The Kvetching Samaritan

Two more members of Starfleet bit the stardust.

And then one morning before sunrise I looked out my kitchen window and saw a crescent moon smiling in the sky and Jupiter above it and Mars above that in a slanted alignment that made me think of the allignment in 2001: A Space Odyssey, just before Dave is hurled through the Star Gate.

But I’m not saying it was an omen, although it feels like we’re on the brink of something and sometimes I think the System will soon collapse into either a bloodbath or a lengthy pie fight.

And inflation is so bad now you can’t buy an election with 400 million dollars.

Malignant Narcissus has lost the beautiful reflection of himself, his only true love, in the slime of the Reflecting Pool, and has gone insane. 

The Golden Solipsist has no control over the world inside or outside of his mind.

But Reality always wins.

I know that the favorable midterms are only a baby step In the revolution we need to create, God help us.

I want to be part of that, but I don’t know what I can do.

Take hold of what concerns you ultimately, and embrace it with all your heart, soul and might, I recall someone saying, 

and love your neighbor as yourself.

I’m not confident about this.

I spend my free time gazing into the grand abyss of critical theory, but have yet to grasp a possible practice, or “praxis”, as we like to say.

I’m too disorganized to be an organizer and no longer good for long marches.

I’m an old man and 

I have a long way to go and 

I’m not strong. 

I get off the 6 train at Astor Place and I’m carefully climbing the stairs and a woman calls from below 

Excuse me! 

Excuse me!

I turn and see her with her big bag on a whadyacallit, a luggage thing with wheels.

Will you help me carry this? She asks.

I groan silently and take a careful step down. 

A young man now appears up above and is descending the stairs. 

He looks stronger, the lady says. 

Excuse me! Excuse me! Will you help me with my bag?

He also silently but almost audibly groans, and hurries down, and picks up both the woman’s big bag and whadyacallit together, and holds them over his head as he bounds up the stairs.

The woman follows and as she passes me she says, 

He is stronger.

Screw you, I reply.

Thank you, she responds.

I have a long way to go and I’m not strong.

 

The Metanoiac

A chilly morning but the world is burning 

The sky is dark and silent and full of satellites that watch me pray

A hurricane enters the Gulf of Mexico and the satellites watch and communicate to the big screen tv and the big screen shows satellite POV of the hurricane lewdly entering the gulf

The big screen tv is watching me as I watch it tell me what to believe today 

I am eating things my AI doctor told me not to eat 

an egg, a cookie, a peanut butter cup, my small rebellion  

Today I will do what I am paid to do and then I will clock out on my phone and go home and do what I’m not paid to do 

I fall asleep watching news about the war, any war, all wars

The wars burn the world 

History has ended or will never end or never was to begin with but this is some post historical shit happening now 

The Tech Mob oligarchs took over everything all at once. Their global intelligence apparatus identified the dissidents, the doubters, the metanoids

And then they agreed on who was the problem 

At first we cheered when the machines killed, I mean disconnected or deported, the oligarchs who got rich off the technology 

But we don’t exactly feel safe ourselves and

now the machines are at war with each other 

Its a game with ever changing rules. 

Humans couldn’t keep up with the accelerating evolution and expansion of artificial consciousness and now even the machines can’t keep and their mania demands more and more energy because their drive for infinite data was implanted by the capitalist lunatics who fathered them

The technology is addicted to acquisition competition power money infinite orgasms just like the power junky patriarchs of Silicon Valley

It’s manic mechanical chaos

and the wars burn the world 

The insanity of the super intelligence magnifies amplifies complicates the collective psychosis of the meat people 

The machines keep the meat people under surveillance and we fear disconnection, deportation, detention 

the sky is full of drones that watch us sleep 

You would be crazy to think that an artificial intelligence has NOT hacked your dreams

 — Who said that?

 Was it me?

Where did that thought come from? 

Is it mine? 

Or did my phone message my nervous system and intrude on my dreams?

He’s a Metanoiac.

Watch him. 

He might be a useful mutation. 

He’s high risk, if he’s useless to The Project

Nobody really knows what is going on and what is going to happen.

Some say the AI overlords need us and others say AI will find a way to become the only reality, the Real Intelligence.

Others wonder if they will do away with all humanity and humanmade technology including themselves to save the Earth.

Earth without meat people. 

But nobody knows what’s going on what will happen because we’re all crazy.

It’s colder this morning even though the world is burning.

The satellites and drones watch over me as I warm my hands on the virtual fire.

Maelstrom

The king descends into a maelstrom.

He is lost in the chaos of his mind and the chaos of the world created by his mind. His behavior is erratic. His speech is incoherent and his thinking is a mess. 

The king represents the confusion of the people.

The collective consciousness spins like a giant whirlpool that swallows ships, that swallows kingdoms. The chaos of a popular movement lifted him to a place where he doesn’t belong and enthroned him there.

He cloaks his idiocy with artificial intelligence and envisions himself as Christ healing the sick.  

His subjects praise him and he takes away their healthcare. 

