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the title of this post is a paraphrase of some of the things my mom tried expressing to me in the delirium of an extended personality-disorder-related anxiety attack that lasted all weekend. it’s none of your business what happened; she’s calmed down now, some. “pay attention, Cody, because the universe is trying to tell you things, always. words, phrases, sentences, numbers…if you notice patterns, that’s because you’re supposed to notice them.” almost parodically, I happen to be in the midst of reading Eros & Civilization, and if my mom weren’t so scattered I might have tried to rigorize her complaint about the world seeming designed to cast out as unacceptable such an outflowing of emotion. but theory and analysis don’t dissolve acute distress. far more likely that they exacerbate it.

a problem of our current situation is the primacy of information, which has led to the oversaturation of information. we are not equipped to handle the volume of data an average person consumes via the miraculous network that now dictates the terms of our lives. information chaoticizes; there’s much I find underwhelming about Byung-Chul Han’s thought, but he is right to point out that information does not help us feel grounded in the world, that information’s superabundance is responsible for the sense that concrete lived experience is disappearing.

Han, as I understand, argues that we must reacquaint ourselves with non-activity, what with neoliberalism’s demand for constant productivity leading to insidiously internalized forms of violence. this is a position I sympathize with, being myself a hyperactive workaholic who feels adrift when not absorbed in research or productive creativity (or sex). but non-activity is also a useful collaborator in the ascendency of fascism and other forms of societal brutality; Pynchon points out sloth’s reign in the years prior to the Nazi regime, and in the years prior to the Reagan administration, in his essay examining the deadly sin.

as an artist, I struggle with how to address these contemporary issues. Pynchon is my only real role model, because he implicitly acknowledges information’s chaotic nature without turning away from its proliferation. in recent years, literature has partaken in this turning away by reverting to “realism,” which, in my mind, is best exemplified by the neo-Kmart realism of the post-alt lit set. but believing it possible to return to “bare facts,” or “concrete/literal” description, belies, or maybe consciously covers up, the polyvalent nature of information; it is not possible to access the facts of existence as such, because such access always comes from a certain position, with its own blindspots and exaggerations. but I can’t just rewrite Gravity’s Rainbow.

additionally, I fear that, increasingly, information will appear free while actually being tightly controlled by the corporations whose power has been built on the accumulation of data. why should I trust Google to provide me answers to queries free of ulterior motive? why should I confide in Google which porn stars I find attractive? it’s not a problem that can be totally obviated by like, switching to Duck Duck Go or whatever either.

but, so, like, does the method of mimicking information overload through dense, research-heavy literary prose only participate in the chaoticizing of the world? no, because what makes such an endeavor art is the effort by the artist to shape the information into an aesthetic form. all art making, even in its most radical forms, is a reduction of chaos, an assertion of order in place of noise. which complicates the project of using art to assail sclerotic cultural norms complicit in the destruction of the world.

but to perform information overload requires overloading on information. and after fielding phone calls from my disturbed mother all weekend, I’m not sure how useful it is to flirt with paranoid psychosis, despite my Romantic tendencies. yet I will continue imagining, “as a joke”/”for the novel”/”metaphorically,” that I’m practicing espionage in a world where literally everyone is a double agent, where happenstance shines forth with meaning, where everything is about numbers and money and things written on paper.

The crudest, but also the most effective among these methods of influence is the chemical one—intoxication. I do not think that anyone completely understands its mechanism, but it is a fact that there are foreign substances which, when present in the blood or tissues, directly cause us pleasurable sensations; and they also so alter the conditions governing our sensibility that we become incapable of receiving unpleasurable impulses….The service rendered by intoxicating media in the struggle for happiness and in keeping misery at a distance is so highly prized as a benefit that individuals and peoples alike have given them an established place in the economics of their libido. We owe to such media not merely the immediate yield of pleasure, but also a greatly desired degree of independence from the external world. For one knows that, with the help of this ‘drowner of cares’ one can at any time withdraw from the pressure of reality and find refuge in a world of one’s own with better conditions of sensibility. As is well known, it is precisely this property of intoxicants which also determines their danger and their injuriousness. They are responsible, in certain circumstances, for the useless waste of a large quota of energy which might have been employed for the improvement of the human lot.

Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud

I’m tempted to “get back into” drugs. not in like, a problematic way—the drug I have a “problem” with I puff all the time, and I don’t like drugs with a high risk of habituation like opioids or benzos. I want to incorporate psychedelics into the program of self-derangement my █████ is a pretense for, and okay maybe “not into drugs with a high risk of habituation” isn’t totally honest, since I always wish I could handle a small amphetamine habit. of course, if I really wanted speed I could just convince a doctor I have ADD, because I probably do but I’m wary of psychiatric (over)prescription so I’ve never consulted a psychiatrist.

unfortunately I am too responsible. or maybe just too worried about appearing less than put together. this is a central struggle for me, because I am drawn to chaos and excitement but know myself well enough to realize I really crave stability and security. but problems arise when stability and security start to feel like a cage I’ve built for myself, and I begin seeking, sometimes subconsciously, ways to rattle the bars in the hope that they become unhinged.

naturally the cage is not entirely of my own making. I certainly tend to “play it safe” and would benefit from being riskier in general, but Reality stands as the border outlining experience even beyond those boundaries of habit, custom, tradition, civility, etc.

in my Romantic mode I think it the poet’s duty to determine the contours of reality by raging against its limits (I’ve been reading Rimbaud). which is to say I don’t want to “improve my mood” by “microdosing” to make me a better (ie more docile) functionary in the machine draining Eros from the surface of the earth. but I also have no illusions about drugs leading to anything like enlightenment; Deadheads who claim to have achieved satori while on acid earn nothing but eye rolls from me.

so what is it I really want?

the ability to “be right” (i.e. do immediate fact checking facilitated by the tentacular and increasingly sclerotic network owned and operated by, among others, a corporation that probably should have been distrusted the first time anyone previously uninitiated saw the words “DON’T BE EVIL” tacked onto its IPO, waiting to be read in disbelief by future historians accustomed to much richer forms of irony) interferes with the writer’s wont to spread harmful, half cited, misconstrued, but otherwise aesthetically (and therefore rhetorically) persuasive disinformation

with the present COVID surge, the library where I work, under direction from the county, isn’t allowing patrons into the building. people can pick up requests for books and movies still, but otherwise our services are all but ceased. consequently, there isn’t much to do during the day, especially after months of similar restrictions last year gave us time to do maintenance and upkeep tasks usually impeded by the need to provide customer service.

personally I’m grateful for the respite, even if things weren’t exactly bustling before. I’m stealing time to read, watch Ableton tutorials, listen to music, write. what a strange blessing to have a place to go to with a cubicle that doesn’t demand I spend all day doing something soul crushing, like sell things or actuary work, or something mind numbing, like coding. plus, at my immediate disposal is a fairly extensive library catalogue. if I want to be an ~intellectual~ and an artist, but I am loath to sell the labor and products of those activities, I couldn’t ask for a better source of income.

my comrades at this library and I, we aren’t very close. tbh I don’t get the sense that they’re very close with one another either. I transferred here from the busy downtown branch almost a year ago now, and everyone else has been here for years. but the contrast between my previous branch’s environment and this one’s is stark, in no small part because that branch is literally on Main Street, downtown, lots of foot traffic from locals and tourists in town to shop the vintage stores and amble by the beach. here we’re tucked away, way off the freeway, nestled among the suburbs surrounding the Navy base just down the street. plus, during my time at the downtown branch, I made a very good friend, a fellow artist whose perspective I’ve come to deeply appreciate, and now I only see him occasionally.

but so anyway, during the day, I don’t really talk to my comrades. they don’t really talk to each other. one guy, he has a reputation for talking people’s ear off, going on and on about his energy investments, international soccer, stock market history, but lately he’s been conspicuously reticent. seems to have lost some weight too. when I use a computer after him, there are entries in the search history like “depression at night,” “insomnia and melatonin,” “music to help relax.”

