degringolade

Been spending time on the story lately. I have been sort of productive in the sense that I have a much better idea about how the ending will occur and the way to the ending. That was what hung me up when the damn thing exploded earlier.

But I have an embarrassing admission to make. I forgot names of characters and how they fit into the story. So I am currently re-reading what I have written so far and I am trying to come up with a cast of characters sheet with a bio on each of the characters. I am also trying to re-read the source documents from both Lovecraft Country and the Haliverse to get ideas for names and settings.

I am figuring that things in the book are occuring at the same time (roughly) as WOH Dreamlands and a voyage to Hyperborea.

I am troubled about using Walt Moore. Per dogma, he joined the Army in 1966. Even if he lied about his age I figure that at best, he would have been born in 1949...There were 16 year old's joining, but that was so rare as to be stupid to try and work that in so 1949 is the date I am working with. He would have had to serve a couple years before qualifying for the SF, so he had to be in for a minimum of six years. The best guess would be he would have been up on the Cambodian/Laotian border region in 1970-71 timeframe. So the WOH was published in 2017 with the Chorazin being in 2020 and Dreamlands being in 2023.

So Walt would have been 71 in Chorazin and if I make my story coincident with dreamlands, that will make him 74. I have to make certain that he does things appropriate for a geezer who is even older than I am.

Symbolism / Cuno Amiet/ Sunset in a snowy landscape

Love my sons. No doubt about it. I have a rule for incoming gifting, anything other than whiskey or sweatpants will not be accepted. There will be exceptions, but I will be pretty strict about the rule.

Might have to modify the rule slightly in order to make it easier on them. Maybe a list of acceptable whiskeys. Below I am presenting a preliminary list of specifications.

First: it needs to be domestic. Has to be made/distilled in the USA. No Canadian, No Irish, no Scotch. Definitely US fermented/distilled only.

Second: Not something that boojie fuckheads drink.

Third: The distillery has to be at least 100 years in business.

Current Mood: indescribable

Futurism / Bruno Munari/ Cosmic Map

There is a difference between cooking for enjoyment and cooking for sustenance. Here in America, Julia Child and Martha Stewart and the celebrity chefs have taught us that only the most delicate flavors, only the finest ingredients, only the most assiduous preparation is worthy of our notice.

I come home from a long day at work and I just want some fuel.

But I am torn between the sneering of folks whose self-image insists that only the best is good enough for them and the reality of an old man who has a limited amount of energy and time.

I am thinking that this entitled view of your belly might be coming to grips with a harsher reality in the none too distant future. But the truth of the matter is that the crux of cuisine is taste. Those seven or eight some-off different types of taste buds need to be stimulated. A body (dependent on size) needs between 2,000 and 3,000 Kcal/day to survive and thrive. Certain minerals and nutrients need be available.

All of this can be done a lot easier than the cooking shows show. Granted, there won’t be the graceful curves of a white dish with color coordinated entree and side tastefully presented. Nope, my cooking is “bowl” cooking.

I have a full drawer of different spices. I have onions and garlic. I have spices, pork, rice and noodles. Right now the farmers market is running. I can’t imagine needing more.

Now, this doesn’t mean that when the fam-damily gets together, or if I am off visiting friends or have friends over, the methodology doesn’t change, I am completely comfortable with cooking for a family-style sit down meal.

Cooking styles do mirror the exigencies of the food industry and the marketing industry. All the fancy presentation and fancy preparation are a marketing ploy for industries, not a daily way of life.

Fancy cooking is fun, but it has its place. Baseline cooking is functional, but it has its place.

Try to keep the two separate in your head.

Realism / Vasily Vereshchagin/ Triumph

Maybe I woke up cranky this AM. It is within the realm of possibilities.

Been reading the string of late and I tend to think that it is going to a strange place. The place where opinions are formed regarding how other people should act. I really can't think of a more frequently visited moral locale or a more dangerous one.

