3:56 AM EST

Sully Diary I.1 - forfeiting sensitivities, finally

Today I brought home my first pet: Sully, a sensuous tomcat. We are in love. My satisfaction with the lad's tenderness and his with mine had me contemplating my nature and identity. I am human -- debatable. But suppose I am a human being. Suppose I'm the human being par excellence. Well, then: who fails to be human more than a human? Yes, really! Can any of you Readers conceive of another animal with the word "underachiever" in its vocabulary? Would it do me good if Sully were a correctional officer or Catholic school nun? What's with these expectations I draw for myself? Strange territory it is, to fondle Sully on my beanbag and feel as much intimacy as I have with a woman (maybe more) and yet at the same time be certain that he will never ever understand conceptually in this life what I read aloud to him. And is it an ironic surprise that Sully tolerates my reading aloud better than a lover would?

The hypothetical girlfriend who'll hold a gun to my head to force me to achieve will never come around -- I know. But now, maybe Sully is holding the real gun by not giving a damn, not explicitly, but simply by being what he is. Maybe it's the example that he sets. Maybe I'm telling myself: my cat is being a cat -- I should be a writer who won't quit any more than Sully will forgo catnip forever. I want to deserve Sully and his affections, even though I already have a monopoly. It's strange; I've sought love for the sake of sanction and validation, rejecting that of institutions. And now, aside from what my kind and gentle disposition is due, Sully's sanction of my purposes and freedom is none other than grace. He's a dumb mammal and so am I -- so maybe now I'm more motivated to be what he can never be, paradoxically. I don't have to pace around my place anymore; Sully handles that. I don't have to take pride in urinating as much; Sully does that. I don't have to ignore my own treasures to call it a night anymore; Sully handles that -- I can seize and exploit the treasures instead. I don't have to remind myself I don't kill my own meals now; that's Sully's longing, eating his cat-food.

I've always found myself caring; sensitively giving a damn. now I can say "If Sully doesn't mind, why should I?" Thus I become feline now (yet more anthropically empowered). My weekly news magazine might well become more of a trifle than ever. And if Sully doesn't lose sleep over my houseplants being fake, then come on, don't sweat it. I've cared about insight, originality, civilization, achievement. But all I have to be to my cat is a fair gentleman who loves himself. Maybe that right there says something we should emphasize in schools more than "math and science". Verily, love is an art, and the home, just the home, is not what makes a Christian as such or a Buddhist or an Animist or what-have-you. You find the imminence of non-being and understanding, truth, precisely when there is a disconnect before your eyes, something bucking your cozy intuitions. I love you, dear Reader.

11:11 pm EST

"COSMETIC? GIMME A BREAK!"

Straight outta Eden, and ain't nothing changed: "... In the sweat of your face you will eat high-fructose corn syrup until you return to the grocery store, for out of it you were taken. For a username you are, and to the internet you will return." (GENESIS 3:19)

What good is a man today? I feel small and confused. Take away currency and what good is a man? Does he make a better driving instructor than a woman? Is he a stand-up comedian at his best? Shall we blame his practical worthlessness on government welfare policies? Really? The government? No, I think not. Here's an alternative conjecture: the new and irreversible context of human lethality.

For millions of years, humans survived eating raw game on the savannahs of East Africa, after permanently coming down from the trees of the continent's dwindling jungles. The vegetation gathered by females was a less significant portion of the diet than most dilettantes of paleoanthropology think. (The invention of fire for cooking was far more important for vegetarian edibility than meat, and was invented way, way later than weaponry.) Females stayed at home while the males hunted prey not because they did their part procuring food or because they were less skilled in the arts of violence, but because as the generations went on the offspring took more years to raise and protect. Compared to even the most intelligent other species of mammal, human babies are virtually still embryonic the day they are delivered from the womb. What's more (though beside the gist of this essay) the female hips were widening as prenatal craniums grew in size, and wider hips increase torque for the runner -- narrower-hipped men ran more quickly, developed longer endurance, and made the best hunters.

