5.4
In part due to our heroine, landlords were now culturally defined as members of the service industry. They set themselves up far from that, though. Most thought that they were on medieval manors and their tenants were their serfs. Dispense with the word lord and all its associations. That’s one thing Franklin and the boys got right.
Critique to improve the system of mass capital. It requires coldness in its participants, a chill that goes against cooperative evolution. The requirement is beyond most people’s in-born limitations. This degree of coldness is reinforced through repetition. Most cannot become completely chill with it. Anyone who says “it’s just business” has participated directly in some harm, is closed off as a person, and should be treated with a downgrade to their lifestyle, to a home-scape coating in petroleum, in the Chevron-polluted Amazon, oil puddles like a water table that never recedes, oozing in their every mansion door. It’s a good bet this business type has three or more close family members they’re actively saddening.
The further problem with this instilled coldness is the way it emanates into the broader culture. As people treat each other like conceptual goods, what it means to have a human experience is cheap’d. One of the first results is equating the dehumanizing of the war opponent with one’s fellow citizens. Internet attacks result — doxxing, brigading, trolling all stem from this conceptual lapse. This butts up against some ancient thought. If one thinks of every person they see, and every word of every online post as coming from a capital-T Thou, then the rant that they’re fomenting will be tempered, and maybe even they’ll forego the rent increase on the impoverished family, and who knows, replace that lead-based paint.
Blunt misgivings aren’t enough. There has to be a method of exciting fracking bosses and a hundred thousand landlords to rate another person’s family just as highly as their own. To not fight wars around the nuke plants. Red Guard re-education did not work, made promises like churches that nobody lived long enough to confirm. All indoctrination has the same Andre sticker message, to obey. What we do is wait, the slow turns of the necessary schooling create disaffected beings, unable to arrest the habitat destroyers who are broiling us all. These latter use their lorded earnings to pay the livelihoods of uniformed gun users, who stop us from stopping them from ruining the climate. The future is a scramble to the temperate, few places like that left, and you won’t have the guns and money that will get you where you won’t be sweating thirsty all the time.
5.5
Our heroine was over the desiring questions posed at her. Fish talked to her and made up stories about being landed major-generals. It happened everywhere she went. She could read it in them like she was the one generating their own thoughts. Puppeteering is a part of power. She hadn’t fought for it or screwed, or screwed over, somebody to get it. She had it nonetheless.
Would that all the books were marvelous books. Would that there was an extended phenotype for comfort for the conscious. Bending nature to our will shifts the conceptual to bending other men the same. Accidents from Africa, our womb, include shot lungs and minds lusting for pleasure. Reasoned friends can set up some wind breaks. We share a baseline motivation.
She felt like getting all spontaneous. Moving states had fired this lust. Returning home was not enough. Had she gone to Belém or someplace, that would have qualified. But she liked nice underwear, enough to buy our hero pairs of silk. One had a yellow happy face across its front, two black eyes and a smile, where the pointing boner made a nose for it. Our hero had them in the car, would wear them when he got there.
She didn’t think her likes would change whenever her men did. There was a degree of comfort she was so accustomed to that it was virtually ingrained. A century ago she’d have five wardrobes on a steamer. This would have limited the scope of her societal desire. On the other hand there’s no surface reason to put herself in stressful ‘ations. That would go against her programming. In a pinch she would stride through the discomfort she created. The rest of the time she had the attitude of one who fixes a problem by throwing money at it. As her art had made her fortune, her currency became with trumpets flare her suitors. There’d come a day when she would date a construction guy trying to be a mason, and get him to have the idea all on his own to redo the path from her parents’ house to their backyard. He’d be thrilled to use his labor, and disappointed later when she changed her mind about his reproductive goo. She had an unrelated reason that she stuck to, allowing her to live with the mercenary subconscious she’d developed, via the system that gives unfeeling mediocrities a good chance to get rich. In later years after her parents’ passing when she decided to restore the old home, she’d walk on that stone path without recalling its creation.
5.6
People get mad not just at what is printed but if it’s printed and not said. So much of social life is managing another’s expectations. It’s incumbent on them to manage their own. Five reduced nights of this made our hero confront himself alone in Californ.
