For St. Nich.

I know a man
named Nick
who deserves a simple poem written for him and
it goes like this.
The big blue empyrean,
the canopy of dreams overhead,
the canvas on which all
human wonder and distraction and hope
is colored by clouds
and their silvery mad groping intestines
of silver, blue, and those values in between, which we labor to annunciate and label,
this is our blessing and our redemption.
Always there for us.

As such bold and glorious monkeys, it is our birthright.
i know Nick and i
in our separate, distant
unanthropological ways
do gaze up at it,
our heads inclined towards theoretical happiness
and proofs contrary to heavy concrete life down here,
we give thanks and
for the spectacle and substance of it,
shower generosities
and good will upon others.
It's for the relaxed godliness of the unknown and unknowable sky
that we behave as we do,
with sincerity, and sass, and kindness.
With an effort to reach the mystery of us and
gentle readers everywhere.
Meanwhile my coworker
directs an infinite series of digital,
miniature tanks and canons, against other well-mean
Ing citizens, amen.
The mobile wargame of life.
Thank you, Nich.

In diffens of Milenniyulls, or, So-so/ciety

You ask them something,
you get a subtle broadside of snidery,
a tone between
annoyance and haughtiness,
with a lazy stop at contempt
for the stupidity and
poor technological savvy inherent
in your question,
or in any question at all.

You will die of starvation,
like one of the ancien regime in an oubliette,
waiting for them to say
"please" or any other of
the weak-minded civilities
which were cherished by
our formerly social species,
once comfortable in its skin and its sense
of communal decency.
They're as jackals who will
eat until they die from engorgement,
rather than suffer another cur a scrap.
It seems their whole lives
lay grim and terrifying before them, 
as a succession of
stampeding black fridays:
Life is now bloodsport.
In their hearts they are fierce freemasons
and dangerous gangsters,
and not unproud of it.
They learn very well
from their elders, as any
new wave of youngsters do:
Highly competitive they are,
but so easily distracted that
no contest with them
is ever fair or desirable.

Civility and manners
either frighten them in their anxiety,
or are seen as a network of booby traps
to avoid if one wishes to be known
as the most important thing,
for which we lack a precise term,
apart from that precious
amerikan brick of a word, "cool."
It seems that
opening or holding
a door for someone they
do not wish to have sex with
is to them a saintly act,
a victory over evil or the animal-headed
ancient alien theory gods
whose mythology they are nursed with now,
and so they stand there,
door held,
jackal faces declined,
frantic with the delayed need to swab
and fondle their phones,
eager for
the life-sized
trophy of themselves to be awarded,
for supererogatory altruism.

Cool is so crucial that Sorority bitches don't even
look different from regular women anymore.
There is a mass merging
towards a marketable and
sexy bacchanalian middle.

They hear little
but the narcissist claptrap
of their own nihilist thoughts,
because their ears are stuffed with
audio tech
and shady music
of the kind we refuse to describe here
beyond noting
the rubbish spine
of repetitive,
hook-laden,
digitized, dirge-like open satanism jutting from its smelly ass.
An awful croaking in the mud
is their dead music.
...Ideas echo pointlessly
in the cavern of their ego-powered minds,
because they learn to value nothing
but what is practical and most modern.

They have heard of
a thing called Nein-eleven
but the numeral set implies
math or troubling
cerebral work, so
they believe they flee from the figure,
but eat it calmly
for all six meals of the day,
in reality.

You have never seen such
marvelous,
selfied,
sculpted,
excruciatingly self-conscious bodies.
Thews upon thews
rippling, asses thick
and fecund with BGH and
insoluble lattes.
The body-type index
has ballooned at both extremes:
quite a few now are as fat as
the King's prized cattle,
while many others worship themselves at the gym
and dispense the luxurious pleasure
of their hard bodies to
all, from their elastic clothing
and muscle shirts.