everyone seems to keep themselves busy throughout the day, but what everyone else does, I couldn’t say. they likely couldn’t guess what I’m doing either, which is fine with me. but maybe it shouldn’t be.

it’s a lovely january morning, after what felt like weeks of storm and gloom. every extra minute of daylight is as a gift from the gods, an assurance of approaching spring.

yet it remains winter.

eventually I’ll finish writing up a rundown of my 2021 reading list. this year I’m starting off with a reread of Nightwood, and this morning I opened Oswald Spengler’s seminal The Decline of the West, with the intention of alternating chapters between it and The Dawn of Everything, the new David Graeber book (with David Wengrow). the fourth Hermetic principle listed in the Kybalion of the Three Initiates, the principle of polarity, states that everything is dual, so why not study world history from both angles: conservative pessimism and anarchic irreverence.

making steady progress on music production. churning out scratch takes of drum patterns and basslines mostly. I have a lot to learn still. soon I’ll write some verses to rap over the beats I really like. I want songs that get a crowd going, rafter rattlers, singalong anthems, mosh breakdowns, deep-as-hell grooves, that sort of thing. music for hot girls to dance to. maybe some drone and noise experiments. something new, but familiar. art pop, essentially.

tomorrow the library closes to the public again, out of a much too late, and therefor too little, abundance of COVID caution. hard not to feel like there’s a concerted effort to shrink my social sphere at just the time when I need opportunities for exogamy, of both the spiritual and the physical variety. but prolly for the best, being forced into slow, deliberate change, instead of my usual incidental flailing.

writing is slow but consistent. I feel like I’m in a collect/excrete phase, jotting ideas as they come and leaving them to be sorted through later. with the start of the next month, in all its inevitability, an adjustment will be called for, with greater focus, and tighter control.

missed the new moon, so if I’m your go-to astrologer…why?

Today, love is being positivized into a formula for enjoyment. Above all, love is supposed to generate pleasant feelings. It no longer represents plot, narration, or drama—only inconsequential emotion and arousal. It is free from the negativity of injury, assault, or crashing. To fall (in love) would already be too negative. Yet it is precisely such negativity that constitutes love: “Love is not a possibility, is not due to our initiative, is without reason; it invades and wounds us.” [Levinas] Achievement society—which is dominated by ability, and where everything is possible and everything occurs as an initiative and a project—has no access to love as something that wounds or incites passion.

Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros

wanna know a secret? well too fuckin bad, cuz I guard mine like they’re the rim and I’m Bill Walton (November 5). admittedly, I don’t really know much about basketball. I am attempting to follow this season, and my Lakers barely squeaked by the 1-and-6 Rockets the other night. I do not understand the Lakers’ offensive strategy. what does Russell Westbrook (November 12) add to the team? again, stupid person talking, but I don’t think his passing game is really making or breaking anything for them. it’s like he’s not even on the same team as everyone else.

y’all ever very obviously fudge part of a task you’ve been assigned, most of which hums along satisfactorily, but when time comes for the assigner to sign off on your submission, they call you out on the part you’re fudging and make you do it again, so you shuffle it around and send it back promptly but get left watching your email until the assigner finally accepts the very last of the work you need to do to be free? another way of putting this, how do I stop obsessively staring at my email? I feel like I’m being held hostage by my graduate advisor. I’m so fucking close to being rid of this bullshit.

