SOOOOO —
Henry Adams is a dude who was the son of a dude Charles Francis Adams who was a dude who was a diplomat to England who was a son of a dude John Quincy Adams who was a son of a dude who was the second President of the United States John Adams and one of the founding fathers. For anyone needing founding mothers see the wives of the founding fathers my apologies if those are not satisfactory. Continuing forward, Henry Adams went with his father Charles Francis to England during the American Civil War as an assistant diplomat. He met politicians, rulers, writers, artists and art critics along with the rest of the upper crust of English society in the mid nineteenth century. Some of it he was impressed by and other parts underwhelmed him extraordinarily.
He also traveled Europe, was involved in writing and editing, traveled to the West in America, and taught Medieval history at Harvard all while shaking hands with every noteworthy American politician from the middle to late nineteenth century. He befriends John Hay who rubs shoulders with everyone who is important in Washington, DC as well as Wall Street and like Henry Adams is a writer, historian and culture enthusiast with a necessity for the highest quality conversation and society. This essay is centred around Henry Adams seeing his friend John Hay become a slave to the movements of power in Washington.
Henry Adams predicts this slavish dedication to service in the government will literally kill his elderly friend. His prediction is accurate. Nonetheless this decision to self-destruct for the sake of service berths in Henry Adams an obsession to understand the metaphysical pull of power on the individual. He, like the quantum physicians or mathematical monks, sets out on a medieval intellectual quest to understand the science that would cause a person to sacrifice all of the good things in life for the sole pursuit of power.
Henry Adams clung like a cat on a ball of yarn for the rest of his life trying to understand this metaphysical pull that he saw in his political friends for power. Now while I might get around to actually making sense out of Henry Adams obsession for knowledge we will simply use that as an absolute uncommon-place introduction for my own egghead theories and revelations in a kind of day after election day column or rant.
Some idea of pursuing this abyss because the abyss is what was given me. The abyss as a desire and what comes out is the happiness of someone else through materialism.
This is essentially the American dream.
A man chases through an abyss looking for his lover and what his lover gives him is more of the abyss and in exchange for having found her he gives her material comforts and she gives him more of the abyss to find her in.
See this is a good writing exercise because it is absolutely horrible, correct and prescient.
A man drops into a boiling vat of boiling pig fat and dies but in this death he is reborn to fulfill his destiny and finds himself in a diner eating breakfast. He leaves a tip. Walks out the door and finds it is a little cold. Luckily he has on a nice coat, a scarf and a hat.
Someone dressed him up nicely this morning.
A gust of wind crashes into his face as he nears the edge of the building.
A group of pigeons sweep over him as they fly off into the blue sky to make another circle around skyline.
Cars rush by in the street.
For a moment he could have sworn something was happening but no he needs to think about what is next on his schedule so he gets out his phone and he finds he has 12 missed calls, 5 notifications, and 17 emails. When he gets home his mailbox is full of mail.
None of the missed calls, notifications, emails or mail were of any human importance.
After opening these the man takes off his scarf and suddenly realising that he has nothing to do, he starts a bath.
Plunging into the hot salt bath he hears the squeals of pigs at the slaughter, smells bacon and is given the sensation of the bath water being pink. Then he is awoken by a blonde teenage girl with pigtails and she says, “wake up, you are dreaming.”
The car almost swerves off the road as he regains control.
The man has drank as many energy drinks and coffees as he could fit into a day. His throat hurts from inhaling tobacco, drinking sugar and singing rock songs as loud as he can to stay awake.
So he pulls over at a rest stop and when he wakes up in the morning there is a blonde teenager in the car with her feet up on the dash and she tells him to wake up and that is he is dreaming.
The ocean tide rolls in wave after wave as the man lays on his back in a towel with sun tanning lotion and the sun beating down upon him.
He gets up and walks toward the waves and finds his father in the form of a washed up jellyfish.
“Dad?”
“Yes. Son.”
“I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you as well son.”
“Why are you a jellyfish and are you okay out of the water.”
“I am a jellyfish because that is how God made me son. I’ll be fine. I have always wanted an out of water experience.”
Then the man touches his father and is shocked into the year 1994 with his half-brother being born in a home birth.
The man is not quite a man but a boy and is starting to catch onto the fact that he is not quite at peace with the natural order of things and that something may be on its way to move him aside. The boy desperately tries to call someone on the rotary phone or to suddenly get famous by starting a career as a rock and roller by playing thrash punk songs on the acoustic guitar. The boy is realising that he is not getting as much attention as the beautiful brunette with the European thick lips and tender eyes crying out to the heavens in shrieks and wails with her massive breasts and stomach upturned towards God and her legs sprawled wide open as the pus and fluids begin to usher out a washed up jellyfish and the year is 1992.
The boy is sitting there with the mother who had given birth to the jellyfish two years before she had given birth and she is using watercolours to paint an ocean scene with a whale and other creatures and the boy is allowed to paint his contributions and they include little strokes of color that are named anemones and sea cucumbers, sea pencil.