You have never heard such
at once
confident but insecure talk:
Brainless, laced with invective, filthy
words, and the latest
degenerate copycat slang
which each financial quarter
sounds more like violent
gibberish
from an under-served junior high.
"Savage" this and "killing" and "smashing"
and "crushing" that.
Measurably worse than
previous generations,
they're drugged on pheromones
and hale youthful vanity.
Half are numbed or excited on behavioral meds.
They cannot read poems.
Poems do not make sense and are silly.
The reading of such dead forms,
they suspect, may cost
them money in the long term.
Instead, their minds are infested with
Opinions
and notions that are
valued only for their currency and sharpness.

They are sybarites and aesthetes,
but not the good kinds.
Their pleasure
is an embarrassment and a pain to the world.
Their art is Culture
and their culture is popular,
and it is slop.
It's formed of self-adoring capitalism's
bloody sloppy seconds.
This explains late rap music and Tindr and
certain kinds of EDM festivals,
and the oceans of ink
covering their flesh.
Perhaps they perform
so diffidently and
awkwardly while standing in the many lines and
queues of civilization because
they are aware that modern life
is one big shuffling coil
towards an absurd end,
with never
any longer a comment on this absurdity.
Where is the profit in reflection.
Stampedes and rock slides don't reflect.


We have done a right fine
job squeezing these
poor, frightened
Attack Lemmings into
the sausage-skin leg-wear
that both male and female
slouch and ponce about in.
We shoe-horned them into their shallow and
malformed selves,
by our neglect for our own
souls and for the soil of
fertile human belonging:
which we once called Society..

nothing grows here but cancer and
yes, still,
the sick infant of hope
in ....
some tough to imagine future where
all this madness, deceit, and cruelty
is cleaned away.
Everything may not be ok.
we don't choose
our bodies or our minds,
but we choose what to do with them,
don't we.

Just a bit more Scribbling on the Philosophical Substance and Origins of the term “Conspiracy Theory.”

I'll state here for the record an axiomatic truth of the modern era, if not the ages: "Conspiracy Theory," as the broad intellectual discipline or area of inquiry has blandly been dubbed by the CIA and the National Security State, is the only fucking game in town. If you draw a distinction of any seriousness between what we call "politics" and this above-termed intellectual discipline, (some of my chums and I cut its clunkiness down to "C.T." but it doesn't please me much more) then you've missed the point and the boat and are drastically behind the curve. Because there's just no solid evidence that conspiracies, as such, should be separated, or Can be separated from the grim business of human politics, governance, etc. Because piracy and cons-piracies get the job done, see? Ask Abraham Lincoln. And if he replies, ask him a more trenchant question, like what do you think of your Secretary of War, really? And how do you feel about the Jesuits, or about central banking? Ask him if he is disappointed in his bodyguard, who was assigned to protect the only entrance to the president’s theater booth, and yet somehow took a break from his post at the most inauspicious time.

 One of the greatest tricks the devil ever played, I've heard repeatedly, was convincing us that he isn't "real."

One of the greatest devices ever fashioned by the cognitive and social engineering wizards of our society---and they put great stock in linguistics, language, and symbols, be assured---is the term "conspiracy theory." This is because it neuters critical thought; it defuses and neuters rational, proportional, objective thought. And it tries to smother political dissent in the cradle. We've been methodically trained to believe that the world is for the most part a mass of events that are on the up and up. (The “lone nut gunman,” who eliminates major political actors, and nowadays masses of innocents, being the only definable, permissible aberration, and one rapidly becoming the status quo and thus an oxymoron, curiously. Check your newsfeed, there’s another lonely gunman.) The Digital Age has taught those who are trying to pay attention that Nothing could be further from the truth. Clandestine acts seem to almost always be more effective than above-board ones.