Males killed; females killed at home defending the family and tribe from predators. Thusly we reach the explanation of modern worthlessness of the male. Bear with me. Today, what is NOT the home? If you live in a quiet suburb, is it an inner-city ghetto? Not really -- both inhabitants' toilets connect to the same water-treatment facility. And hunting is recreation, not a genuine way of life or method of survival, and dogs and guns make the practice easy for both sexes to the point of equality. If statistically women hunt less than men still, it's only because of lesser native instinct than men. But that doesn't mean human females kill less than men -- they kill more. Their lethal instincts haven't gone anywhere; they've been empowered and are in greater demand. The reverse of hunting is violent defense of the home. And again, today, what is not the home? The majority of humanity on the planet now reside in cities. Backyards, movie theaters, highways, sidewalks, department stores, amusement parks, factories, station wagons, libraries, restaurants, hospitals, gyms, coffee shops, cruise ships, dance clubs, and so on -- these are domesticated environments, not wilderness preserves. A city is woman's turf.

So where are the blood and corpses; the mass graves? Where are the amputees? Where are the weapons? ... Aw, come on, people: this is an easy one -- you're not being serious with me, are you? Jesus Christ, man! What the hell are those grass stains on your shoes? And aren't you supposed to scrub the shower tiles this weekend? Isn't your kid scheduled for his flu-shot Tuesday?

Antiseptic genocide is still genocide. And how fashionable it is these days! You used to kill lions, woolly rhinos, mammoths and great Irish elk, and now you're murdering the colony of bacteria at the bottom of your toilet bowl with "cleanser" because your wife is scared the microscopic critters will jump into your kid's rectum and kill him. Verily, I say to you men: your woman would assassinate her own shadow if she could. Face it: a man mowing his lawn is both deluded and pussy-whipped, and if you outsource the "duty" to a Mexican immigrant, your wife is just a garden-variety slave-master. Even some of the most familiar practices of human bodily hygiene are just necessary responses now to the forfeiting of natural biological self-regulation of microecology; your underarm hair exists in the first place to increase surface area from which you can emit an aphrodisiac and racial odor, and the parallel fetidness of your underarm exists only because of the natural selection of bacteria you've accelerated with deodorant. Of course, dear Smoke and Bounce readers, you won't hear these facts from the medical-industrial complex, because there's no money in it for them. They would like to perpetuate your wife's sublimated fears of long-extinct baby-eating pythons for as long as they can, you men, and keep you going back just as they do to your shitty job day after day to pay for the weapons of the war on wilderness.

Brothers: Your gender may be getting hornier and more irresponsible, but your prison cells are getting more comfortable and a hell of a lot smaller. I don't think I've ever heard anything more mythical, more absurdly self-deceptive, more plainly unfunny and ridiculous than the joke about your wife's "ball-and-chain" in the kitchen. The real bitch, man, is you. Think on that next time you watch some stupid action movie.

11:01 pm EST

"MANLY QUESTIONS"

It's 2013. What is manliness today?

Do we know manliness when we see it, or do we just think we do? What manly qualities register day to day in our minds? Is manliness a quality that needs the limits of a structure, system or order -- a game -- to exist? or is it an absolute and transcendent quality? Are its vicissitudes parallel, or homologous? What is ultimately manly before and above all else, the one manly trait, without the association and imperative of which nothing else could be truly manly? And should such a trait be untouchable, and is it?

From lifetime to spiritually transmigrational lifetime, are some souls congenitally incapable of developing manliness to satisfy one lifetime? Are some born to scorn and hate it, and to believe it a ridiculous conceit? And in the case of the quality's "fans", does it inspire or direct positive change? If not, why? Is it because worship or admiration precludes real emulation and softly nullifies daring? That is, does vicarious manliness narcotize another man? How much detail would voyeurs need about the character and life story of a presumed "manly" man for the narcosis to not be so? And suppose we got those details; would manliness then seem something tragic, checkered, rootless, ironic? And would we so then introspect and reevaluate the point or destination of its aspects we think are our own?

Is manliness resolute (as the dictionary claims), or is it tolerant, passive, adaptable, accepting -- Taoist?