The next nights after those reduced had the risible doubts about himself leaving. They were strong enough to make him turn the car around, if only he had not been so far along already. He was the predatory bird that saw things far away and not the challenges up close. He said he’d pull off and sleep at the next rest stop once he got through this town. The baubles that he wanted, he came to bag them in the night. He went over their couples’ conversations in his head. Even her barbs were all too beautiful. It was as though a syndicate had ordered them apart — otherwise it made no sense to him. He hadn’t understood that it was not required to. His personal exceptionalism might apply near everywhere, but not with his lost love, now represented by a silken pair of boxers with a cartoon heart over the flap, a heart that once protruded when she unsnapped her lace bra from the front. The bra marks on her ribs would be the lines that he would live in.
Witless videos would never change his mind. He was going off a study in sympathy instead of one in hope. He understood the quid pro quo but he rejected it. It did not fit morality, he considered grandiosely, as though that would help in a society that expected qpq. The division and conquering mired with the pervasive self-perceived star syndrome made it so people would take out their phones and film someone run over rather than assist them. It was distressingly easy for a loved one to slip into that mind. After that the relationship became kaput.
She was pursued by the head of fishy fun in her hometown. Every town had more than one. They tried to hook her eye. They always offered her a job. A job, and not an income. She’d be taught to hand her earnings over, then go back out and earn some more. As her parents loved her and had instilled her self-esteem, she was in no danger of falling for their ploys. She kept her hand over her cup. The only way to handle them was to ignore and move on. A woman learns all the ways to shut down mackin; alas these do not work on anti-social personality disorders. These have OEDs of dirty tricks, manipulations, psychological attacks disguised as therapy. Having seen situations the born emotional cannot conceive, they’re primed to weaponize what is taboo. They have pills to put in drinks and they give orders. A woman will come to in a motel with some grunting lout inside her. ASPDs have bypassed the protest, dignity, autonomy, the lot. They set the stakes, unfairly pounded.
She’d developed some weird unconscious trick she could not explain. She had a way of shutting off her hearing when someone was attacking her with words. More precisely, it was a way of trapping the vibrations in the cochlea before they could travel to the brain. She knew it was something like this because she could hear the sound, initially. But on its own the brain short-circuited so that the intelligibility was lost. It was not a matter of consciously telling herself to ignore it, or to start singing an earworm in her mind to drown it out. It was instead just like the glandular response to danger, that millisecond dump of hormones. She did not control it and did not know how she had acquired it. It happened on its own. She could feel worded attacks but not understand the words. They did not register. If this was documented in the sciences, she did not know it. If other women had this too, she was unaware. She’d never heard anyone discuss something like it. It was some instinctual protective measure. If only it blocked out your typical inanities like talkers on their phones in waiting rooms and music coming through the walls.
Our hero had a Muslim friend. He once asked him how he could stand being sober all the time — it’s so boring. His friend waited a comedic beat, and then replied, “I have a lot of sex.” Our hero cracked up. It was the perfect answer. They laughed on that for years.
Our heroine had forgotten all about it in the swirl of all the fish. She had a garden man who showed up during the day and walked all over her property. He’d taken many forms, but consistently he appeared in her calm refuge. He cut some plants and left, but she knew that he’d be back. It was that thought, not his very presence, that gave her unease. A subconscious reason for her flight back to Nebraska was to get away from him. He’d stay away when she was around her family. Nonetheless he’d followed her. The night of the first fight her sister picked with her parents, he reappeared. Our heroine chased him away with her mother’s dissociatives. They made the days float by but the nights rougher, amping up her dreams. There was a staggering drunk she couldn’t get away from. It was a great fight — he bit her on the arm, leaving marks, drawing blood. It shook her upon waking and stayed in her mind for days. Does anybody have an explanation for the heart? she asked the night. The models that she lived by were outdated. At some point slapstick isn’t funny, it just hurts.
5.7
The world’s greatest juggler lives in a shitty state, is contemptuous of his own gift. Cause no one gives a shit. He heard somebody broke his record in a big production with showgirls, lights, and tunes, so he went outside his home with an old cam-phone, hit record, and rebroke the record in one take. He felt no joy at this, conveyed none. There was naught to say. Then he went back inside his swampy duplex and dressed for his day job. Had he reset the record in a sold-out stadium, broadcast to millions of obeisant reinforcements, it would still have meant the same. That’s how far neglect goes.
Power hasn’t changed in the new century, it has only shifted. Laws had dressed it in a gentler trim, but in its drawers the studded toys remain. They came out, on schedule and on whims. Immaculate thoughts have maimed their tries. We still continue trying once again. The self will give when it is not in need. Few things are less superior than underwear. We’re admonished to look inside. It’s where the value lies, and value lies distract us from the weal.
