A Few Weeks from Now

Hey, tech bros: 

Make sure to carry plenty of cash. That is, if the cash machine will still let you get any out. 

You go to the gas station, but you can't fill up because the automated system in the station tells the manager you're not MAGA enough. So you have to bribe him, let's say double the cost of the gas you need.

You want to go to that AI conference in Singapore, but the conveyor is pissed because you didn't bribe *him enough last time, so he reckons, but you don't find out until you get to the airport and you're on a no fly list. So you have to bribe DHS a LOT, and the people at the gate, and eventually the convenor of the conference. In fact you have to kiss his ass so bad you spend two more days in Singapore wining and dining him just to be able to get out of there.

And that's your weekend.

Oh, also get ready to boil all your tap water, and overcook all meats and vegetables. 

Be sure to have a generator. 

Can't Wait to See You in Chicago

 If you're anywhere near, please come to the Seminary Co-Op, the best bookstore in the whole of the USA, for an hour of talk between me and Liam Heneghan, biologist and novelist and philosopher. 

It's at 6pm this Friday (October 25). 

"Having Mercy" (my Kent State Lecture)

 This was a prestigious Veroni Lecture, to which I was incredibly honored to have been invited to give. 

At Kent State

 Frank Ryan, one of the professors in the wonderful philosophy department at Kent State, showed me and Treena on a pilgrimage to the site of the Kent State Massacre. He was just starting out himself at the University of Colorado at Boulder at the time. Frank's telling of the story was plangent and detailed and loving and suffused with passion and anger and grief. 

I'll try to say more about it here when I can. I am still absorbing the first shock of it. One of the biggest reasons to visit Kent State was to make this pilgrimage. 

But for now I'll say that bringing this event to consciousness and making it a part of the university's life, creating the visitor center with its incredible exhibit and video (and audio) footage, the research library devoted to studying it, is nothing but good. Relating to grief is nothing but good. It doesn't feel that way, sometimes, but it's true. 

For a very long time Kent State tried to ignore what had happened. But this only resulted in further pain. 

Come to My Hell Book Launch in Chicago (October 25 6pm)!

 

PTSD Every Day (Complex PTSD in Fact) or, Now I Know Why Succeeding Makes Me Feel Terrible (Really Terrible; Really Really Terrible)

 ...hello. If you've been reading this for a while (started in 2007) you'll know this has never occurred to me before. 

I used to think I was an introvert. Then I think introvert is a suspect category, and what this actually is, is exhibitionism plus a phobia of it. 

But I have a much simpler explanation for my feelings after I do a  lecture or, in this case, right now today, finish doing an interview. 

Whenever I succeed at a task, I feel bad. I mean I feel like a bad person. The sense of being contaminated or evil is in direct proportion to the magnitude of the task, how successful it was, what it churned up .

I just did an interview with a Czech magazine that was without doubt one of the best interviews I've ever done. 

And now I get to feel like I'm a terrible bad person, possibly for hours, possibly for the rest of the day. Like really bad. Like I keep saying to Treena, "I'm a bad person." And she keeps saying no. At least I've learned to verbalize it. And she knows how to hold it and respond. 

Sometimes the PTSD is so intense and all pervasive, you don't realize it is what it is. Actually, Complex PTSD, to get technical. Links are to National Health Service definitions. 

It's not that I feel physically exhausted. I feel morally terrible. Like evil. Really evil. Like I should be deprived of property and money and a life and killed. 

Interview with Me in Texas Monthly

 I really enjoyed talking with Michael Hardy about the book and about a number of related topics. 

Read This. That's an Order

 

Fascist Hypnosis by Daniel Pinchbeck

Time to break it

Read on Substack

Autocracy and Poverty Go Together

 

Autocracy and Poverty by Timothy Snyder

Trump and Vance bring them together

Read on Substack

Deconstructionists Interview about Hell (really good--REALLY good)

 This was the one, if you ask me. 

Interview in LiveScience

 I really enjoyed it... 

"The person dubbed "the prophet of the Anthropocene" talks to Live Science about how they got this title, what the Anthropocene means, and why we need to stop trying to define when it started and accept that we've been in it for millennia."