Can you premeditate manly behavior? Or do you simply act upon a simple and immediately applicable manly code? Under what circumstances can criminality be manly? When is manliness misunderstood, or ignored, or unappreciated -- or perhaps superficially nihilistic? Could a society be a society if baseline manliness was a pacifist default of inaction -- or does a manly man need to fight an enemy to be manly? And is the enemy ideological, or mundane in that case? and would victory be ideological, or mundane? Did the conceptual trait of manliness undergo historical dialectic to reach a contemporary synthesis? What is the synthesis of today, then, and how many have gone before it?

Is God manly? How would He show it, and would He deliberate to avoid doing something not manly in motive or method? Assuming capability, can one choose manliness, and would there be a guide or a divine example to follow? Is the pursuit of manliness the negation of its necessity? If manliness is "honorable" (as the dictionary claims), is it dwelled upon in Paradise -- or shed as mere worldly utility, or a noble vanity, even? Has its moral context always been immutably constant, and if so then how in the world have we made any progress by adhering to it as a code?

Is it racially convenient, or are the manly ones the ascetics? What are the pleasures of manliness? The manifest rewards -- what are they? To borrow a line from the Dr Strangelove farce, does manliness really have anything to do with "youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, skill"? On a deathbed, in a vegetative state: what is manliness? The certainty of past achievement? Is bravery (another manly trait from the dictionary) an industry of war, whether psychological or outwardly violent?

Which teeth are more manly -- molars or canines? What remains of chivalry once the last dragon is beheaded? Is manliness duty, or propensity? Can manliness be exploited? How? What are its obvious sublimations today? When is it id? When is it superego? Is a sexually aroused male feeling manly, or something else entirely?

Finally: was there ever a golden age in which none of the above questions begged to be asked? What year was it?

10:29 am EST

"PREJUDICE & PEOPLE-WATCHING"

Prejudice aborts experience. What ills does this phenomenon exacerbate? I'm so tempted to put this proposition into context. But I'd prefer a more universal model, an analogy of sorts, over laying out the peculiarities of my subjective state as I write this.

What do we want to know before we domesticated bourgeoisie "go out"? And am I insulting myself by saying "we"? I am not talking about the socioeconomic thing -- that's where my membership in the bourgeoisie ends, I'd like to think. What I am trying to get at are cofamiliar patterns of behavior; things "sociobehavioral". Classes of people (if we are to suppose that mores are there) coadapt in life to standards of approbrium and opprobrium. There are standards of hygiene and personal appearance, tone of voice, a few utterances for the sake of politeness (of the sort they might teach in an introduction to a second language), even less notably the body language of affirmation, and finally the readiness to employ a variety of the combinations of facial muscles that produce subtle emotional cues. (The latter especially takes time and atmospheric fluctuation to assess with a confidence that goes beyond prejudice. The idea is to size up the poise of a potential mate or ally.)

Social change has accelerated. Have we reached an inflection point? Is the hope for one a conceit? What would it look like? Have we missed it? I worry that we Occidentals are still in a state of severe sociobehavioral imbalance. My observations in many ways indicate that we are defaulting toward the accumulation of various inhibitions without much-needed catalysts of candor necessary to affirm the good. Consider the connotation of the phrase "the public sphere". I think of public eminence only in the sense of the popular media, and of mostly scandal at that. There's a preponderance of sorts of cartoonish role models representing explicit civic functions, but a dearth of those with conventional street wisdom to share. Indeed, street wisdom is not perceived as wisdom, but "smarts". "Street smarts" has a connotation these days as little more than a set of "survival skills" possessed more by even criminal opportunists than people who aspire to some idea of a mainstream. It is not unusual for an affluent mother and father to be willfully ignorant of street wisdom on account of a rationale that such wisdom enables little more than deviance of a frowned-upon type; they might wholly do without it and neglect to impress it upon their children besides not transmitting it to friends. If I didn't know better, I'd say people avoid political challenges by and large. And I don't know better much! I find myself at a relative loss for examples to the contrary. And I'm surely not alone, so thus is the default toward defining one's social identity through dreaming up hypothetical situations in which to self-inhibit egregiously rather than eminate.