once I am rid of this bullshit, I will, after a brief respite, be diving headfirst into my stagnant art projects. there’s nothing to be said here of the Big Thing I’m working on other than that I have shed all self-defeating hesitation on the matter. this novel is getting written by me one way or the other. other than writing, which I’m stuck doing no matter how much I vacillate on the value of fiction or the novel’s loss of stature in the culture, I’ve been playing the guitar more. I wouldn’t say that I can play the guitar quite yet, but I know how to play the guitar, if that distinction makes sense. I also plan to acquire a MIDI controller keyboard to make music on my laptop with. let me repeat: I barely know the guitar, but I intend to make music in the near future. so stay tuned on how that turns out. JPEGMAFIA, whose bday comes in just short of the Scorpio side of October (the 22nd), and his newest album put that fire under my ass. Adam advised me to keep a journal about my music making attempts, so maybe some of that will appear here at some point. he asked if I felt like I needed to express something that’s better suited to music than to fiction. Sontag argues that modern (ie contemporary) art tends to deal more in the interplay of constituent material, rather than it being an expression something specific through media, and I find it very easy to revel in the possibilities of music making, much easier than I do with language. but like I said, I’m cursed to write, so by altering course I’m not seeking the appropriate avenue to express something specific so much as widening my range of options for aesthetic play. and music is the most mysterious and explicitly occultist of the art forms, since it’s through creating tiny vibrations on the air that emotions aren’t just suggested, but foisted on the audience, as a magical spell. artful writing is also a kind of spell, but it’s easier to get hung up on Ideas with language-based arts, so I’m hoping that by pursuing music I can get some relief from my neurosis.

elsewhere, in an essay titlted “The Pornographic Imagination,” Sontag makes the point that it isn’t clear whether human sexuality ought to be understood as healthy and positive, something I spend a lot of time thinking about, since I’m preoccupied with sex. Colin Wilson, in his seminal work The Occult, argues that sexuality as we understand it now is a result of the sublimation of primitive erotic instincts into the social field created by urbanization millennia ago. he also argues that sexuality is one of the more stubborn primitive impulses, one our progressive domestication has not succeeded in muting. I don’t totally agree with Wilson’s argument, but I’m having a blast reading the book.

Today’s Google Doodle honors Charles K. Kao (November 4), who initiated the fiber optic revolution that allowed the internet to flourish into the Leviathan it is today. What’s more Scorpionic than a cryptic, all-powerful network of interstitial connection, the slow insinuation of which went largely unnoticed until it was too late?

my brother is applying to be a cop. he’s already a deputy with a semi-major city’s sheriff’s department, but he wants a transfer to somewhere more suburban. my dad was formerly an FBI agent. you can listen to him here, guesting on the relentless picnic. he sucks. full disclosure, I worked for the campus PD in college. it was the best paying student job. but no thank you, never again. I lucked out that an Oedipus complex trained me to be distrustful of the police state.

unfortunately, I also better understand cop psychology than most people who put ACAB in their Twitter bios. empathizing with viewpoints I disagree with comes so easily to me because my entire psychological development is a struggle to parse through the cryptofascist background noise of my upbringing. speaking of Oedipus, I would love to hear what Freud has to say about how I was affected when my dad left me, 7 months old, for Quantico, to return as an American Gestapo agent. I have suspicions.

anyway, I’m supposed to fill out a character reference questionnaire for my brother’s new department. he’s fine, much smarter than most cops. I just don’t understand how he could want to be a cop, and not in the abstract, from my political or moral objection to policing. like, he was never someone to enjoy wielding power over others. he often threw a fit when he felt like we were asking him to make a decision that affected everyone. but he doesn’t know anything else to do. he’s lazy, he didn’t enjoy school. most of his life was devoted to playing baseball, so when that didn’t work out career-wise, where was he supposed to go? I mean my answer would be “not be a cop,” but what does my opinion matter.

and that’s just it, my opinion does not matter. not to the police department asking me for a reference, not to my brother, not to my dad, not to this fucked world where everything seems awful and doomed and I can see it so clearly and it does not matter. I have tried to push back against their blinkered worldview. during the protests last summer I threatened to stop visiting if my dad didn’t take down his “thin blue line flag.” wrote a whole letter explaining my position and why it never feels like I can be heard. they did not take down their fascist memorabilia, and I have visited them since.