Folks like us, out here on the fringes, tend to intellectualize the the actions of a society. If it goes the way we agree with, that is a "good" society. If it goes the way we don't like, it is a "bad" society. We sit in our bubble of our own making and try to pretend that folks should follow the "norms" that we hold in our brains as to the proper social rituals and mores appropriate to the enlightened. But those little trends aren't really that important. They might be important to us and make us feel that we live within a proto-paradise of good and virtue. But the world is a nasty place, full of plebians who don't agree with our cultured enlightenment.

In a sense, intellectuals such as ourselves don't live in the dirty world of the left side of the IQ bell curve or dead-end jobs. In the US, these seem to occupy more than their fair share of the population. I am fairly certain that our counterparts outside of London or Wellington hold differing values. What city slickers like us think as "courtesy" and "correct behavior" a great deal of time simply boils down to proper deference to our ideological majesty. But I can't for the life of me remember who appointed the elites, or the Christians, or the scientists, or even us as the arbiters of correct behavior.

Behaviors and beliefs are internal to the individual. Judgement upon the correctness of those beliefs is a function of the overall society. You might be among those who feel that no one should be able to judge you, but that little idea is so obviously false as to be laughable. You are judged every moment of the day. Maybe folks here in the West ought to consider the idea that behaviors of an individual are perhaps more appropriate for modification than the behaviors of a society. But demanding the society follow along when individual behaviors are changed just seems an odd idea to me.

Tradition says that Moses did not set the Tabernacle up straight away, but delayed for three months, despite the fact that the people wanted to dedicate it at once. In this is repeated a lesson of patience concerning matters of the spirit. For instead of accepting their Teacher's word, which conveyed the will of God, the Israelites sought to impose their own will over what they had made ... This phenomenon is not unknown among those who cannot wait, which is a vital part of esoteric training. Unfortunately, it has to be demonstrated over and over again that the timing of a spiritual event is contingent upon a cosmic schedule, and not the will of the individual.
Z.B.S. Halevi -- Kabbalah and Exodus

Current Location: happy lamp and coffee
Current Music: Fleetwood Mac: Dreams

Impressionism / Mary Cassatt/ Girl with a Banjo

So, I subscribed to Philosophy Now and came across this little gem.

But at the same time, as I was listening to some Greensky Bluegrass. This was the song playing.

That's all. Take some time. Read one and listen to the other. What else are you doing?

Current Location: In front of the happy lamp
Current Music: Bluesky Bluegrass: Living Over

Art Nouveau / A.Y. Jackson/ Winter Morning, Charlevoix County

Personal life needs no report to describe dullness. Don't see any reason to get crazy and change this though.

Last night I tried to figure out Opera. Coming to the conclusion that the older, the better. And maybe the acting ought to get better. I think that I will forego any further research into this matter.

Screed:

So, looks like Biden is in the dumpster. Fifth place shows suckage. Biden has always been a sleazy little shithead. It's just too bad he didn't get seventh. Bernie got a win. But the sleazy little consultant that the big boys are grooming for their spokesmodel showed a strong second, and the ghosts of Hillary past showed third and fourth.

I am torn with Bernie, I will vote for him if he is the nominee. If he isn't the nominee I will probably hold my nose and vote for fuckwad.

But even should Bernie get the nomination (25% chance, tops) he will force the party to re-evaluate and things will harden off and probably cause a split in the party. The corporate Democrats who currently have the keys won't give in, there is too much money and too many perquisites flowing into the party and their personal hands to give up. The first rule of politics is that you never, ever give up your power and money. Bernie represents the move to have people do just that.

AOC is a pretty smart kid. She said out loud what everyone knows in their heart of hearts. There is no left wing in American politics. There is only the right and the center right. But with that admission, she reinforces my opinion that the right will do anything to prevent any movement of the American spectrum to the left. So the Democratic party apparatus will do what it needs to do to prevent Bernie's getting the nomination.

Any of other contenders to the Democratic mantle will do what the money and the power tell them to do (Sorry Gabi, but you ain't a contender). Just like Trump. If Bernie wins, I think that he will try to shift things to the left. If this happens, there will be a fragmentation and possibly a civil war. It won't be Bernie's fault. I think that he will try to do the right thing regardless. But the owners, the 1% and the 19% that are their henchmen will move heaven and earth to continue the maldistribution of wealth and power that allows for the presentation of their status and the continuation of their greed.