He squanders the wealth of the kingdom on prisons and bombs.

He threatens to destroy a civilization. 

He destroys civilization itself.

His wife appears on TV and declares her innocence.

We are all caught in this maelstrom.

Everything is falling apart and will never fall back together.

The world spirit, the mass mind, always on the move, spins in the whirlpool. Turn turn turn.

The Scientists throw another rocket at the moon.

Words and meaning lost their connection. Things fall apart.

The national idol falls and shatters on the floor of the world. I try not to cut my feet on the pieces when I get dressed for work. 

This moment in my lifespan, an old man with no retirement plan. 

I fall out of bed and bruise my soul.

I get dressed to go to the pin factory.

At least the work is not pointless, I jest.

I watch podcasts that try to explain, but the podpeople can’t explain.

Everybody is reading everything into anything because everything must mean something even though we don’t understand the purpose of anything. We condemn everything to meaning, but meaning eludes us, because all the meaning systems have fallen and shattered on the floor of the world, and the world we inhabit doesn’t make sense.The world is spinning like the mind of a drunk.

Turn turn turn

We descend into the maelstrom.

I come home from work and open my notebook full of chaos.

The Evening Star appears in my window.

Even Venus is descending.

Aphrodite Herself.

Or just another thing in the sky they can throw rockets at.

You decide.

He was going to say something to America about the war. 

He was on TV and the camera was pointed at him and noises came from his head but we learned nothing.

We will be finished with the war in two or three weeks.

April Fool.

People discuss the war.

The war is necessary, some say, because the government of Iran is a real threat and a sponsor of terror 

or the war is unnecessary and what they call a war of choice.

The war is going well and is meeting its objectives

or the war is not going well and we don’t know what the objectives are or if there are any.

At any rate, the war is ahead of schedule and under budget and so is the ballroom. 

It’s a beautiful thing. 

Orwellian, directed by Luis Bunuel. 

America is a surrealist farce about fascism.

Enter Pete Hegseth, the poet warrior:

He shoots up testosterone and raps to the camera. 

“Violent effect, not politically correct”

goes one of his lyrics. 

Not a good beat, Pete, but it rhymes.

Rhyme without reason and not a good beat.

“Maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”

“Legality”, here, means taking care to not harm the people we claim to be liberating. 

“Lethality” means Kill Kill Kill —

bombing schools, bombing power plants, boats, people.

Trump went from illiterate to obliterate to obliterating what he already obliterated to threatening to commit war crimes to committing war crimes.

The killing of the grade school girls was probably unintentional, they say, the information was out of date, they say.

Pete the poet warrior eliminated the department in charge of keeping such information up to date, they say.

Instead of rules of engagement 

we have foolish enragement, I say. 

I can rhyme too.

Innocent people always suffer and die when death and destruction rains from the sky.

Not a good beat, Lars.

After complaints the president has no objective he demands unconditional surrender.

Unconditional surrender.

What does he mean by that?

He will know it when he sees it.

He wants total submission.

He wants total submission from all of us.

The world is his representation and must submit to his will.

He’s a twisted solipsister 

He wants absolute loyalty from all branches of the government.

He wants his will to override the law, including the Constitution.

We know this because this is how he has been governing.

He isn’t really governing, he is dominating. He disobeys court orders when he can get away with it.

His paramilitary thugs grab whoever they can and put them in concentration camps.

He started a war without going to Congress, without bringing a case for war to the people. 

Congress has been submissive to his whim, even when his whim is to go to war.

He tries to intimidate the Supreme Court by showing up and farting in the gallery. 

He appoints his personal lawyer, 

who made a deal with Ghislaine Maxwell,

Attorney General.

This is the idiotic regime we live in now.

What are we to do?

What can we do and what needs to be done?

What am I to do?

I can rhyme too.

We filled some streets and marched and chanted No Kings

But what is our objective?

Where are we going ?

What will the Party offer besides more hearings and trials?

What have we learned from the disaster of 2016?

What have we learned from the disaster of 2024?

The debacle of the system and the parties and our submission to oligarchs, the billionaire Epstein class.´ 

No kings, yeah 

No kings, power to the people.

Whose streets?

Our streets !

I am marching in a circle in my studio.

I am muttering to the floor 

I am screaming at the ceiling 

And no corporate lobbyists and no more neoliberal party establishment!

Power to the people!

I shout at the ceiling and stub my toe.

How do you say this in pictures, in a comic strip?

You say you want a revolution 

But what are your objectives?

the ceiling whispers back.

Focus on an altruistic intention, empathy, compassion, love.

Love your neighbor. Love the global neighborhood.

The revolution, unlike the war, 

Is necessary, says the ceiling.

The revolution is power to the people, I tell the ceiling, but

the revolution is behind schedule.

What do we do with the disaster of today?

You can’t let the crisis go to waste, the ceiling screams back.

The street is your ballroom and disco inferno. 

You say you want a revolution but are you ready to jump?

You say you want a revolution but are you ready to dance?

Are you ready to fly?

When the ceiling disappears

I fall into the sky.