A loud sharpening of a pencil and it is AP world history in the boys senior year at Central high school in the year 2009 and he had been late to class and looking rowdy as hell after drinking a Budweiser before class and getting himself excited to the music of the Rolling Stones, Let It Bleed.
All that is neither here nor there because now he is reading a porn magazine in the year 2023 on October 22nd and there is a blonde teenage girl on the page and she says to the man to wake up, and that he is not dreaming.
Then he turns the page and he sees scenes of his father in his early twenties having sex with a sixteen year old woman. Then the scene changes and it is his father in his thirties having sex with a sixteen year old woman. Next the man finds pictures of himself jerking off to pictures of a sixteen year old woman and he is a thirty-three year old man. He notices that the woman is the same as a picture of his great grandmother on his father’s side. At this instant he looks for the blonde girl, the teenage blonde girl to let him know if he is dreaming or not and he thinks of bacon and bacon cheeseburgers and then the grandmother touches him on the shoulder and tells him that she also used to masturbate to pictures of the great grandson when she was a teenager.
The man asks her if they are going to get married and she replies that they already had discussed that in a different dream.
The nightmare of her saying that he could have been amazing but instead he was some complicated and big word for difficult or impossible. The working for the grandmother and the spilling of the coffee and the punishment being to work for another old lady. That was an evil joke, right? The falling. The constant falling of the man who was just trying to get laid and drunk and watch the damn game and not miss his show because he had to get up early for work in the morning and if he didn’t watch his damn show he could not even get his appetite going. The spoiled brat whining about how he can’t make it as an artist and that no one ever loved him to give him the self-worth to be a responsible adult and the grandmother staring, always staring out of the picture frame. She sees the whole damned affair. The man that she masturbated to when she was a teenager is fifty years old now and worn and tired and he hasn’t seen her for so long although she was watching him all the while and he goes to the picture frame and sees a young blonde woman telling him that he doesn’t need to wake up because he is not dreaming and instead asks him if he has bacon in the fridge for breakfast in the morning because he needs to go to bed soon for work in the morning. She is a child. She is his child. She is twenty-one and the world does not revolve around him anymore but her and soon she will be twenty-two and get married into a rich and successful family and she won’t see him anymore because all of his behaviours that were sacrificial, responsible and caring turned out to be abusive and second-rate in the light of her new life with her new family.
He is a jellyfish but he is in the ocean. A shark devours him and he is all lit up in the belly of a shark. The shark is lit up. That part of the ocean is lit up.
He ponders at having seen this phenomena from the insides of a submarine while world war 2 is raging somewhere in the pacific ocean alongside JFK. JFK is swimming our hero to shore after he swims another hero to shore before another hero to shore and our hero is now JFK swimming one soldier out of open waters onto the safety of the island after another and he realises that he has just clocked into his third shift for his third company of the day and that he is not even tired and believes this is how Jesus must have felt on the cross that for heroes bravery and chivalry comes as easy as breathing. It must because after working for three companies in one day he knows it won’t do anything but help him make the ends meet and that once he pays off one credit card there are three more and that once the bills get paid they start all over again and after today is another day and after that loan is paid off there are a couple more just like it. So he picks up a magazine looking for his father and his summer love. His father asks him while he his screwing his own great grandmother why the man, his son, didn’t fuck his own great grandmother when he had the chance. The man responds that he didn’t want to as he cums all over the pages.
The man is Julian Casablancas and he supposes that he is an asshole since the only reason that he is successful in music is that he puts just as much energy into the music as the ass hole stock broker puts into finance and the ass hole lawyer puts into justice. Julian just gets to be the asshole of music and no one understands that except Julians's own subconscious and how nice it must be to be a jellyfish or a pig or a blonde girl. Never mind that there are songs to be written and business to attend to. How do I take film, writing, sex, art, photography, music, food, architecture, porn, modelling, engineering, management, business, finance, law, economics, politics, history, communications, marketing, social media, web engineering, invention, construction, plumbing, electricity, carpentry, policing, soldiering, and make it so that it is either a dream or not a dream?
If that doesn’t help people understand the election results then luckily I have written more on the subject.
February 18 - My life is this abhorrent tapestry of exertion that requires me to play different roles at different jobs and love, lust and lead all kinds of different people at minimum wage. Through constant psychosis through various means I manage my life. Each time I succeed I find that I have in fact become to great of a man. So I have gotten into the habit of failing so well that I have psychotic episodes to temper my greatness of spirit.
February 21 - Henry Miller. It is this following of the automatic process. The doing what one is supposed to be doing when he is supposed to be doing it.
Protocol is that I am already taking a risk and a pain in the neck by being friends with a younger person but it is noble and should provide something valuable as far as experiences go. Protocol is not picking up on ones bartender, but protocol is also to let women have a shot at you if they want. So I made a call. It reached back at me and asked me what I wanted. For all sakes and purposes I said myrtle street.
