Tiw's Day Thing, 9/20/22

Where the fuck have you been?!

Pictured: What’s been happening, in collage form. I think this is called a vision board or something.

“She is an aggressive mid-wit with a cloth ear to respectful discourse -- and from what I've gathered from her posts on multiple subs, a hothead who, to quote Virginia Woolf, "has read nothing, thought nothing, felt nothing." In other words, a troll. Do not feed.” - some guy; some comment thread (2022). Substack. If anyone wants to embroider this onto a sampler for me (I never learned), a year’s paid sub for you.

Holy crap, it’s been almost three weeks. And there’s like 50 more of you since then. Where the fuck did all these people come from? Someone should build a wall.

Pictured: a Mouth Farms heirloom tomato (actual diameter approx 6 goddamned inches) beats up a helpless little hothouse tomato from the Big City Supermarket for its lunch money.

• On Sunday 4th, I went back to Viking Fight Club because we got training versions of dane axes in and, after a month, I felt like my knee was back up to it and I desperately missed the exercise and socializing. I was fighting for a total of about 5 minutes when- no impact or fall- my knee blew out again, even harder this time, laying me out instantly and in so much pain I started heaving from nausea. I was still wearing a brace!

  • Husbandmouth was incredibly kind over the first couple days where there was really immense pain from just about any kind of movement, and I discovered (or perhaps really just internalized) that I have a REAL problem with being sick or disabled that I know comes from my mother and grandmother, both of whom had really self-destructive martyr fetishes, where I begin to feel incredibly depressed about being useless and worthless.

  • What was also a ‘rich emotional experience’ was relenting this time and actually going to a doctor, because this time I was worried about it happening AGAIN for no apparent reason. I was (and still am, a little) a bit scared, if I can confess that, of the idea of permanent damage- that I’m now “too old” or “too worn down” to do things like martial arts or hard play. Feeling and living youthfully are a big part of my identity, for better or worse- I’m often mistaken for younger, and I’ve long been grateful that I can go hard, take risks, and really devour life. For various reasons, I have a lot of time to make up for, and it would be hard for me to accept that the only medical explanation I ultimately receive is “you’re getting old.”

  • I also had to really confront what I can’t get around calling a “fear of doctors” that has developed since the beginning of COVID. I guess I could more precisely call it “fear of COVID measures in healthcare settings.” I went to a GP and then an orthopedist, and have an MRI next week, and in all cases, I dragged Husbandmouth along (and felt stupid and guilty about needing ‘backup’ for a doctor’s appointment) to A) save me from myself if I acted out about mask requirements or vaccines and/or B) make sure that no one attempted to vaccinate me against my will or otherwise mess with my ability to get help because of bad COVID behavior. And I feel ridiculous having just written those things.

  • I didn’t end up being forced to mask- which was good because I really needed healthcare this time- and COVID never came up at all, but we still don’t know exactly what’s wrong with my knee. A week and two days on, now, I have pain when I twist at the knee, and get soreness and throbbing after long exercise, but an X-ray revealed nothing wrong skeletally and the orthopedist actually encouraged me to exercise as much as possible without pain, except for lifting weights of any kind.

• Speaking of lifting weights, Brothermouth and I have spent the last three days putting up roughly 3 acres of electric fencing in a “wild and untamed” square of Mouth Farms, which involves dragging out metal T-posts, huge wooden gate posts, and metal cattle (and human) gates into the middle of a thickly-grown meadow, pounding those things manually into the clay-filled Rocksylvania ground, and hacking away paths in vegetation to see what the hell we’re doing. It is still plenty hot here, but thankfully global warming seems to have killed all the bugs, so we mainly just have to negotiate heat and fatigue. Brothermouth has risen amazingly to the occasion in picking up my slack when I have to rest more frequently as the uneven ground seems to fatigue my leg a lot- I guess I understand how Fathermouth felt when he was first here recovering from his vaxx injury.