He himself was used to never being right, not when other egos were involved. He could not build when he needed propping up. He was uncomfortably used to critical spotting. He had their marks on him. The arrow was the only thing that mattered. When everything was upside down and he was just about to crack, he could look to the arrow. It was pointed like a boner just one way — at eternity. The arrow was unwavering and it was always there. The target was unending. Drama couldn’t change it. Belief could not tarnish its appeal. It wasn’t awfully appealing indeed. It just was. When he saw that, all dogma dissolved in its own bath. He’d thought his way out early, and university gave the base, steel-trap conclusions, logically unassailable. It took fewer than ten years to conceive the arrow, its meaning and what it implied. After that no wind, no stormy seas, nor magnetic pole reversal could alter his direction. Stonehenge was losing to erosion, the jungle’s splitting Angkor Wat. The pyramids were chafing, and a meteor was coming for the footprints on the moon.
The creeps were leaving cause a loving couple tinged their tongues with bonhomie. They couldn’t stand them so they wouldn’t let themselves be like them. Single-handedly they ceded all their ground. The hell set collected their favorites, which coincided with what made the born emotional feel sick. It was time for the latter to try something other than the yclept phallic thrusts that bust the habitat.
Subtle questions sometimes rang a bell. The rest was focused on their over-riding want. They bounced from one thing they’d been conditioned to, to another, and this they called free will. The series of options the stakeholders, the apers of the born emotionless, gave the people seemed inexhaustible, enough to control them through their lives. It was a service in a way, pulling people from their existential terror. Something strange occurred in outlandish statements — their entertainment had a higher rating than veracity.
Our heroine had not headed this way with a clear picture of where it ended up. Had she known beforehand, etc. Singling someone out for new attention cannot help but activate a mad lust inside them. As the morés of society no longer apply, a monster is revealed. It only dies when the person realizes they haven’t had, in a long time, a belly warming laugh. For our hero, he had a hard time when someone he was intimate with wanted something from him. A degree of fantasy was necessary for him to be invested. As soon as it was punctured, even if a scratch, part of him shut down. A piece of him lost interest. It wouldn’t be the same again. This is another way people get addicted to the honeymoon phase and pass through a series of relationships, sustaining the phase, if not one person. It was hard for him to clean up his mistakes when that’s how he was going. It finally dawned on him, this could have been the catalyst for her leaving.
She was aware enough to recognize a young man roleplaying his fantasy. She was perceptive enough to notice when he’d given up the game. He thought for the first time that it was possible, just possible, that his true inner being was the reason that she dipped.
5.8
Politics is the worst of human nature written large. Did you hear the latest example of territorial behavior? A politician peed on someone else’s rug whether that’s a bugaboo of his constituents or, more likely, to effect his own access to luxury, corporate institutions, and the dopamine of being the only one in charge of the contemptible.
Not nearly often enough, unless you’re lucky to be born Latino, people band together to improve a facet of society. This must be supported when it happens.
Peace-desiring people pose questions of the game. We’re not pieces though, we’re the board it rolls the dice on. We think we’re playing but we’re not even 3D.
Our heroine would not be described as too positive at anything.
Years had been, for our hero anyway, more casual. He had not been constantly on the make. Blushingly with screwy desires, he’d navigated from one unintentional mal action to the next.
In some parts of the world today, Christians and Muslims both will take a rape victim and kill her. Her own family will kill her. It is a culture they call honor, and it exists no matter their religion. Their assaulted children were to have been their future habitat (there are no old folks homes there). Even so they must be killed. Look, they just have to be or the whole family loses face all right? This is their culture, not yours. Who are you to equate what they do with their raped children to a warming habitat? Questioning them on this will only bring their anger and citations of the impetus they live in. If you kill the person who would have taken care of you when you grow old, there will be no one to do so when you get there. They can understand this. They kill the victim anyway. When you’re a being who needs clean air and water, and beings like you not only pollute the air and water, but increase the pollution every year, as the habitat becomes acidic and salt-strewn, til nobody can live on the entire planet including the polluters, it’s like living in an age of gun-cocking heart surgeons. They show up at your door and say it’s time for them to crack your ribcage open and scalpel out your heart. If you protest you’ll be jailed. You appeal to them with reason, I cannot live without my heart, I’ll die. You say, You have a heart too that you have to have to live. You plead, I need my organs, We have to have the conditions that let life continue. They respond by screaming and by firing their guns. Your time is up before you wanted. They’re paid by the born emotionless (and those who ape ASPDs) and they’re brainwashed against reason.
Or you say that government and business ought to follow the scientifically proven recommendations of the IPCC to stop global warming. And they keep removing organs door to door.