views from here

“We might have very different notions about the nature of the oncoming night…But as darkness descends does it matter?” — Cormac

there was a woman on the bus who had a chunk of a diaper stuck in her shoe. presumably to prevent blisters.

same bus. different stop. a man pushing a wheelchair so covered in bags of belongings and non-perishable foodstuffs i didn’t even realize there was a human there too until they turned right after exiting the bus.

her crinkled helpless face jutting out from under a hood. hands clasped on plastic bags. the shame on his face. if i were able to convince him he was not a liable applicant for where shame ought to rest. doing all he can. trying. i wish i could.

me feeling sorry for myself as i stumble through an objectively blessed life.

“If you scratch from the menu everything that’s hard to swallow it’s going to make for a pretty lean lunch.” — Cormac

— -

“That was a song about being lonely. This is a song about not being lonely yet.”
— Mary Cutrufello

all the humor is gallows now. i believe more and more what she tells me — that we’re whistling past the graveyard. she makes it better.

flames abound. heatwaves melting the homeless. st. paul smoke from canada fires. questions of sentience with misaligned incentives. biblical testimony we once thought far fetched some days seems like best possible outcomes.

i had heard there were bonfires on the hillsides and the yahoos thought their time had come. i had not realized the density of the yahoos. these motherfuckers have us outnumbered. and many of them have the biggest hands on the biggest dials. playing with the toys of existential risk. while laughing. it’s fermi fielding bets about if trinity will light the atmosphere on fucking fire. end it all.

“robots can’t do that.
yet.
yet. yes. next year perhaps.”

the techies think they outsmarted the need for a god but they don’t know how much they have in common with the bible thumpers. bostram gets his roll going about the statistical probability we’re living in a simulation and he’s saying precisely that there’s an intelligent creator. he’s just not nifty enough with prose to think of a flood. tip your hat the the people who wrote the books we love to talk shit about. at least they had a keen sense for the dramatic.

in the end we’ll be praying for a compassionate deity. a world on its knees at the feet of all the gods both celestial and silicon.

—

religion attacked is usually attacked as if it were a proposition that has to stand and be defended. religion more properly understood is a feature of the self that one engages with in varying shades.

you might say you have no religion. you act on reason. well then the step towards reason is itself an act of faith. it is a deployment of your faith. an orientation.

the more we come to understand the fact that language is imposed upon and after ideas imperfectly the better we can get at understanding the ideas for what they are. most people hung up on defending or promoting are too certain that the words they use are describing precisely what they think they are describing.

“Every inquiry displaces what is being addressed.” — Cormac

—

my days involve the most loving eyes in all of creation looking back at me. with a view like this i ought not to complain. i am aware of this. but the command center often gives poor instructions.

this hole in my pocket ain’t stitchin’ itself. i lack the attention to detail to attend to a to-do list. though i do love making them for some reason. i woke up 33 and realized i stopped orienting towards my dreams somewhere around 27. they had a short run, poor bastards. an honorable sellout sees where the ship is headed and at least knows how to get something out of it. the worst kind of sellout is the naive. blind. doesn’t even notice his soul slipping through the back door. leaving nightmares in the wake.

you can learn how to stand on the side of the odds and get all bookish about it all but in fact your life is not lived double blind nor with an omniscient narrator. it is entirely possible to live with a blocked view or blocked from view. or at the whims of a causal factor you’d never see or comprehend.

there are things that help and things that don’t. you get real acquainted with both when you’re bouncing off walls. waking up sweating. things that don’t — sometimes you see that straight away but you don’t bounce off of it. you ride it. try again tomorrow. that’s what you tell yourself.

—

here you are trying to plan to avoid landmines. and bless your sorry little soul.

“It was fatalism with a loophole, and all you had to do to make it work was never miss a sign. Survival by coordination, as it were. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh.” — HST

i have been writing these half-rate screeds for something like eight years and in forty so of me bitching about my discomfort what comes out in the wash is that i simply cannot see what’s going on. the forest for the trees. being that one’s own view is all one ever gets it’s hard to tell how unique my blindness is.

i’m in the front row of a wedding and feel like an imposter. like a frog that stood up and tried putting on pants. a day late and a dollar short. trying to outwit calamity but i’ve a sneaking suspicion she can see my hand and i can’t even see the table.

“I once years back had an older but much unwiser professorial friend who told me after his seventh bloody mary:
— All you have to do is tell it like it is.
— But nothing is like anything, I replied with a very precise Oriental smile.”
— Jim Harrison

i only see the result in hindsight, if ever. a fatal flaw. increasingly i need the distance to have any words at all. and then. and then what. there’s often nothing malleable to do with them.

there is nothing you gave advice to that you’ve done before. nothing you recall happens again.

—

in the road on page 112 the man thinks “this is the moment. this is the moment.” the reader knows he means the moment to kill the boy. to prevent the rape and torture that otherwise awaits. on 114 he contemplates if the gun doesn’t fire could he smash the boy’s head in with a rock. but the boy’s head stays intact and they walk on. carrying the fire. on reread i found out that the road is a hell of a lot more hopeful than i remember it being. it’s a story of hoping quite literally against hope.

if you got your dying ass out of bed today you’re less cynical than you might give yourself credit for.

“He thought that god’s goodness appeared in strange places. Don’t close your eyes.” — Cormac