  • As of today, all that remains is to run the wire through the clips we’ve attached to each post, hang all the gates, and hook up the electric fence power and controls, which sounds like a lot but is honestly less work put together than everything aforementioned. We’ll probably be done today or tomorrow. And we have good reason to rush; with autumn officially on, the pasture area we want to release our cows and hogs into becomes less nutritious every day, and the herd’s efforts at clearing that land becomes less likely to eradicate weeds for next year with things already going to seed.

• We were prompted to do all of this by another cow getaway about a week and a half ago, which led to chasing sprinting cows through neighbors’ corn fields and another roughly 2-mile hike leading them home after which my knee was like a softball. This expansion will radically increase their access to forage they haven’t already devoured to the ground, with more space to spread out and hopefully do it a whole bunch with each other like they’re supposed to be doing.

• I finally own an AR-15. I don’t know why I never bought one before; I never felt a specific need for one, but a friend called me at 11 at night to let me know about a flash sale of the notorious “AR Pistols” on Combat Armory at incredibly rock-bottom prices (under $300!!!) Unfortunately, I will need to affix my own brace and linear compensator and I don’t seem to have any of the tools appropriate to this (and, I guess, don’t know exactly what I’m doing) so will be bothering said friend sometime this weekend to make him do it since he was so goddamned excited about me buying the thing. Remember, everyone, things that make otherwise-unremarkable semiautomatic rifles more comfortable or easier to use accurately makes them dangerous assault weapons of war, but thankfully, those are still legal in this state.

• I lost my voice over the weekend. This was probably precipitated by a sinus or throat infection that I exacerbated by getting depressed over various things not going well and rapidly smoking a pack of cigarettes (especially when I don’t otherwise smoke anymore). I’m at “painfully croaking” level today, which I went and screwed up by running 2 one-hour meetings. When 95% of my paid work involves talking, this situation really sucks ass.

• Mothermouth just concluded a 4-day visit (yes, while I had no voice). It was her first visit in a long time as she has developed something of a travel anxiety. I love her but she is quite exhausting as she is allergic to silence of any kind, frequently talks over people, including immediately after having asked questions, and has the general posture that everything is happening because of bad things/not liking her, which leads to more anxious, loud talking that doesn’t seem to especially need responses. (“Are we going out to dinner? …You’re probably sick of everything around here. I can see on your face it’s the worst idea you’ve ever heard. Don’t get mad. You know what, I’m not really in the mood to go out anyway” before you’ve even had a chance to open your mouth.) I frequently fall into “cowboy” mode where I speak as little possible and answer as briefly as I can to minimize long strings of repetitive dialogue or loud noise. So losing my voice was a fucked-up kind of serendipity.

• Husbandmouth finally got a good, full time job. He’s driving for a major logistics company that I won’t name (purely to protect him from potential social media psychopathy in the interests of hurting me) that seems to be a pretty worker-friendly employer. He’ll be spending about a week alone in Baltimore for sleepaway camp training, during which time I am going to be incredibly worried about his sobriety while he has, I guess, pillow fights with the other truck drivers in their boxer shorts or something. I’m not really sure what big groups of unattended men do by themselves besides invade the Middle East or start secret societies. We are all very excited because it’s a really solid position with nice benefits that has him home every day, even if the days can potentially run long, doing meaningful work.

• I’ve decided to introduce some paid-only content starting pretty soon. Until now, I’ve offered paid accounts purely for people who really enjoy the stack and the community to show their appreciation and get free shit from the Gutter merch store, but never wanted to demand payment just to read the content I would have been posting anyway, and certainly not to have the right to comment.

  • And that is still essentially true. None of the kind of stuff I’ve written so far- the weekly Things and essays- will ever be paywalled. I’m introducing paid content to offer people who want it access to completely different, unrelated stuff, which I’m paywalling because it is stuff that I would otherwise or actually will pursue paid publication of in the future.

