blips and bloops and oofs or lacks thereof.

on the left and moving offline

i can’t seem to scrape the shame out of my bucket. the bucket’s never full but it’s never completely empty either. there’s never any capital-S Shame about anything, i would like to clarify, but instead it’s small blips and bloops or oofs or lacks thereof; it’s a shame i can’t quite place, can’t quite shake, but also can’t quite get behind; whatever the feeling is, it’s remote and distant.

BDM

writes that shame can only be experienced around other people. maybe this is guilt then. but guilt about what? whenever i try and reach for it, i’m reaching for open air. in such a case… have i done something i’m completely unaware of having done? anyways…

leaning out the window of my apartment to get some fresh air, ahhhhhhh spring. i could say i’m looking for the mystery, or maybe i’m just smoking in the spring morning. a pigeon perched on the other side of the alleyway and gave me a strong sideeye, and i said “what, what?” to the pigeon. what, a word likely sounding like one of their coos, attracted more pigeons flying down to gather on the window ledge across from mine, all cooing loudly. two, then three, then four. a cat in one of the nearby windows looks at me, wide-eyed then at the pigeons, wide-eyed. i shut the window.

loss is hard. my motorcycle’s engine feels gunked up. Spr. Zrr. Brr. well let’s get going. here we go speeding off this dock, trading one (murky) topic of conversation out for another — let’s hop along…

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what to do, what to do

i was having lunch with a friend at a fairly nice Italian place in the west loop last week and we were talking about people yelp review bombing restaurants when the cruelty of the decade struck us both at around the same time. when did the world become so overtly cruel?

twitter has been crushed, juiced, destroyed and somehow its internal juices, like a squeezed orange, became the political world entirely in the 2020s, giving everything a harsh (and clearly expired, i might add) new citrus tang. posting is a pathetic praxis. Veep is more accurate than it could have ever imagined. twitter would eat washington, it turned out. we just didn’t realize what that would mean.

politics posting has serious drawbacks; the only reasonable end goal of political posting in the short-form, at least, is to get one up on the other side of the aisle.

american politics is a nationalized sport. this is well known. but who would have guessed things would become this surface level? there are no coherent goals here, no visions of any future, no expansions of rights or liberties, only a simple mandate: thee must dunketh on thine enemies.

like so much since the pandemic, here’s a classic case of an imperial boomerang come spinning back our way to explode gas stations and tenement housing.

the internet is designed to be a competition ground. twitter was a stock market. facebook is a stock market for baby pictures. substack? marketplace for essays, reporting, and journal entries. twitter’s dead, though, and it’s been replaced by X The Everything App where the animosity and fighting in twitter was turned up to highest volume. across all platforms we have a hundred thousand little “business owner” content creators gunking up information systems entirely, trying to make a dollar or two off of a generally collapsing world order.

ever since X The Everything App took over the united states’ government, with random users like Catturd2 influencing policy decisions in the federal government, the culture on the platform has become the domestic policy of the country. we’re caught in the “dunk tank”. both sides fall for this endless rote gotchaathon. the only way out of this, for the left, anyways, is to reduce the surface area by which we can be attacked and proceed quietly. but get organized! go join an organization with monthly meetings, help support unionization efforts, just generally be there for each other in the real world. online doesn’t matter. it’s not a real place. we need to organize, radical book clubs, we need to start talking and thinking about if this system is working.

it’s completely okay to rail against things (you know how much i love railing against things) but it’s increasingly important to only rail against things in real life, and not online. watch out what you post if you live in the states, and even moreso if you’re here on a student visa.

we need to have conversations with each other and not the algorithm. the left needs to get offline. in a world of mass flattening, the only way to resist is to hold onto 3d dimensional, empathetic but radical political ideologies in the face of flat demolition urges made politically manifest these past couple years.

the best future path for the left in this country might be simply to get offline. we don’t need a joe rogan of the left, instead we need something like a tradleft. we need people organizing unions, organizing strikes, and just in general keeping off social media and sharing stuff in meetings and group chats instead. we need radical book clubs, on imessage or better, on signal. the project of our time is to not steer ourselves as individuals towards the future but to use consideration and political thinking (and conversations!) to steer ourselves back together after a long period of digital estrangement.

the future of the american left needs to do anything it can to avoid being self-aggrandizing. so donate, organize, go to rallies, don’t wage war with “problematic” people online, just go outside and touch grass and talk to someone normal without trying to sell them on socialism or whatever. just be a normal person who’s involved.

look, i’m guilty of being a political hobbyist too but a silver lining can be made out of almost anything and if this terrible chaos we’re plunging into can be used for good in any way is if it inspires you and me to join our local DSA branch or something. it sounds slow. it sounds dull. that’s the point. you can have a little online as a treat. but it’s not the main thing. the main thing is figuring out how we can help each other. posting black squares doesn’t cut it. it hurts the cause, in fact, because it gives space to be dunked on.

when there’s a stain on your shirt, cake on the detergent — get those stains out! there’s always some solution to the problem. but wait a second, this stain (on your new white shirt, i might add) is in the shape of a star… or is it jesus’s face? and you can’t quite tell which. either way, you say, i will wear it on my chest until either i die or the tee shirt rots off my body. don’t do that. wash your shirt.

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my nose is full of carrion carried over the mountains of night to here where i am in the desolation of a new day but there’s a squirrel climbing the tree outside my window and the squirrel is pretty dang cute. nothing like the pigeons mobbing me yesterday. i think i’ve been smoking too many cigarettes me throat feels like toast. toast you put in the toaster. white toast, burnt. to put jam or jelly or butter or honey on top of and eat like your life depended on it. a cigarette dunked in honey is an idea.

some sort of construction noise across lincoln and down george. a bmw goes by outside. the trees are green and only becoming greener. find yourself a big head to start from. this is what everything else depends on. find yourself a new jupiter, a new jump-start into the end of a sentence and punctuate it thus (.) and move on top something new. i’m here to tell you you can hear your own voice when you talk. i’m here to tell you the mornings can be for coffee and contemplation. i’m here to tell you you have autonomy over your own life and you can do whatever you want. you can do things and talk to people and jump into lakes. do what you will with that information.