Truckin' on

6 months and two days ago death took my wife with a visit to my home

I recently amused myself with an online psych test. Extraverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiver (ENFP) personality commonly referred to as "The Social Philosopher". And honestly I think as these 30 minute rapid tests go quite spot on. I gotta find sumthin’ to blame beside me for being very much out of step with my hour. Can’t blame Momma because she tried, and tried, and really really tried but in the end though she kept me out of prison a failure. The highest and best of the Counter Culture going say back to the Greeks and Latins as translated by Brits :) framed me. And then San Francisco Counter Culture and Science Fiction too. LOL. Phillip K. Dick come on down. So 36 years ago in August I moved to the Mission. I was broke at 30 too funny enough but a categorical imperative was getting my existence elsewhere.

Even then moving much too slow.

Transformation is a one way street and irreversible change in dominant personal human economic activity driven by slower or faster continuous improvement in sector productivity growth rate. Jobs then. Some pay well. Many do not. My and when productivity growth is offshored and then re-shored? Not much better. Machines replace spending wage earners. Offshore requires real labor costs even in China for the Western corporations.

A great rationalization of experts is upon us, Technique traps all. To have a job expertise must be guarded saying no and prefers to say yes but -your expertise took too long so I, the functionary, took the notes recorded and made it a report I distributed online to key players.

Productivity growth itself is fueled by advances in technology, inflow of useful innovations, accumulated practical knowledge and experience, levels of education, viability of institutions, quality of decision making and organized human effort. Individual sector transformations are the outcomes of human socio-economic evolution. Yup. Disposable income. How to have it? Why toil! Then you can afford it all.

I am working on my perception. I am starting to be able to place the background to my life and understand better how it was not thinking but feeling that drove me. A certain sensibility which I can only surmise was a little yes and a big No. Ivan Illich described his work as Counter-Foil and Agamben, a student of Illich, speaks of interventions. Fate intervened in my life and I cannot say how much is changed. Everything yes. Her death by medicine in this time was very human and gentle, she did rage against the dying of the light and did go gentle into the good early morning after 3AM.

Here I exist in the middle of things at Christmas. I have few friends and no family and I still have no money but but but so much more really that it makes money silly. 66 in San Francisco for 36 years. Bohemia or bust! Bust!

Ain’t no Bohemia. Can’t be. Conformity won. Dig it. All gotta eat. Pay bills. Live. Even with pet Lobster on leash. Agamben’s critique of the state of exception is that he task at hand is not to bring the state of exception back within its spatially and temporally defined boundaries in order to then reaffirm the primacy of a norm and of rights that are themselves ultimately grounded in it. From the real state of exception in which we live, it is not possible to return to the state of law.

I go forward into the New Year eyes open, heart centered, recognizing the illusion relies on mis-direction and damn sure all the post-Covid tyranny can be brought to heel by the NO.