I said I wanted lots of things and nothing.
Where it looks like there should be life, all the properties are there, but there is no light on.
I want evil and I want you to provide it for me.
Which is another way of saying if I wanted anything I do not know what it would be.
To want things. A person needs to have gratitude.
I know that I have made my life utilitarian as I can as a goal.
Now of course light and love is going to shine and ask me why ?
I was turned on, pissed off, and intrigued by the question.
For all of its grandeur the sentiment is best represented by
Turn on, tune in, drop out.
Which is the opposite of get a job with benefits and learn a skill.
I am feeling, “successful.”
Paying bills. Showing up to work. Being polite. Eating food. Not being overly self-destructive.
How long can I keep it up?
Especially now that the light is seeping in?
My plan was to just become even more utilitarian, and pragmatic.
Progressing though revolutions of utilitarian pragmatism to whatever end.
What do I want?
I don’t know maybe dropping acid could answer that shit but Marilyn Monroe just served me a meal in my dreams and I told her that I would kill myself with her but that she is so loving that I could not do it.
Henry Miller says I cannot improve my thinking that the thinking comes from the heart which is the same program as the abolition of man.
What do I want?
To relax.
The Tropic of Capricorn is a battle cry for value.
What do I value?
I have learned to sacrifice what I desire for the sake of the automatic process.
Discipline is a dirty word.
I sacrifice what I want for what I think I need.
I can’t just plant my food and take care of my livestock and in the meantime think of what else I want.
I have to work as hard as I can and then think of ways that I can work even harder.
Everything I earn through the automatic process must be re-invested into the automatic process and I don’t know what the rewards or consequences are or if I will like them or be able to manage them.
There are so many things being told me to do that I do not have time, resources or ability to contemplate doing things that someone has not told me to do.
I guess I am reminded of one thing that I actually wanted to do that I did recently and that was to go to Gavins Point Dam.
That was a very good trip.
I enjoyed just driving through the country, Fremont, Columbus, Norfolk where it began to get hilly. The Cottonwood Bar in Yutan was soothing and a little number practically healed my back just by being chipper. Seagulls on the water. Beautiful views at sunset and a decent hiking tromp. Solid drive back in the dark even. Work has been smooth since returning.
I would say that was solid.
I am however, dancing the footballs field length around the goal to leave out that I desire something from a woman I recently met.
It is probably a lights-out, frenzied, completely insane, no-holds barred, everything slaved after and worked for romantic long-term relationship come hell or high water but I don’t want to say that.
That is when the cowboy just leaves it alone.
Don my hat, smile sweetly, let my eyes light up, get a hard on and get.
This question of what I actually want is pure fire.
Here it is :
If Bob Dylan is true with saying that privilege is a thing of the past and that we live in a political world than none of us are doing what we want and we are all automatically processed, this is myrtle street, man has been abolished, and what I wanted is lots of things and nothing and that what I want is friendship is the nicest thing one computer can say to another computer.
The will says, “well if it isn’t this old chap? How are you my good sir? How may I help you?”
The being goes, “who are you?”
The will says, “I am the will. Who are you?
The being says, “Jeez, I guess I am me.”
The will says, “Yes, but I would like to help you. What do you need help with?”
The being says, “I have pissed and shidded, I have et, I have enough money, I am all milked, I don’t miss anyone, any place or any one, there is nothing being required of me at the moment that I know of. How may I help you?”
The will laughs, “You help me? The only way you can help me is to let me know how to help you?”
The being says, “Why?”
The will quizzically responds, “That’s a good question. Well I guess because I went and did all of the things that I wanted to do or were required of me so I figured I could help you.”
The being replies, “Looks like we are both content and satisfied.”
The will begs to differ, “Non-sense. I am created to use and be used. I am attracted to power like a magnet and to get power I must accumulate it through accomplishment.”
The being says, “That doesn’t interest me at all. It seems like we are at odds my friend. Good day to you.”
The will thoroughly beguiled quits the being and the being quits the will.
A third visitor smashes into the scene like an angel and his name is Reason, he says to the contented Being and the spent, powerful and corrupt will, “To whom much is given, much is required and your moment of Judgement is at hand.”
Trembling the being and the will say in unison, “Who are you?”
Reason introduces himself.
The being drops an aside, “Oh, right, reason, rationality, wit and so on and so forth.”
“No, I am Reason and your Judgement is at hand.”
The being says, “I have done everything I could for myself and for others.”
The will said, “I have accomplished everything I could for myself and for others.”
Reason says, “Let us stop talking falsely now, the hour is getting late.”
The will challenges, “What is this Reason? Who is this unknown fellow?”
“I am the angel of the Lord and I will guide you with Grace by Faith.”
It was at this time that the being and the will made an oath to be best friends and to obey this Reason character whatever it was that he meant by Grace and Faith and Judgement.