  • As I’ve mentioned in a few earlier posts, I had begun working in broad outlines on a book framed as a repository of advice for the future self of an adopted daughter, with each chapter covering an area of life or living with my accumulated “wisdom” (I just laughed hard enough that my nipples chafed) that I would want my child to have access to in the event I got hit by a bus or taken to an FBI-run happy camp for model citizens, and that such a collection might be useful to people who might find supportive advice from a complete stranger to be comforting, maybe because they had shitty parents or are raising themselves entirely using books ordered online as part of some dystopian reality show. So, I’ll be posting draft chapters here and essentially gradually dripping what will be a whole book if it ever gets finished.

  • I’ve also been really enjoying SCA: The Best Bad Fairy You Know because SCA, despite being too good to subscribe to this stack, makes me incredibly jelly (a slang term meaning ‘jealous’ that Brothermouth hates so much it actually steals a month from his life and adds it onto the end of whoever says it) of her short fiction, because once upon a time I actually had the imagination and discipline and character to do that.

    So I’ll also be trying out new pieces of short fiction here as well, things that I wouldn’t otherwise be publicly sharing except as an eventual compilation that I would try to publish.

  • In conclusion, those of you with your lame excuses for free subscriptions like “I need healthcare” or “I have a mortgage” or “your very existence is an insult to the Lord God Almighty” will miss out on absolutely nothing you haven’t already been enjoying. I’ll post the first few of these new things as paywalled-but-free-to-all-after-24-hours like some other people do so you can get a taste of them and see if they’re worth selling just a little more plasma this month to unlock. And any Gutterballs with a paid sub will of course get all this stuff without having to do anything special. Good? Good.

  We’re 2/3s into September already. A lot’s been happening.

  

• COVID shenanigans seem to be hitting the fan at an accelerated rate. In the not-too-distant future, we may even be able to say things like “cloth masks don’t stop a respiratory virus” and “there are actually lots of non-trivial social and medical and psychological costs to mask mandates” and “pharmaceutical companies acted in coordination with government agencies to cover up and deny mass-scale harm to people’s health with toxic injections, including the legal and professional destruction of their critics” without automatically landing on a domestic terrorism list.

  I’m not especially excited about all these truth bombs dropping, though, because as of this writing, not a single “whoopsie” the MSM deigns to cover has been accompanied by PROFESSIONAL OR LEGAL OR CRIMINAL CONSEQUENCES OF ANY KIND FOR ANYONE, NOT EVEN A SPECIFIC ACCUSATION OR FINDING OF GUILT.

• According to President Brandon, He Who Speaks Before The Blood Moon, the COVID pandemic is “over.” That’s a nice word, isn’t it? “Over?” Like “love” or “freedom,” it has a dictionary meaning but can mostly mean whatever you want it to. Like I can say, “platform jellies are OVER,” but you can still buy them online, while I can also say, “Better Call Saul is OVER,” and there will never be any more of it ever again (until AMC needs to milk the Breaking Bad IP again a few years from now when Obese Latinx Queen Elizabeth doesn’t pan out).

  So, does calling COVID “over” mean “throw away your slave wraps and don’t worry about getting any more myocarditis boosters because the SARS-COV-2 respiratory virus was previously a legitimately serious public health concern but isn’t now” or does it mean “COVID? That old thing? Yeah, we’re still kind of doing COVID but we’re really more excited about Ukrainepoxwarming.”

  Importantly, the word “over” has enough subjective meaning that it carries no legal implications of any kind whatsoever.

  • The Church of COVID is having a hissy fit, spooging apocalyptic statistics all over social media about the nightmare virus now largely indistinguishable from the common cold. Fauci paused amidst his hurried packing up of the human-flesh lampshades and tapes of dying beagles from his offices to remind everyone that we’re basically still in April 2020, you guys, and no one will ever touch or love one another or even smile ever again because the virus can hear you smiling, and this totally isn’t an erection it’s a pen I’m stealing. These are mentally ill religious zealots, and there will never, ever, ever be a victory condition under which COVID is “over.” Any death of any human anywhere in the world standing near the word “COVID,” written or spoken, is evidence of the ongoing holocaust-in-progress that you murderous monsters are allowing to perpetuate simply because an IFR analogous to seasonal flus has never justified the worst excesses of fascism and authoritarianism outside of wartime.

