that work around the field, I see more harm than good. I refer to the harm that arrives with the absolving of consumers from participating. Thus, entertainment takes on the role of temporarily warding off boredom, which in itself is not a bad thing; it is the lack of balance between being an observer and participant that concerns me. Why do I care about this imbalance? Because I think it is part and parcel of our collective madness.

Just as humans must create new humans, I sense that those in balance and finding happiness do so as they cultivate aspects of themselves that flirt with creativity, thought, contemplation, and exploring difficulty. Mind you, these need not only to orbit around purely intellectual processes. Woodworking, pottery, fiber arts, robotics, playing an instrument, gardening, and a host of other labor-intensive hobbies can allow someone to practice mastery of a subject as they work through iterations of success and failure.

Maybe introducing something new to your senses on a daily basis will lead you to a succession of subjects that fail to find resonance with you but what if one a month strikes a chord? What if this only occurs once per year? Over a 10-year period, you will either be overwhelmed with dozens of fascinating subjects, or you’ll be honing in on less than a dozen new areas of thought and hobbies, which, either way, would be a win-win situation.

Late yesterday, Elon Musk asked on Twitter, “Is TikTok destroying civilization? Some people think so.” Nearly immediately, he answered his own question with, “Or perhaps social media in general.”

Just this past week I stopped following Musk on Twitter, and already I find myself blocking him so I can avoid his form of madness. Back to the opening of this post, the audacity, banality, and sardonic nature of his missives have devolved into trolling, and this coming from the man who claims he wants to improve the human condition. Had his question been phrased, “Is social media exposing the true debased face of a society where mediocrity has been propagated for the past 50 years?” maybe then I could have easier digested his aggression.

Social media is a mirror, and the reflection of cultural trainwrecks is the cream that rises to the top because stale stories and images of success are boring. Why would positive stories be boring to society at large? Because success is normal, it’s routine, so who wants to see the commonplace? The spectacle of the extraordinarily stupid, vulgar, and violent is far more interesting when all around us, people just keep paying bills, go on vacation, find praise at work, and buy cars, clothes, and nice food. Why be interested in the mundane while there are people willing to gulp down the world’s hottest chili pepper, stride atop cranes 1000 feet over the street below, or act out some ridiculous miming of the next viral hit?

We do not want to be average, and social media offers us the avenue to be larger than life even if we don’t recognize that we are dumber than all life that came before us. This makes sense when you think about it: you are validated in your mediocrity from a young age, and now you are celebrating it thinking that the other troglodytes are going to dance with you in your overwhelming stupidity, not recognizing just how akin you are to the proverbial box of rocks.

So my message to Elon Musk is: Get off your high horse! You’ve lost sight of the majority of not only our country but the mass of humanity that isn’t insanely rich, works with the smartest people on earth, and rubs elbows with the most successful and beautiful people who move in rarified circles. Elon, you can easily find yourself on any TV show you choose, snag an interview with any news source on earth, ask for a cameo role in a movie, and get it, but the rest of us are relegated to Twitter accounts with maybe a few hundred followers, Facebook with the tiniest fraction of friends as compared to influencers, or a TikTok account that will never see millions of views. Consider that for the masses, this is their version of playing on the stage where Charli D’Amelio, Rodrigo Contreras, and Elon Musk live, and the idea of erasing these platforms because they are distractions, places where people say things hateful or show themselves committing atrocious violence is missing the point.

The point is that we, as a society, are incredibly primitive, and NOBODY wants to address the question of what individual responsibility to the intellectual process is and what it means to be in the club of humans. We are as free to be as stupid, insipid, banal, and lacking self-awareness as we choose, just like Elon Musk.

It’s time for a break, to do the laundry and wash my brain before unfolding the labyrinth of patterns that risk leaving creases in places they don’t belong. I’m entertaining the notion of languishing in a space of mindlessness, just drifting along on an open sea where analytical calm prevails, and thought currents have slowed. I can’t say I’ve been traveling deep within revelatory crevasses or discovered much new about myself as much as I’ve massaged the fabric of familiarity that allows things to fit in evermore comfortable ways hitherto familiar, yet not.

How does one find intentional boredom, which often seems elusive while otherwise showing at inopportune times when wishes for boredom were the furthest things from one’s mind? To sit down at a coffee shop with nothing to do, desiring to find nothing to say, only half considering the reading of a book because the real goal is to sit still and merely observe. But no, that brain abhorring the vacuum I’m trying to cultivate gets to work populating threads and streams with fragments of non-sequiturs and hoped-for mixed metaphors that are best left forgotten.

And then, just like that, the hour dilates due to a glitch in the matrix of someone else’s memory, and I find myself with an additional two empty hours. Striving to keep thoughts of action at bay, I try hard not to stare at possibilities but instead hold steady, rowing into my yearning for nothing. After all, what’s wrong with just sitting here playing word spaghetti with sentences that will challenge my wife to discover if my gobbledygook actually means anything?

You might never know it, but one hundred minutes have passed, and even more than that will have gone by before I was able to place a period at the end of this sentence. Then there will be the elapsed time between then and now when whatever immaterial string of words, falling short of sharing deeper anything-ness, will slowly appear, but to what end? Filler? Consider that my objective is not a Hegelian chore but may as well be characterized as a Sisyphusian uphill rock toss, a kind of coffee shop version of cornhole where the bags/rock are thought fragments culled from a languid mind failing to engage in the profound. And then, just like that, blam, we approach the two-hour mark, and I’ve conquered another paragraph demonstrating my unfolding of nothing.

Considering this last proposition, I suppose I have to admit failure as true success could only have been had if I were still staring at a blank page, or better yet, I’d fixed my gaze on some unfocused point on a horizon where a blur of indistinctness was washing thoughts off the cliff of observation. Where does one find this state of pure being with a truly empty mind?