Philip Dru can lick my ...

"In many world societies, however, there are still spaces—if only interior, or metaphorical, or temporal—set aside for contemplation, for noiseless recalibration of the soul, and in contemporary American culture there are almost none. Our social rituals are constrained by the incessant soundtrack imposed in our public spaces, and our places of worship, by and large, have given themselves over to a muzak-based sense of liturgy that tells us at every step of the way what to feel and with what intensity."

- Andrew Waggoner

thanks to foucaultonacid for finding this.

The larger point that I resonate with is that our world is increasingly growing "scripted" and we're being alienated from the people writing the scripts.
I don't want my criticism of modern society to be confused with standard issue socialism. The socialists (at least the ones who confuse "society" with "state") see the symptoms but make a very shallow diagnosis, by and large. But to simply throw up one's hands and say "well then write your own script" or, even worse, "then get on board with the scriptwriters" is horribly dismissive. Sure, someone like me, could potentially, I think, work my way up to that. But I'm a statistical anomaly. And it would only work because everyone else isn't doing it.
For everyone or even most people in the west to have a chance to "write their own script", the system of the world, the mythos we are living under, must change pretty fundamentally. The two world wars broke something fundamental in the mythos, and what was put in its place is anathema. You can see it pretty well discussed in Gravity's Rainbow or 1984. Or even from the other side, The Managerial Revolution by Burnham.
This relates to some of the things I've been pointing out about the biological basis of behavior. Yes, there is one, but it's how we use it that counts. How we relieve these urges and express these predispositions is what is really important to me. And just fatalistically saying "it's human nature" puts the conch in the hands who know there's more to it than that, and don't have your best interests as an individual in mind at all...

(more on this later)

(no subject)

"The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, yet its inhabitants are strikingly unhappy. Accordingly, we present to the rest of mankind, on a planet rife with suffering and tragedy, the spectacle of a clown civilization. Sustained on a clown diet rich in sugar and fat, we have developed a clown physiognomy. We dress like clowns. We move about a landscape filled with cartoon buildings in clown-mobiles, absorbed in clownish activities. We fill our idle hours enjoying the canned antics of professional clowns. We perceive God to be an elderly comedian. Death, when we acknowledge it, is just another pratfall on the boob tube. Bang! You're dead!" -- James Howard Kunstler, Home from Nowhere

And that reminded me of an older post of mine: Kol Beseder

I think that quote captures the flavor of what I meant at the time. To do something truly self-representative, despite the fact that it's not "normal" (with all the lack of context those quotes imply), is the only serious way to live in a clown civilization. You're exposing the joke and also not participating in it. While at the same time, you're getting to liberate yourself from the chains of false determinism, even if for a short while, before you get pummelled, figuratively or, sadly all too common in this day and age, literally.

Baroquen

Something missing. I don't know where it went, because it's nothing at all.
It is precisely nothing, a nothing with a shape.
And it didn't really go anywhere at all, but I know it's not there.
I think I'm being carved, by different shapes without being
into something smaller but more ornate
more pleasing to the mind's eye, though painful it is to the current ego.