  • Meanwhile, the GOP is really concerned about COVID-anything showing up in spending, since it’s “over,” which is nice. Know what isn’t happening? Anywhere? Anyone even attempting lawsuits, formal petitions, or complaints against vaccine mandates in universities, workplaces, or the military, mask mandates, or punitive testing/masking regimes for anyone who has thus far refused the injections. Oh, and COVID is so “over,” they’re rolling out a whole new generation of injections we may or may not be mandated to take, but you have to take the old ones first.

  • In short, Brandon’s announcement meant absolutely nothing and the fact that it didn’t and won’t move the needle on either side of the conflict is probably the only reason his handlers didn’t fill today’s airwaves with damage control counter-propaganda. Admitted diversity hire press secretary Raggedy Ann 2: Black Lesbian Immigrant Woman Edition won’t even acknowledge her boss said it, let alone attempt to lamely excuse it or distract people with her binder full of Garbage Pail Kids.

    Boy, it must be nice to be able to say irresponsible, inflammatory, divisive, factually incorrect, provocative shit just because it pops into your head and suffer absolutely no consequences whatsoever. Thank goodness this right is enshrined as one of the unique powers enjoyed by all Presidents of the United States, past and present.

  • I’ve had very strong feelings about illegal immigration, even going back to the days where I strongly identified as a lefty. (Reminder: the American Left was right there with me, too, for much of its history, because illegal immigration depressed minority wages, drove up unemployment by citizens, worsened public services like education and healthcare because of overcrowding and a depressed tax base, killed labor unions, etc., etc., and promoting open-door immigration was seen as the province of ‘evil plutocrats’ on the Right who were seeking slave labor. ‘member?) Brothermouth and I grew up in NYC, in largely working-class areas where we were ethnic minorities as whites (and suffered significantly because of it), where a substantial fraction of people we lived near or went to school with spoke English as a second language, if at all, more or less dominated the local landscape of businesses and cultural centers, and white kids were mostly punching bags or sources of extra lunch money because they really didn’t have anyone rallying behind them as a group where it was forbidden to touch them. My grandparents were immigrants at a time when entering the country required proof you had a job waiting for you or family to take care of you, with no welfare or other benefits, and if you had entered illegally you were deported immediately. You were expected to learn English and wouldn’t get services catering to you if you didn’t, and kids of every ethnic background, whites included, were educated about the glorious “melting pot” that was America where we were all expected to follow roughly similar norms regarding the treatment of women, children, and people of other races, and it was at least implied that no one got special treatment or was above the law on the basis of their identities, and that this was what made America so wildly successful compared to her competitors.

    Much has been said about the Martha’s Vineyard stunt that Governor DeSantis pulled this weekend. As political trolling, I find it nothing short of brilliant: significant portions of the Left are still on fire today scrambling to make excuses as to why 50 illegal aliens deposited onto an ultra-rich historically WASP enclave is an apocalypse but 300,000 of them descending on a Texas town of 300 is just a call for basic human kindness, and anyway Texans didn’t want all those jobs. As a stunt, it exposed the inevitable hypocrisy of the elite as they scrambled to divest themselves of the diverse diversity that got dropped on their doorstep, illustrate that illegal immigration is a problem for everyone, even those who don’t admit it until they’re forced to, and motivates the circular firing squad of progressives to fire even faster, as the people who DON’T live on Martha’s Vineyard can excommunicate them as racist xenophobes who did something that they would absolutely never do. Personally, I hope every governor of every red border state does this nonstop, shipping busload after busload to the most progressive cities in America until they cry “uncle.” With any luck, the migrants that head back south over the border will tell their friends that the joke is over, and now they’re being used as a political football and not getting any of the carte blanche Brandon said they would.

