Every now and then these days I still have great ideas.

Then, I switch them off and work on paying ideas.

I am giving the best years of my intellectual life to the pursuit of cash, which requires that I divert raging creative and analytical energies along an engineered tributary leading to the little irrigation canals that can be used to grow garlic, onions, and tomatoes in order to fund the nasty habits of eating and sleeping.

This is what happens to the majority of the world’s best ideas, I suspect: they are recycled for change to feed parking meters, never heard from again, all the intellectual potential of generations bound up in asphalt and steel, paved over layer by layer, season by season, never to be seen or heard from again.

World’s loss.

Oh, and mine.

🙁

I could kill all of the world’s kindergarten teachers, who begin to tell students from such a young age that it is life’s cardinal virtue to stay “on task,” the “task” being, of course, precisely ideologically defined for a capitalist milieu.

All that is solid melts into air.

—

Are there any people left?

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The west is dying. How many generations remain before it is completely irrelevant? Six? Seven?

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Good riddance.

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We are all alone in this culture.

Just finished reading 2666 by Roberto Bolano.

I am still reeling.

Also, I need to create a “media” box here, like I had in 2002, to keep track of what I’m reading and watching and what I thought of it.

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One thing I’ve noticed recently, both in the stories coming out about the New School and tonight (this morning) as I’m reading some reader reviews of 2666 online: Americans are asses about their opinions, and most Americans’ ideological worlds are shut tightly around them.

The world is full, for most Americans, of lying intellectuals and communist plots. Nobody in their right mind should believe anything that’s actually published, or anything that’s taught in college classrooms, or indeed anything outside the sensationalistic whorehouses that are cable news. The others are lying, self-serving, red-guard intellectuals, all of them. Thought is but pretense. The wise don’t think, they kill, God Bless America!

—

I cannot express deeply enough how much I hate America at moments like this. Not the system, specifically, but rather the culture.

—

Oh, and my concise review of the novel:

This is a deeply troubling work. Not terrifying, quite, nor horrifying, nor shattering. Instead, demanding. Incriminating. An accusation of the most serious kind. Chilling. Mesmerizing. Giant, as it were.

The only thing I’ve read which approximates the scope or scale of the novel is War and Peace, but War and Peace is a rotten comparison because if you haven’t actually read 2666 yet but have read Tolstoy, such a comparison will give you absolutely the wrong idea.

2666 is a haunting, creeping, threatening, silently (and ever more) dangerous whisper that gradually accumulates, begins to hang in the air, the whisper of death, of all of the deaths of modernity, foremost amongst these the deaths of society and of a particular conception of humanity and civilization. It is not a eulogy for the modern project, but rather the warning of an impending reckoning, a cold, calculated demand for payment, the calm before a dreadful storm that (thankfully) doesn’t actually arrive in the novel’s pages, but that continues to color the silence that follows, the certainty of its ultimate arrival at some unknown future date all too clear.

It is an implicit, intuitive, wild summary of existential dread, of the uniquely modern aggregation of history atop which we live, of holocausts and nuclear politics and terrorism and slavery and capitalism and totalitarianism and unrestrained virtuality and uncontrollable sexuality and the tyranny, the utter, utter tyranny of individual and collective human agency, which has proven to be restrainable neither with freedom nor with unfreedom, neither with technology nor through romanticized constructions of the “natural.”

It is perhaps the most incriminating thing I’ve ever read, a pronouncement about the human condition in the age of exponential population growth, encroaching climate change, the unchallenged dominance of capital and the banalization of violence. As a sociologist, I found it to be endlessly illuminating and diverting. As a fan of fiction, I found it to be innovative and surprising. As a professional writer, I found it to be the most willfully “incorrect” body of writing that I ever been unable to put down.

the United States Postal Service is third-world in its reliability.

I have this tracking number from a shipper within ten miles of my home that shipped an item out last weekend, and it took until today for a delivery attempt to occur and be recorded in the tracking system. Three business days for their first delivery “attempt” only ten miles away. But that’s not all.

There was, in fact, no actual “attempt” to deliver at all. The tracking system says that just after 2:00 in the afternoon today, a postal worker attempted to deliver a package to us and we weren’t home, so a notice was left in our box.

We were here. We saw the guy. He didn’t attempt to deliver shit. And he didn’t leave a notice. Our mail people don’t deliver anything in this neighborhood. They walk on by. We saw him out the window today and actually had a conversation about it, wondering if he had something for us, finally, this crazy package that takes three days to come ten miles. But as happens probably 80 percent of the time these days, he didn’t even come in the building, much less try to buzz us.

So as I said, shortly thereafter the tracking system is updated to tell us “notice left,” but that’s also a lie. We don’t get any such notices. The tracking system will show “notice left” again tomorrow and again Friday (a total of three attempts) and on Saturday morning we will know from experience, without ever having received a notice, that have three hours to go to the local office and demand our package, no notice in hand, about which they will hassle us, claiming that if there really was a package for us, we’d have received at least one pink notice. We will make a series of threats and get into a verbal fight with the office staff and finally someone will check and whaddyaknow, there really will be a package for us, lucky we came by, it would have been returned to sender or liquidated if we’d waited.

This has been the state of affairs for a year or so.

We’ve complained and been told by the manager of the Long Island City post office that they know there’s a “problem” with “some carriers” not delivering mail, and they’re “working to resolve it.”

Well it’s been a year and we still have guys just not bothering to deliver mail to us. They stroll through the neighborhood like it’s a Sunday afternoon walk, then report that nothing could be delivered and at the end of the week everything is sent back. They don’t knock. They don’t buzz. They don’t leave notices. They just blow it off.

And we only can see this happening when we have something that was sent with delivery confirmation (as we do this week) so that we have a tracking number and are expecting it.

If someone sends us a package that we don’t expect via USPS and that we don’t have a tracking number for, it will never reach us and it will disappear into the void.

So, everyone: please don’t send us anything via the United States Postal Service, because we won’t receive it. The national mail here in America is simply not safe or reliable. Please use a company like Federal Express or United Parcel Service instead.

This is what comes of governance by fucking Republicans who foster a fucking cutthroat free market ideology suggesting that all public services should be drowned in a bathtub.

Can you tell I’d like to get my mail sometimes?

First, there are people who got where they are by working long and hard, climbing the skills and statuses ladder one step at a time, putting in their dues, remaining diligent and organized, and eventually rising to the top.

Second, there are people who are brilliant and take risks and are forever trying to begin at the top, gaining fragments and flashes of additional brilliance with each new attempt, until eventually they alight.

These two kinds of people can never work together. Not only do they dislike, mistrust, and condescend to each other, they also cannot communicate at a fundamental level, and sharing languages and skillsets is not nearly enough to overcome this barrier. They are simply living in different worlds, according to different rules, and different limitations and criticalities.