Black cold once hot coffee
Just another day contemplating condition of situation normal all fucd up
By 11:00 AM 4 cups of coffee. Judith went back to sleep. Energy hard to find even in summery San Francisco. I sit here watching sunbeams play on my windows thinking we might make it to a museum this afternoon. Tomorrow we go to Davis to see a play directed and written by Judith’s grand daughter -a sophomore at UC Davis. 103 will be the weather in Davis. Likely a high of 80 in SF.
We also will be having breakfast tomorrow with my oldest friend. He lives in Sacramento. He is the Counsel for the past 30 years for the Mountain Lion Foundation. He wants to retire in Spain, holds the over all quality of life is superior. I wish I believed. He is fully vaccinated. Scoffs at VAERS.
Today, the morning non-news is on rerun. San Francisco has no news really. I think Judith puts it on because she like the patina of information. I listen. Dumbed down. Still even the fish wrap newspapers are unaware of how much news they are unaware. Local station covers dog thefts, drug busts, and Monkey Pox fear -spreading fast- and Monkey Pox feel good news from an arrogant Indian doctor reminding the audience “unlike Covid” asymptomatic infectees are not transmitting, casual space sharing will not transmit, intimate contact spreads it-and segue to a Pox victim who took the 2 week cure, then REO Speedwagon news for light entertainment. There is more of course, a feel good story that you can adopt a dog for x period of time even if you work, even in apartments, medical care and 24/7 advice and food provided. The county adopts the homeless human of course at eye brow raising cost but that is another item not in the news folderol.
When I was young there were quite a few underground papers springing up. Some even lasted into the 70’s like the Berkeley Barb. Radio was big too. FM was new. AM everywhere. Substack reminds me of this time. What alien Stephen Gould millions of years from now will ponder and think on Substack, the internet as a "type locality" a Burgess Pass in the Canadian Rockies. A formation of Middle Cambrian age, deposited near the end of the great Cambrian Explosion that 20-million-year period of explosive evolution across several phyla. The rock unit is some 150m (500 ft) thick. So easy to see the similarity with human history. Especially that history detached by WW1 from the rest of the world.
WW1 ending La Belle Époque revealed ours is the time of malignant Dwarf Titans. Virilio offers a genealogy in which civil society (originally the city) was actually twin-born with military society from pre-civilized “tumults” of all-against-all violence. He posits this in contradistinction to the model of trade as the basis for civilization. According to him, war has evolved from tactics (pre-martial violence), through strategy (control of space), to logistics (control of time). The global fruition of logistics is the “pure war” in which humanity is increasingly subject to a non-human technological agenda predicated on abstract, hyperreal conflict.
I was a history major as a kid interested in war. Not the war in Vietnam really from history but Vietnam as fact brutally believed. I listened to FM radio with Travis T. Hipp who scoffed at the threat of Soviet or even US army occupation of the country. “Too many armed people man” he opined one night and the lights went off. Travis T. Hipp who talked to Mae on his KZAP FM program. https://archive.org/details/the-compleat-mae-brussell
Substack is a message and in a medium that is eye and ear bottle. Make of it as you will but there is a warning out everything is well known to God and only cherry picked memes to man. “The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
Frank Zappa
Very good writing about life in the Gulag Summer of 2022. How it feels to have best friends and families lost to the Covid dystopia. My brother lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, retired from teaching in a London private school. The family is all vaccinated including 2 grown daughters.He spends part of the summer in a small village in Spain loving the laid back country life. It’s nice for those who got their situation set up before Covid in many places but the overhanging weight of what is happening doesn’t give much reason for an idyllic life in a Spanish village or anywhere else.
Good post. Kudos to maintaining a life in San Francisco these days. Know Davis well. Amazing there used to be a Berkeley Barb and that Rolling Stone was an actual respectable music & politics entity. Today Rolling Stone is a "fish wrap".