There is no legitimate philosophical reason why the term "conspiracy theory" has the relevance and traction that it does in our time, outside of the prominent fact that political conspiracies themselves do truly exist in abundance. It's of absolutely no consequence what type of conspiracy we are talking about, or, as is most often the case in this land and time, Not talking about. No centralized committee or unelected agency has any right to manufacture and proliferate a phrase that demonizes focused, calculating, sober analysis of things; of collective human events. This reductionist and mind-numbing phrase in question shares a kind of genetic illegitimacy with the term "anti-semite," insofar as it is very commonly used, in the form of a crushing catchall brickbat. Quite often when either of these terms are used in modern politics, the party using them is not acting in good philosophical faith. They are making baseless character attacks. They are saying they are uncomfortable with another party's arguments. They are burrowing down past reason and careful, moderated thought and trying to poison the soil and the root of the so-called discussion. It's total war with this ridiculous Operation Mockingbird term, it is a salting of the earth so that nothing can be done to solve matters or grow anything of value. And maybe the most crucial thing to understand about the fallacy, the mindless tautology that is this phrase, "conspiracy theory," is that it simply would never have been able to exist and breed as well as it has, if it was not nurtured and coddled by the field of journalism, held to be so integrally important to what we are said to be inhabiting: a democratic society. Here is where we once again proclaim, Fuck Journalists and the devils that infest their sad, soft little worm-bodies.

Next in line for the hotly deserved fucking, and nearly as important in its role of solidifying the political importance of this noxious phrase, is Academia and its first-born, fat and arrogant homunculus-child, History: As It is Taught. The main reason why i am devoted to alternative politics, or para-politics, as i prefer to call this limitless area of intellectual inquiry into sociology, history, philosophy, and generic "politics," is because i am preoccupied with and quite interested in Objective Truth and justice. No puny term that appeared like overnight magic in the journals and newspapers and television news broadcasts, and also just like one mass, academic, national belching after meals of Kennedy flesh throughout the 1960's, can ever cause me to change my thinking, or my natural interest in pursuing a knowledge of the reality of things, as they are. We know people by their words as well as their deeds. Those who sneer and pooh-pooh and make use of this gibberish phrase that was designed explicitly to dumb us down, have done what their masters have decided they should do. It resembles the reflex of a scared, caged animal, the way they plop right down in a mud puddle and are seemingly pleased to believe they’re having a healthy, responsible bath. It knows, through coercion and culture and cruelty, no better. They've shamed themselves and shirked their natural human responsibility to try to think clearly and use that huge, noble brain.

You can wisely, safely discount the things these types of people say when they are pretending to argue with you in good faith, if they even pretend, at all. Defenestrate them and their insincere conflations and sour looks. For years it's been my sad opinion that the only good thing resulting from Nein-11 is that it flushed out into the undeniable open the people who are terminally asleep at the wheel. Those who don’t wish to be troubled by logic, physics, probability, causation, and quite honestly, the thing we call “morality.” It exposed those among us who cannot think for themselves, or are just too timid and comfortable with the way things are. The way things are is morally objectionable to all moral beings. Neuro-linguistics be damned. State-mandated and -controlled education and their anti-intellectual trickery be triply damned.

The god-damned phrase doesn’t even make sense; it has no valid, intrinsic merit or meaning. You can have a “conspiracy,” and you can have a “theory,” but marrying the two in the tedious and obsessive way that our society has is a forced relationship: the phrase/concept intends to be a meme unto itself, and obviously so. If you have questions about making pancakes you are not derisively called a “pancake theorist.” God forbid if you make empirically supported observations on how pancakes can't be made by smashing human babies together into a paste and frying them in virgin goat-lard. America coined this poisonous, brainless phrase simply because it is the land at the tip of an evil spear: it is verily the land of conspiracies. Yea, you shall smell hogwash and deception all over this awkward verbal two-step, and go forth and denounce it. In the picture atop this note, you shall also just make out a look of worry in the furrowed brow of TX governor John Connally, who is officially recorded as having at first declined to sit in the limo that day.