Bernie represents class war. The right wing deplorables and the left wing deplorables are starting to figure it out. The elite want to keep their thumb on the masses, right where they are. This is not a situation that can continue, all we have to decide is when the treatment will begin.

Current Location: Happy Lamp and Tea
Current Music: Molly Macve: Sycamore Tree

Impressionism / Antoine Blanchard/ Porte St. Denis

Weaseled out of a social event last night. Still feel a little guilty, but Thursdays just ain't my day. Came home, read a little and went to bed early.

No guilt

Screed:

One of the reasons I got out of the business is the propensity of the denizens to cry wolf.

I tend to think that the folks who go into virology and infectious disease see themselves as knights errant, bravely battling the unseen death of disease. But truth be told, as a group, we were remarkably parochial in our outlook and appallingly mercenary in our responses. Seems to me that we were blinded by the less than complete truths revealed to us by the flawed statistics that we used to gauge things and the desire to prophetic in our proclamations.

Yep, new disease coming out of China. Wow, first time that has ever happened. Oh, some people are dying. Not good.

But what has it been, a week now? Maybe two weeks?

I find this article interesting

I can't say for a moment that I trust the r naught value that has been assigned. The death toll doesn't seem to be all that bad and the recovery rate....well lets just say it is a bit early to tell. I would guess that it is offing folks weakened by other diseases, poverty, and environmental degradation. Oh wait, this is China, and not the rich China of the coast.

I think that as long as there is a population problem in China and India, the problems will come out of there. China will be more prolific in the generation of new strains because of the cold and the close quarters shared by humans, animals, and vectors. But I think that new black plagues are not in the cards. Oh granted, there is a chance of something worthy of becoming an epidemic, but the chances are pretty small.

One of the things that I do know is that one day there will be a pandemic from a new disease. Said pandemic will probably kill quite a number of people. A new strain of XXXX is out. That will be coming every year for the rest of the days of homo sapiens. What is needed is a way to ignore the bleatings of the press and the cognoscenti and deal with what comes.

I think that folks get off on thinking about the apocalypse. Too many zombie movies, too many stories of the last man on earth battling nature to retrieve his passionately missed lifestyle.

Hell, none of that stuff is going to happen. Even if a new flavor of the bubonic plague comes tearing through, it would behoove everyone to remember that even with rats and lice being prevalent, the plague only took a third of the population. Like it or not, even if that went up to half, we would only be back to the population when I was a junior in high school. I think that the human race would manage.

Now, don't get me wrong, I am not in any way rooting for the disease, all I am doing is pointing out that we had better get used to this kind of shit. It is going to get worse as it is part and parcel of a too-populated world.

Current Location: Happy Lamp and Coffee
Current Music: Jay Z/Rhianna: Run This Town

Early Dynastic Period (3150 – 2686 BC) / Ancient Egypt/ Women Preparing Food, Tomb of Djari

I didn't have an alarm today. That is turned off until Wednesday. This is a good thing.

Gonna head up to Kingston today, Might stop in Centralia and/or Olympia to pick up a stamp or two for my McMenamin's passport and nibble some lunch. Maybe the Spar is still serving the "Hangtown Fry" which will bring me screeching back to the early nineties for my reminisces.

Driving will suck as always, I will wait until around 09:00 to get on the road so that I can avoid the bulk of the idiots here in the Rose City.

Last time I spent time thinking before I sat down to write. I think that doing such in a bar where people serve you dark brown alcohol, while it does let you work around problems in the plotline, makes for a serious lack of ambition when you get home to sit down and at the laptop and type words into a word processor.

But all might turn out well anyway. On the drive today is several hours of boredom and thinking. I will try to use that as a tool to throw together the dialog and the motivations. Hopefully I will do better this time than I have done in the past.

Screed:

"The barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being.

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”

Hilaire Belloc

Now, there are those out among you who feel that I am directing this last quote at fuckwad. Well, in truth, you may well be partially correct. Trump fits the description to a "T". But unfortunately, these kind of folks are in charge of the asylum thoughout. Now granted, there are some pretty honorable, pretty decent folks out there in office, but they are thin on the ground.