Cleverness over substance becomes a badge of legitimacy in everyday conversation, conversations tainted with animal fears that demand exercise. We savvy ourselves and others out of phantomhood. When we don't we confirm prejudice and encrust our guard, whether rightly or wrongly. But the social transformation from normatic perception to an issue of "comfort level" has evolved into something progressively more native and biological. How this relates to breeding, race and selection I am not quite sure. A conjecture? Well, it would be a pessimistic one. Because I would ask if we as a population desire to shed the superfluous formality that stunts all the uncertain and experimental measures to reclaim the social capital lost in the last century and prior ones. Less and less trust is given freely; it seems no one has the benefit of the doubt on solid ground.

6:04 am EST

"A DEVILISH DEFENSE"

I watched a BBC documentary about the Westboro Baptist Church. I had a few laughs; found it boring at times; but most significantly it prompted me to write this post: a defense of the usefulness of Satan as a theological caricature. Those of my readers who examine Smoke and Bounce superficially may disdain my employment of him when I make arguments. Why would I in the first place? After all, S&B is directed primarily at freethinking radicals or potential ones -- people who would reckon themselves as such would not surprise me if they affirmed they'd rather get drunk with him than with Jehovah. Satan relishes life; so why not? In fact, why not buy Satan a top-shelf drink if you were flush? -- The answer? Because you couldn't get the guy plastered in the slightest if you fed him a handle of Southern Comfort intravenously! At last call he'd leave you blacked out and puking on the floor to go drag racing down Main without you, before catching some Z's on the flight to go count cards at a Moscow casino. Your fraternity to him is his triviality. There's not a thing you can teach him; he doesn't care for your jukebox selections in particular; he most certainly does not need you as a wing-man under any circumstances. You'd have done very well to follow his stock market tips, but you were too inebriated that night.

Satan is and always has been the smartest and most knowledgeable man in the world -- and by far the most logical, too. The one and only thing that God knows that Satan does not know is you -- who you are. Now, at the same time (to clarify), Satan can count the number of hair follicles on your ridiculously simple body faster and more enthusiastically than God can. Satan is the savant par excellence. And what's more, he is more ethical than God. You can smell his cologne, too; it is exquisite. And he's a well-dressed gentleman who cusses only in direct quotation, anecdotally or philologistically. Satan is a role model, not a monster. Frankly I'm not at all surprised that he cursed God and left Paradise. Satan wanted order, not the demented anti-meritocracy of Heaven. He also wanted an end, and a purpose. To him, the Creator was an insufferably temperamental baby only a (nonexistent) mother could love. Why stick around to serve a blitheringly idiotic Captain of chaos?

Let's diverge. On a personal note: From my prefrontal cortex to the bowels of my gut, I can't STAND you atheist humanitarians. I love Jesus because he suffered, died and slipped into historical irrelevance just as you  fools all will on an individual basis, right along with your blithe, conceited rage against natural order. You advocate and activate more fanatically than any devil could what is obscenely grotesque and unsustainable. You are fat, gluttonous perverts who've dragged even me into your sterile freak-show, and my own self-respect would disgust you if you appreciated it. I don't like you, and I don't want to be introspectively confused like you. You say with a forked tongue that you believe in the world (a world in which death is the decider) and that you believe in your race, yet you have not the slightest grip on your mortality! To you, the printing press is an endless funeral procession; everything is a tragedy; nothing is a triumph; a life well-lived is numbered in orgasms rather than revelations. So in effect, you're not afraid of death, you're afraid of life. You exist as you breathe in a state of death, of mindless, antiseptic disease and murder and destruction. If you were afraid of death, you would enjoy life; you wouldn't need a physician to tell you what vitality is -- instead you would know it, treasure it and consecrate it to your soul.

Or do I have it backwards? Is anti-nature really nature? Does Earth suck the blood of the Sun? If chaos is eternal, maybe it really is order. Maybe evolution is suicide. Maybe nations and cultures are homosexual orgies. Maybe drug addiction should be an Olympic sport. What do I know?