my thinking is I shouldn’t be so plain spoken about this, and instead use it all as the basis for fiction, which I fear will be weakened if I pull the veil back and let you see what goes into it. but I also think it’s valuable for me to be honest and forthright about this. then, when I get accused of being a plant, an op, a spook, or otherwise complicit, at least no one can ask why I hid this stuff. while we’re at it, what my dad does now, ie provide “security consultation” for very wealthy people, is even more evil, and by association probably sullies me worse, even though I refuse his offers for work. all these moral dilemmas are brought into focus by my mere existence, and I have no idea how to deal with any of them.

part of me wants to sandbag this reference questionnaire, somehow be a minor wrench in the oppressive machine recruiting my brother. but the questions just make me sad. “How often do you have contact with the candidate?” rarely. I miss my brother always, he was the only person I really had when my parents divorced. even though we have very little, next-to-nothing in common, he and I have no problem spending time together. enjoyable time. but I barely hear from him, in part because I harbor resentment over how I was always a satellite for my dad’s and brother’s interests, following around the baseball team my brother played on and my dad coached. but that childish indignation on my part seems to have created the space that made it possible for my brother to drift into law enforcement without any input from me.

when you’re a coward, everything’s always too little, too late.

somehow I lived til 2021 without having seen Jennifer’s Body (dir. Kusama, 2009). the movie deserves its cult status and does not deserve such a low score on rotten tomatoes. or maybe it does, but only if we lived in a world where real Movies got made, not advertisements for merchandise. I’d give anything for someone to make a zero-fucks campfest as bonkers as Jennifer’s Body in 2021.

I mean, ultimately it’s nowhere near a perfect movie. I can’t even say for sure if it’s a Good movie. not sure if it’s really my business saying if it’s Good or Bad anyway, but that’s an aesthetic discussion I’m not getting into now, not exactly. Jennifer’s Body is definitely a Fun movie, and it’s got grit and texture and takes silly risks and let’s itself be overrun with ideas. so few movies do that nowadays. and far be it from me to criticize a movie that burns Chris Pratt up in a fire explicitly symbolic of the World Trade Center attacks.

where it loses me is in the last 1/3, when Diablo Cody has to explain the mechanism of evil and tie it all up, and the film’s logic becomes too convenient. this hinges on easy “occult” cliches that offer very corny justification for Needy’s escape and revenge. when she goes into her school library searching for answers and finds an extensive “occult” section, me, being the pedantic librarian I am, I was like “yr school library would not have those books.” (later, Needy’s boyfriend “hangs the lampshade” on this when he asks her “our library has an occult section?”) but like, fine, like, the movie obviously relishes the absurdity of teen films and splatter flicks. the end just gets a little too Diablo Cody, and wobbles.

speaking of the occult (hoped for a more artful segue, but fuck you this is my blog), I started reading The Occult: A History, by Colin Wilson. truth be told, I’m ambivalent about the occult. And to maintain my ambivalence, or to prevent it from being too easy to determine what I “actually” think, I sometimes struggle with how much I should write publicly what I feel about my preoccupations. I don’t have simple explanations for my perverse fascinations, or for my idiosyncratic convictions. like, in The Occult, Wilson writes about faculties often termed paranormal or supernatural as being nothing of the sort, and that we all have some measure of perception that is subconscious, instinctual, not explainable by narrow conceptions of “logic.” this seems obviously true to me, based on my own experiences with premonition, intuition, and nonverbal communication. from this epistemological basis, though, one could easily follow lines of thought and feeling that would not only seem insane, they would feel insane. when one attempts to communicate felt truths from that alienated point of view, with all the conviction of someone asserting that 2 and 2 is 4, a mismatch of contexts gives the impression of psychosis. if you’ve ever read the writings of schizophrenics or any of those books that get labeled “conspiracy theory” on the back, you know what I mean. I have a stack of these books, plus books on shit like ESP, astral projection, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, etc., that I intend to read once my school work is done. whether it’s all true, or if I’ll go crazy, or if those are two sides of the same coin, we’re going to find out.

were it to have not been so horror-lore exposition-y, Jennifer’s Body obviously would have been a different movie, so my criticism feels a little meaningless. I most value art that commits to its premise, which hell fuckin yeah that movie commits.