    Just as a reminder (this can easily be found in a search of the extensive video material from the MV fiasco): every single migrant present knew they were acting illegally, openly stated they were there illegally, were coming because Brandon told them there would be no consequences, and several said all of this to reporters. Usually with a big smirk on their faces while doing so.

    Every single human on earth wants a “better life” for themselves and their families. There is no inherent moral heroism in this, or in being willing to do anything to achieve it. Achieving this success on the basis of lying, cheating, and stealing may be morally forgivable under certain frameworks, but it is disingenuous to call it noble.

  • Much like Brandon declaring “Mission Accomplished” to COVID to absolutely no effect, the global Green Revolution is failing as an approach to civilizational energy needs in every country it plays out in and, just like COVID in so many ways, the shock and alarm of the lumpenproles realizing what they’ve signed on for (remember when you signed on for this?) as wealthy first-world countries have rolling blackouts and are told by their governments that this is their own fault for being selfish eaters who want air conditioning when it’s very hot out instead of literally saving the planet, and that if they aren’t going to be unselfish voluntarily next time, well.

  • This is funny/not funny. This has the same power to kill us in great numbers like COVID lockdowns and closures, only even faster, and can get us into a tailspin of interconnected global failures that is even harder than COVID economic destruction to pull out of. People will die in Europe this winter, offered as a sacrifice to the “Mother Nature” that Pelosi gibbers insanely about; the chain reactions of supply chain disruption and breakdowns of social services that accompany a modern civilization built on the reliable availability of power will kill plenty more.

  • Lots of smarter people across substack (some of whom are even Gutterballs!) have shown the math of why an obsessive fixation on replacing and dismantling existing petrochemical power supplies for 1-to-1 replacement with “renewable” wind and solar power while simultaneously thwarting nuclear at every possible turn is never, ever, EVER going to be a viable system for any modern society. It is more parsimonious to assume that there are at least SOME people in the halls of power that are smart enough to know this themselves and, like COVID, are being silent because they’re cowards and/or have already been silenced or unpersoned for speaking against climate change extremism. To put it simply, it is just as obvious to anyone not blind to the data as COVID that this WILL NOT WORK and, again, just like COVID, the elite will be able to circumvent most of the worst consequences of their own policies with access to their own parallel infrastructures run on whatever energy source they want while you die of heatstroke like in the Middle Ages because the wind wasn’t blowing this afternoon.

    • I’m beating the “this is just like COVID” dead horse because we can expect the EXACT same rules to apply: crushing dissent and critical thinking, lots of corrupt and nepotistic plundering of “emergency” resources, lots of confiscations of previously-guaranteed civil rights under the aegis of a “state of emergency,” constant mainstream media complicity, the destruction of decades and centuries-long established scientific norms, the scapegoating and punishment of unpersons, the passing of the economic costs on to the social classes unable to evade heavy taxation, and the deaths, permanent damage, and hardship of many times more people than have suffered from the exaggerated “emergency” itself.

    • Likewise, similar theories can be argued: we are in a global mass psychosis where logic has been abandoned; we are in a controlled demolition of the global economy and population by a globalist conspiracy; we are in am end-times event like Ragnarök or Maitreya or the Rapture; pick your poison. In the end, the appropriate response is the same: RESIST and resist HARD, because when this really gets going, it will be life or death.

  • Lastly, check out the Rarely Certain substack, dedicated to a subject near and dear to my heart- radical uncertainty- and especially today’s comment thread where substack intellectual heavyweights Mike Hind, Doc Hammer, Jay Rollins and I join forces to coin the term “Teddy Bear Pipe Bomb” to describe the rhetorical trick of cynically packaging malicious content in semantic packages that become morally unassailable, like “Build Back Better” and “DREAMers.”

Two more essays in the pipe for this week. It’s good to be back.