And here is an amateurish riddle for you, unaffiliated with any university and unfunded by any agency, and to answer it you may again refer to the image Fixed above, of the King of the Sun and His Bride of Earthly Beauty in their final parading moments in Dallas, TX, on the plaza where the first Masonic Temple in that city once stood:

“What is clad in black, and Always looks back, and to both sides, and forward, and as a rule clutches handles on carriages of State, but is Late, late, late...if not simply Absent?”

2016 Pre-dictions, as first appeared on Facebook, with one personalized addendum.

1. Clever people everywhere will finally fashion new terminology to describe their old, threadbare emotions and also their mildewed, inadequate political notions: their many staid dictums, misapprehensions, unifying theories, scabby formulations that smell of Professor Father’s logic, opinions on the predictability of Pearl Harbor, generalized schools of thought and such. Our current, devil-worshiping form of Capitalism is listening in, however, and so this new terminology is discovered and, the public is told, sent to an island prison. In reality, the terms are tortured and dismembered, but for use in snuff films that fetch an obese price in Panama, Tel Aviv, and the UAE.

2. Interested and mentally active types in certain isolated pockets will begin to research world and human cultural history as if they could bravely think for themselves. A narrow stratum of credentialed, so-called historians will discard their asinine training and vain pedagogical models, and discover the phenomenon of Most major historical transformations having come as a result of connivance and conspiracy, often undertaken in places called “groves,” and “lodges” or “backrooms,” not to speak of “state-run child brothels.” They will also miraculously locate information on World International Freemasonry and the ancient mystery schools and religions from which it depends. Freemasonry will be admitted to be one and the same, virtually, with Hebrew Kabbalah, (which, in essence, predates Judaism, as such) as the Masons themselves know and write about openly.

3. We will somehow squeeze in a return of a Mahdi or Messiah or an Anti-Christ or two. Sequels and puerile cinema will proliferate, of the animated and super hero variety. Count on 95 per cent of filthiness, rubbish, and occult flim-flam-fakery in all these developments.

4. All the monumental stone phalluses everywhere will come alive at once and a great mystical shower of Osiris-powered life support fluid will fill the skies of every land. It will be blamed on global warming, instead of the obvious and logical sorceries that surround us at every turn in this modern age which fatuously claims to have banished God, demons, magic, and the Devil, in favor of nuclear deterrents, analgesic opioid pills, and easily collapsible Manhattan skyscrapers.

5. Some number of sinister books will be published, codifying cynical and jingoist philosophies that will lead to newer, ever more flavorful forms of imperialist bloodshed in the service of much darker Izms, on which exactly no books will be published. The sinister books will appear and be lauded in all the right journals and universities.

6. Lots of mind-numbing propaganda supporting obstinate and morally unsupportable belief systems. Crucial mysteries go unsolved, every day. Occult Hollywood will continue to impishly foretell of weird and generally deadly public Scenarios such as mass shootings, the snuffing out of somehow symbolic celebrity personalities, and, of course, mass casualty events to be blamed in every erroneous case on some other people or religion than those which authored them.

7. There will be an uncertain tottering in the confidence and arrogance of this dreadful cryptocracy that runs the world, if erratically and seemingly under the duress of factionalism and the contrary efforts of slight but measurable forces of Human or Godly Goodness and Virtue. These will be perhaps minor blows to the sure-footing of the evils currently enshrined in the human order of things. But we will be able to identify them and we will all swell with pride if not participation. Little, quiet, private battles will be waged in millions of chest cavities and minds and dreams, against wickedness and villainy and the debilitating effect on the human soul of professional year-round sports leagues that sublimate warfare and train us for easily provoked limbic fevers against The Other. Etc.