I am kinda thinking that the change that has been brewing in my lifetime is coming to a head. Now, Joseph walked away with five ounces of silver because I though that 2015 would be the date. I didn't mind at all being wrong, but I do miss those eagles.

There is a lot of talk out there about making the change to suit the majority. But I really think that such a thing isn't possible. For the past twenty years we have been an evenly divided polity. At the same time, whichever side wins an election with a "majority" feels that they have a "mandate" to shove whatever current fashion appeals to a small majority of the electorate down the throats of a large minority of the electorate.

This is how you end up with the ruthless barbarians we have had to suffer though since 1980.

Current Location: Tea and Happy Lamp
Current Music: Lila Downs: Xquenda

Abstract Expressionism / Robert Goodnough/ Vari-color gold

Plugging along on the music project. The next thing to do is to go over the Book/Kindle/Reader project. I am looking at Amazon with a jaundiced eye right now. I think that them having the "books" that I have purchased "safely" stored in one of their data centers just isn't cool. I purchased the books contents in order to have them available to me. I don't feel that I purchased the contents to be read with Amazon's permission.

So I am going to plug along with the music scheme. Currently I have one day, ten hours, and twenty-seven minutes of music taking up residence on a small player and a couple of hard drives. I think that I will expand that out to ten days straight of music. I will need to purchase a 16gb microSD card to accomplish this, and also pester friends and friendly bar owners for access to CD collections, but I don't see this as too much a problem

Books are going to be easier. One of the nice things about going with a Linux system is there are many folks out there who have put in hard work neutralizing Amazon's stranglehold. I will be commenting further on this as I continue my research. As always, Project Gutenberg is an amazing resource that needs to be cloned everywhere possible.

Maybe not to much today on the screed front. Gonna go have lunch with the FamDamily and then hang out and watch some football. As I side note on this little pathology (re:football, not family. But sometimes I do wonder), I have decided that losing in an online league is actually winning.

Current Location: Laundry and Coffee
Current Music: Dusty Springfield: I Don't Want to Hear it Anymore

Ustad Mansur/ Zebra

Back around to Friday. Gotta get through and get done with today and then....I don't know what. Maybe nothing. I probably will go in to work and pump up the hours and the "best three" retirement years for the soon arriving "get the fuck out of Dodge" moment.

Weather has been holding pretty steady, people around me not so much so. I think that I will keep a weather eye out on things that need to get done and things that need to be assiduously avoided. I'll head over to the Vantucky sometime this weekend and hang out with the famdamily.

Gotta figure out how/when to get the fuck out of Dodge. Right now this is just a short-term thing, but I have to start strongly considering how to do the long term thing.

Screed:

War is the health of the state.
Randolph Bourne

"Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. . . . the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down."
Woodrow Wilson

Thinking that it ain't gonna be too long now. Pray I am wrong. I certainly have been in the past.

Current Location: Happy Lamp and Coffee
Current Music: Jamestown Revival: Dead Wrong

Early Sunday morning. I am doing the laundry and drinking coffee. Today is wandering over Vantucky way to hang out with the elder and hope that the younger can spare a moment. I am not holding out any particular hope.

I do have to pick up spices from Winco and maybe a couple of pounds of tea from my little Russian Store. I am feeling the need to up my game in the pantry. I am feeling that the cold times might be pretty damned cold this winter. The market is making some strange creaking and the money looks to be getting shaky. I am going to spend some time with AA tonight. She is country-crazy enough to understand where I am going with this.

Screed

I gave out the link in yesterday's post. So let's start from the beginning. The title itself gives a pretty big clue as to the author's mindset and what audience he is pitching the article toward.

The Rise of the Incompetent Citizen and the Appeal of Right Wing Populism

If the title itself isn't a tell, I don't know what is. Now, I do want to tell you that the article is well written and has many cogent points that need to pondered in a serious way. But the author is an academic, pure and simple. My guess is that he is tenured and has years of clear thought behind him going into this article. I kinda think that I read a couple of his early papers in the long-ago when I was going to be a lawyer and reveled in the soft sciences. But that may just be old age creeping up on me.