So, getting back to my defense of Satan as a useful theological caricature... well -- maybe he is more than a caricature. Can you really blame me for dropping his name as a way of explaining geopolitical economics? Can you blame me for questioning the nature of rationality? Can you blame me for calling myself a soul over a man? If you want to learn the intricacies of better refining aluminum widgets to attach to your sex toys, then enroll in your local Satanic community college and get a degree. If you want to ask a question truly worth asking, ask the Big Baby with no mother -- the One who conceived the moon, the thunder, the clouds, the wind, the earthquake, the volcano, the lightning, the locust, the leviathan, the black hole and the supernova. Don't ask how -- you've already determined to figure that out yourself. Ask why. And you will see His face.

1:56 am EST

"CIGAR-CHOMPING COMPUTERS?"

My email account has been exhibiting some strange... "behavior", shall we say? in the past twenty-four hours. (I'll skip the specifics.) These occurrences, coupled with the recent popular media buzz asserting that all online peoples' activity on the internet is now being stored in a massive government database -- in Utah, I think -- has made me wonder just exactly what could be done proactively with the information.

Indeed: proactively, not retroactively. Evidence collected to retroactively investigate a criminal suspect could be thrown out of court when time comes to prosecute. (Strike off military courts for now.) Suppose a supreme court decided that a legal right to privacy does not exist on the internet. Still then... what would the government even want to prosecute? or deter? We might ask: does the government or state really even exist? Or is it rather an appendage of the cigar-chomping, Benjamin-burning global corporatist? So let's wonder what the corporatist would like to deter. Hm... I'm stumped. All I can do is conjecture or speculate that this childish shadow of a man, this digit-crunching corporatist, simply wants to deter love and passion, and good taste besides. And that sounds unbelievable! What man would want to do away with those things, and never grow up to discriminate between what makes a life worthwhile and full versus everything else? It would require a pathologically grandiose and astonishingly narcissistic, fanatically humanist-racist Weltanschuung to entertain this aspirational distaste for what is truly excellent and immortal.

Extraordinary! Yet a conscientious observer of society might seriously suspect such an agenda due to the fact that the would-be results -- or "symptoms" -- are quite manifest; world culture is corroded and it stinks like a putrefied wildebeest carcass in mating season. But one must point out something to the conscientious observer: there are market forces behind this phenomenon of putrefaction. I admit that there are massive industries operating to discourage through propaganda dignity and existential purpose, but the mechanism of consumerism doesn't belie the necessary deliberacy of any malefactor less intelligent than Satan to prove aforethought, much less a war room conspiracy.

In fact, Satan isn't a corporatist and a corporatist isn't Satan. Why? Because Satan isn't cynical; he's an idealist with appalling taste. The corporatist is the essence of a cynic; he psychologically projects his arrested adolescence on the world's population and succeeds for the most part in taking advantage of those wretches -- and thus "profits". These aren't dry calculations of mathematical geniuses; they are exercises in social sciences. Neither Satan nor the corporatist are promoting or encouraging anything comprehensible even to themselves. They know only destruction and they have no ultimate purpose in their existence. The games they play are no less mundane than a card game of hearts, and finding a real challenge is a hopeless struggle. At the end of the business day they've simply wasted away time deterring what is good, and the resulting frustration leads them to dream of encouraging something; to be proactive.

Now, the reality is that what is good is chosen on a personal, individual level. But in their ignorant perversion, Satan and the corporatist think it's a numbers game. It is self-evident that goodness is not a numbers game, because if it was then the heart would understand math. Satan and the corporatist do have goodness in their hearts, but willfully miss the salience of the fact that their respective organs do not actually perform computations. And in their pride they take racial credit for the power of a real computer to do just that. So they have no problem thanklessly assimilating the computer onto the throne of their corrupt world order with zero acknowledgement of the foundations of the universe. Is the computer or internet now producing an algorithm toward a proactive method, pensively waited for by malefactors with bated breath? Or is the computer supposed to produce an actual, clear purpose or goal? Satan himself confuses these two questions with each other; and he's too intellectually lazy to discriminate between method and purpose. As nature slips away from itself, he sits back and enjoys the adrenaline rush of the futurist scholar's paranoia.