8. Kristaps Prozingis will win ROTY and cease growing except in areas of general human excellence. Etc.

9. Children will become more like materialist mad dogs devoted to sensualism, self-seeking, and the love of technologies that do and encourage almost everything universally wrong. Adults continue to become more like children. Adults will get even more disgraceful forms of plastic surgery than have yet been devised by our sick, infantilizing, soulless armies of priestly doctors. Adults will increase their consumption of the briny piss of the pan-sexual demimonde of Madison Avenue and Hollywood, and will finally certify and announce that the piss is ambrosial quality. The fluid will be marked up beyond the reach of the huge lower classes, which event will naturally create a cultic need among those classes, for the expensive piss. Knock-off brands and lines of fashion referencing the Olympic piss will then be spawned. Perversely related to all this scheduled, piss-drinking infantilism, The Predominant ethical issue of our time will keep being ignored so that its implied, institutionalized criminality may continue without any fussing or trouble. Which is to say, the use of children for the pleasure and compromising of powerful human beings all throughout world governments and high society, everywhere, will continue to be permitted and sanctioned by the state, and slowly, larger society will be conditioned to accept this through various insidious modes of pedophile and gender-confusing cultural programming. The Dennis Hastert, Tom Delay, Caitlyn Jenner and Jeff Gannon brand of moral relativism. None of the above is good, unless one is into that sort of thing.

10. Cthulhu and The Kraken and all their kind will return from the depths and other shadowy regions to give us a full upbraiding. 

11. I will personally fail at something in a conspicuous, flailing manner, and it will be widely observed. I will succeed at my Great Work, and it will be as well-and widely-regarded as a silent fart in a communal old person's home, or facility, or holding pen, or whatever you prefer to call it.

Love songs, potentially... a progressive melodic stance on the ritual of woke-modern mating.

Side A

1. Baby, come back to me (because the batteries in your collar are running low.)
2. You and I (were made for each other )( but is your friend interested in going home with us tonight?)
3. How Can You Stand Not to Love Me, Baby?
4. What is a Little Wart compared to My Love for Thee?
5. You're Just like Your Father, Baby.
6. You're Exactly Like Your Mother, Baby.
7. How Dare You Block Me, I'm the Best and Kindest Person You will Ever Know.
8. When Assholes Cry.

Side B

(currently awaiting inspiration)

Brothers and Sisters.

we are a mess,
we are foully worse than a mess.
a mess can be cleaned.
we are a stain of leftover pain from
a secret blood ritual practiced in the dark
on an ancient sabbath.

we are a cyclone of orderly doubt and small-mindedness,
of dependence on drugs and onanism.
ephemeral pleasure is our God.

we have little time
but that's never been an obstacle
to our lust for wasting it,
along with the timid dignity of our souls.

we all wear the hair shirt and the crucifix
and the necktie and
the jagged-toothed chastity belt.
none of us really knows why.

we all have our favorite dirty things
and we all secretly dislike our own stink,
and love it, too.

Let's go out for a drink by myself

in the humid, confounded
confines of my mind, i am often heard saying
"fuck this," or "fuck that,"
or "this motherfucking moron and that shit-brained scoundrel-beast. What happened to all
the good abortion doctors?"
i peer at unknown men across bars,
too comfortably scanning their faults and vanities,
with the kind of consuming but off-handed
contempt that even their depressed
and ashamed mothers
might have trouble feeling.
The thoughtless, self-adoring follies
of youth
are to me a very big intolerable deal,
because these days,
you must admit
the youth is like terminal cancer,
like daily nuclear war and fallout.
They are far too big for any britches ever made,
and there are no legitimate medical organizations
founded to stamp them out,
or stem their tide,
or limit their travel to within the boundaries
of the plantation.