Now, you are probably asking "what tell are you talking about?" What I am talking about is the differing parts of society described by Toynbee and to a less extent, Spengler. The man is a true-blood elite. Now, there is no problem with the idea of the elite. To ability posit that all people are gifted with the same intellectual horsepower is to ignore the evidence of the world around you. As a matter of fact, the basic premise is that the Hoi Polloi just ain't got the horsepower

The weakness is the relative inability of the citizens of the modern, multicultural democracies to meet the demands the polity imposes upon them. Drawing on a wide range of research in political science and psychology, I argue that citizens typically do not have the cognitive or emotional capacities required.

Fair enough. As a man who spent four years in the infantry and way too much time in the seedy working-class bars that I so enjoy, I really can't argue this point. I think that this gentleman's point is clear.

But, as an elite, he is part of the minority that have created the Democracy that he now feels as threatened. Whether the gentleman likes it or not, the complexity and the mental effort required to understand and successfully navigate an increasingly complex polity are, in a great majority of the population, beyond their intellectual powers.

But exactly what to do. That is a pretty huge question. I will get back to that in tomorrow's post. I got laundry to do.

Current Location: Doing Laundry
Current Music: Red River: Red River Dialect

Man, healing is boring, that is all I gotta say on that matter.

So today I want to talk about my countrymen. Now, let's be honest, for all that we pump ourselves up with our obligatory optimism and self-esteem rituals, we are a fairly average bunch. Our education system is failing us, becoming a scam to allow the current possessors of the credentials to funnel off more than their fair share of the funny money circulating in the economy with the rapacious help of banks, Sallie Mae, and the Department of Education. I went into hock sending my youngest to do some learning and have some fun at the local University, but they really didn't bother to teach him and he really didn't put in that much effort to learn. So I get a couple more years pushing the rock, but truthfully, I don't mind. Now that he is off that wheel, he has decided that there is something to the life of the mind after all and appears to be actually thinking now. Maybe after a year or two of being an autodidact, he will be able to go back and polish off the rough edges of that particular learning methodology. I am actually more hopeful now than I was a year ago.

I guess that what make me sadder than anything is how going to University here has stopped being about teaching critical thinking, but has instead become a ticket-punching exercise, with rote learning and credentials and certificates that allow one to get a "good job" appearing to be the only goal worthy of pursuing.

I kinda thing that we are at the cusp of a pretty dramatic change in this attitude. Lots of folks are seriously questioning the methodologies and goals of higher education and are not liking the answers. The narrowing of the range for acceptable ideological thought is narrowing, and the persecution of unbelievers is becoming both evident and distasteful. Academia has always had a touch of the "ivory tower" deal going on, but lately it has become endemic and the means of suppressing questions and dissent much more intrusive and spiteful than before.

So, now that part of the rant is over, I will try to connect this idea with the ideas from the last couple of posts. The educational system that I so freely disparage is the fons et origo of the bourgeois culture that passes for the dominant majority here in the US of A. It is currently how this tragically dysfunctional system scores supplicants to the dominant minority and through the indoctrination received, how it keeps the accepted in line and allows the bourgeois heritage to pass from generation to generation.

As I have stated in the past, I am on the fringes of the dominant minority, but I never, ever bought in. I am first and foremost a Prole. I am not ashamed of this, actually I quite proud of this. But knowing both the self-absorbed coterie of the dominant minority and the steady marginalization of the proletariat to service that self-absorption, I am placing my bets on the proles.

Because you see, at the end of the day, the bourgeois poseurs that inhabit the dominant minority and control the gates of the educational system that serves as the gatekeeper for entry to that dominant minority will find that the canaille massing outside their ivory tower aren't there to ask nice for entry, but are there to tear it down.

Current Mood: 等候
Current Location: Looking out at grey skies
Current Music: Not feeling it today

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Degringolade

June 2025

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A Sorta Public Diary and Comment

Entries tagged with hexagram 05

Book Notes

Whiskey

OnePot

Cranky

Nietzsche's Bluegrass

Too Bad Bernie

Mers-Sars-NCoV

No Alarm

Sunday's

Non Dodge

Incompetence

Nourishment