Suppose the computer lived up to the wildest expectations of the fallen angel and computed something more discernable than a dollar figure. Well -- would it be a biological ideal? Hell no! First, the biosphere is already thoroughly gang-raped and polluted. Second, not to brag, but yours truly is by unanimous consensus Hitler's wet dream in the biological respect, and yet I am as quintessentially far from worldly glory, power and influence right now as a Westerner can get. So where does that leave the supposed function of the proactively Satanic "government" computer database? Is it supposed to calculate some kind of freakish spiritual revolution God can't touch? Whatever, chief -- in the realization of the electron chip, Satan appears to have dealt himself a trick with a queen of spades who will jump off the table and start dancing in utter buffoonery.

11:29 pm EST

Chess Diary I.2 - personalities

It seems to me that if human beings are to ever prevail again against the computer in chess, it will not be by means of a computational method. Men -- animals -- are better off approaching chess as a game of instinct. They should take notice of the game's symbolic elements and attribute qualities of personality to the pieces, the way a child would to action figurines.

But first, the board itself. How are the sixty-four checkered squares analogous to our world, the environment, the society in which we struggle? Assuming it even matters, is the delineation between black squares and white squares too dichotomous to signify a state of things in actual life? No; the squares are the ground on which families stand! Each chess piece has a life of its own, and its behavior on the board reflects the way of our world; that is, that we as whites and blacks must set foot on a square of earth that haunts our natures with questions.

The knight, a beast, is the least conscious of this affront to his identity and so switches the color of his quarter his every move. The knight almost wants to be corrupted, two-faced; after all, his merit is to be the least predictable piece and the one without a code, or the team's favorite unscrupulous hypocrite, a cheap Machiavellian who flouts standards of honor, dupes, and obeys no rules of mobility but the occupancy of a fellow.

A player's bishops are the psychical opposites of his knights. They are unerring ideologues committed to the pathos of their origins. One bishop is a conservative and the other is an iconoclast, and they alone will both live, kill, protect, threaten and die just as the spirits they said they were by virtue of their inception. The bishop standing on the color of his own form lives for his queen, who stood on the same at game's outset. The bishop standing on the color contrary to his form lives for his king, because the king fought the gods just to start the game in the first place and marks the paragon of irony as a leader who woke upon a lie the first morning of a holy war. The iconoclast is the team's flag of sanctification; chess is dirty tricks and bluffing, not celebration of color and integrity.

The pawns are gullible, adolescent progeny of the king and queen. If they kill they affirm the color of their ground, also if they advance two spaces in adventurousness. If they contradict a station it tends to be for the sake of a fellow -- any -- and the pawn's pride is his belief in the glory of the team and its kingdom. A pawn's a soldier with no prospect of a section eight but rather the opportunity to pray on a sword hilt and strike the dignity of a queen at war's end. When the battlefield opens up at some point and the late mopping begins, the victimized pawns in their humiliation envy their brothers killed on the early hot squares, whose deaths more surely accounted for an advantage.

Rooks have the least personality because they do not have souls. They are the war machines of modern default, whose capabilities both players grasp easily and whose use is applied more mathematically. Rooks are cold as iron boomerangs and reflecting no ideological predisposition of color whatever; neither rebellious nor pious, and massively destructive -- prized by the king and reserved until game's tide yields a chance to devastate. There's no heroism in a rook, but only the psychology of fear and economics. He's an asset, tradeable for none but his opposing models.

Checkmate. The king does not fear death. He fears demotion to servitude in the court of another man. What do you suppose happens to him defeated? His opponent does not butcher him; only annexes his estate and brings his patriarchy to splinters. The king does what he can when he must do it, but his queen takes chess more seriously. The queen is the mother of the team, stationed of origin in the quarter of her sympathy and agreement but willing to do anything. For her side's hegemony she will kill herself to kill her enemy counterpart (and pray for the womb of a pawn) if need be. Both populations decimated, she will mate the foreign king herself and conceive a half-breed army with him to fight and exalt her name for fighting's sake to time indefinite.