....(Fearfully) ..Also, there are just more of them now,
in simple math terms:
because they never grow up...
the instinct to adulthood is excised, purged
away into the toilet of youth-worship
and Currency and Orgasm:
things that Aging is Not.
Yes what you are seeing is a
concretion of hot, idle, human droppings,
a plague of
many generations of giant infants,
a mass backing and piling up of
big ol babies
pumped full of a mad priapic sex drive,
with the evil motor of
ascendant,
war-mongering capitalism
powering their well-muscled
and tightly packaged,
glorious legs and arms,
justifying everything for them,
every casual, disdainful
act of shittiness, every answer delivered with a snarkle,
every posture of uncaring,
each dull impulse towards combativeness
and the cruel humor of
the shallow and insecure, 
yes justifying
all this with Josey Wales-style gritty determination
and the will to shoot any Nicaraguan who
does not smile agreeably or join the US Marines
on a dodgy citizenship basis,
justifying the imagined responsibility to publicly revile
any sensible person
who might not care about carbon emissions
or the fucking trans-gendered,
any more than any other pointless soft-shoe
shuffling of a manufactured political issue.
O sweet blood-drinking neo-liberal capitalism that
gives all this shucking a very hale and immortal
and fashionable
soundtrack of death denied,
but ever-present.
Fucking milquetoast petit bourgeois poseurs,
your soft hands stink of blood.

Admit it. 

...The youth is expert at sneering, and derision,
and sniffing at things and pronouncing
that they have definitely
seen and sniffed better things before,
and did so first.
Here is the link, they opine,
Full of vile second-hand opinions as they all are.


And they like better bands and
have seen more better movies than you,
and for them, those two trifling
cultural forms actually pass
as "art," providing
the raw flavorless material
for major aspects
of their shabby personalities.
Conversation seems to be cannibal,
a mode of combat among them,
marked by insecure waving around
of the wooden swords
of their intellects,
and some pissing
about alternately with slang and
pseudo-informed phrases, sucked from the
fat mother's teats they can no longer survive
without:
their beloved internet,
and black american culture.

Honestly i suspect that many
of them could not put on their tight leggings
without first consulting directions on Reddit,
or find white privilege distasteful,
unless
some very knowledgeable rapper
had explained the process to them.
They are the most dismal
and therefore the most perfect americans ever.

Above all, they are happy to love mostly themselves...no, no..
they are positively Ecstatic at this prospect
of a life spent
loving mostly their
own tired, opinion-holding, dingy asses.
If they could tongue and make love to their own bungholes,
we would never have to deal with them, for
they would be chronic shut-ins,
eating every meal
repeatedly,
and posting awful pictures
of each repast.
These average icons whose shit not only
doesn't stink, but which
has excellent flavor.
I am not really joking.
Narcissism is the new
default state.
Facebook is deathless proof
that we are all celebrities,
celebrity rats trained
to stab the hell out of various buttons,
fiendishly hungry for the
cocaine rewards of acknowledgment
and a carefully designed,
favorably impressive
image of the Self..
The Lie of YOLO is
now official, sanctioned State Policy.

i try to avoid conflict and dreadful fits of
embarrassment at belonging to this shit-ass species of
gussied-up monkey,
this
infantilized and perfumed primate,
that is, i try
to avoid going needlessly into public
without the fortification of alcohol or some other drug,
but sometimes it can't be helped.

sometimes i must go to
a bar and drink in public
so that i can
scrabble about
in the great trashy pre-school of my particular city,
hunting
for some feelings of
bonhomie with a familiar face
or a brand-new face, one of those
that has
the rare
promise of wit or humanity,
or that prima materia, Humility.
Or maybe
i go out to remind myself of the happiness
and wisdom there is in staying home.

It can't be said
that i am a complete cynic
or a hopeless acid-bellied sourpuss,
for i never go out drinking without my lantern,
my magic lantern
of Diogenes,
for looking in the gloomy cave
of my particular society for that honest man who
doesn't babble
and confuse his ass-fed opinion with
truth or reason,
and who doesn't say dull, infuriating, inert things
as a rule,
Just like it says in the script,
and in the meme,
and on the bathroom wall