Sunday, January 22, 2017

Cognitive Dissidents

Goddamnit Jeff, let's get right down to business. What'll it be? Me? Oh, don't mind me. (Enormous pull off a handle of Beam.) I'm fine. It's all going to be fine. Nothing to worry about. (Gesturing to two rows of fine white powder) C'mon, sir. Why not? What? You're a father? Fine, I'll just, you know, do it all.(Away it goes!) Ah. Jesus! That's the stuff! You know, one of the big criticisms of Vinyl was that they over-dramatized the inhalation of this wonderful drug. They would finish by spasmodically jerking their heads toward heaven. Personally, it didn't bother me at all. What? Oh yeah, they botched it up in many other ways, but not so much with the drugs. A little to...what? Why am I rambling, you ask? Why the heavy dosage? No, don't go, man. Take off your coat. Sit down. Why are you wearing that thing, anyway? It's eighty two fucking degrees out there!

Shit man, I'm sorry. It's the day after Inauguration Day, and I'm feeling pretty weird. It's been this way for a while. How do they term it? Cognitive dissonance. Can't shake the feeling of visceral disruption. It's a witches brew of the world and myself. Indeed, the demons are riding out into the beautiful blue sky wielding sabers atop giant bats, no longer fearful of the light of day. The Ascension is on hand. The president-elect is shoving giant spiders into his being. Things are going sideways. The world order is about to shuffle; it's about to do the forbidden dance.

Fuck! I just remembered the Cowboys. Okay, veering away. There's already enough shit to go around here. Why burden the world with true pain?

So where are we here?

What? It just seems like a bad thing, but things really weren't that great anyway? With all these bearded plaid-clad artisanal hipsters and their sanctimonious purchasing power? Well, okay. They ARE pretty irritating. Still, I don't know if I buy that. I myself am not the biggest fan of globalization. Personally, I enjoyed the diversity of currency and culture. But I feel it's worth the sacrifice to bring the third world and the poor into the fold? Homogenization sucks, man, especially for the traveller. 1 But to regress into nationalism is a fantasy and this go-around we and they have a nuclear capability. And this is the prime reason for me why a dude like Trump is a big deal. We can't have an aberration on this scale. And yet, we have this aberration, on this very scale. The institutions that were created in the wake of the second World War were put there for a reason. Listen: outside of my own life and my loved one's I don't have a dog in this fight. On a certain level, it's all death hilarious to me. It is also out of my control. I want to believe that this is a hiccup in the world order, that we'll get past it in, say, 10 years. And I think we will...unless the missiles fly. But of course the missiles themselves will probably never fly. They very well could, however, dictate the geopolitical order in other ways. As in: who has them and who does not have them. Laura is always referring to 1984, where there are three powers that alternately team up against one another. So here we go. The United States, Russia and China. If we throw the UN, Nato and every other inviolable international sacred bond into the shitter, gravity will take over.

Sigh. No matter how many statistics you sling around, no matter what angle you want to take on it ("No man, I get it. You don't like Air Supply. But ((gently laying down the needle)) Have you heard this song?") having a man like Donald Trump in the Oval Office is an a priori bad idea. It is known before you start to make mistakes in your brain, also know as reasoning. Indeed, before you even have the spark. Before you even know that you are yourself. Like electing an African warlord. Why do you have to elaborate on the why of it all?
Ah, but I'm just preaching to the choir, am I not? We're newly segregated, by affinity, in this new strange internet epoch. Anonymous and shiftless, we're like a goddamned Mormon congregation, people emerging from the body to give the sermon and then disappearing back into the body like fucking glob of ground beef back into the dead delicious meat of the internet until- Wait, hold on. Gotta change the tunes...smoke a little of this. (Exhalation) Ahhhh, cool. Man. It's hard not to get intense these days.

I'm not gonna lie to you about the tunes, El Dauggoerotype- I have been inspired by all of these teenage dreams that you and all our friends have been putting out there. And that's why I selected none other than the Counting Crows to listen to. Yes...it hurts. But that's the pain of the mirror, right? And upon this fateful eve we all must stare into the empty void. It's what Peter Gabriel sang of, and what Neil Peart wrote upon. Indeed, self-examination seems to have been an essential characteristic of my teenage requirements for music. Well, except for the Pink Floyd. But that is wrong- they too looked inward. Man. I wonder how much Floyd is on the Spotify. Hold on, I'm gonna check.

Holy balls! It's all there. It's 1:50 in the afternoon and I am young again, flying high. Here, Doctor, drink this beer. We're going to take this roughed up route, primarily for the experience, but mainly to just shed the horrible bullshit that is straight ahead and escape it all into the juicy womb of our nostalgia. So drink! Good man. Here's a shot to wash it down.

Speaking of the Big Trip, I am going to see 2001 on the 'morrow at the Alamo in 70mm. It's fitting, because I feel l
like we're about to set solar sail down a nightmare corridor right here on terra firma. You know the passage of what I speak. Another sort of ascension. Man, if only the benevolant aliens had really gotten to us in the 50's. But still. Here we are. 2017. The music will be not as cool- all big band jazz and the horrible amplified intestinal rumblings of a faltering elephant. And it won't be psychedelic to the eye, either. It'll be more akin to a primordial plunge. A bunch of indecipherable soil, moving through and past you at breakneck speed, straight into the molten core. Cue the Milton. Cue the Mordor. Wait. Where is Gandalf? For that matter, where is Shadowfax? Is he flying around our tumultuous orb in tandem with Traveller? Two white horses doing what flying undead horses are born to do? I hope there is a heaven teeming with unbridled horses.

For the moment however, here on Earth, our own Mitch McConnell is soaring through the skies atop his vicious flying lizard, and he is fearsome both to the eye and to the spirit. It's like a carnivorous wild turkey hitching a ride atop a piece of fossilized dogshit you drunkenly hurled into your neighbor's yard. The scale is off, yes, but you get my point. Indeed, 2017 could be alternately titled as the Wild Ride of Mitch McConnell. Watch that bilious asshole soar unnaturally through the flesh-eating sky!

Man, I guess this is the time when you join the fight. Middle-Earth isn't just going to save itself, after-all. Someone has to wrangle those giant eagles. What else is going to pluck us out of this lava-strewn mire?
It's all there, waiting to be saved so it can be trashed and so it can be saved again. This, of course, is not the dialectic. It is the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Different German! But back to Herr Hegel- If the dialectic is true, then that means that we're gonna chisel off the schist in tiny little increments back and forth in ever, smaller swings. That's the reasoning of the great experiment, is it not? Humans are basically good way down, and through said chiseling, we're going to get it all cool and smooth.
I think we all know that it's always going to be at least a little rough, though.

And fuck it all, I forget to see that movie.

Stock.


  1. Or even for Traveller. How it must look to him, winged in the sky, flying over the free Earth? ↩︎

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