I think our brains can only do so much major cognitive work at a time. Playing from your soul, and feeling big feelings, these things override the ability to maintain social control over your facial expression. Perhaps keeping emotions off our faces is a skill that evolved more recently than having emotions, and thus it’s the first to go when we’re concentrating on other things.

I’m really glad you at least partially qualified what you mean by forgiveness. Or at least what you do not mean by it. The type of forgiveness I think you’re trying to suggest is more of an internal process. It’s not really about the other person at all. For example, there are some family members of murder victims who say they have forgiven the killer. They are not saying the killer deserves to go free. They’re just saying they don’t want to carry that hatred through the rest of their lives. By that definition, I don’t think any of us know what we might be able to let go of.

Not really a lesson learned, but a line that stayed with me. I forget which book it’s in, maybe Post Office, but he writes about a winning streak he had at the track. It was so good he either quit or took a leave of absence from his job. He woke late, enjoyed steak and scotch, then ambled down to the track. And then he says, “it was a great life, and I did not tire of it.”

All our lives, we’re told that wealth won’t buy happiness, that the only true fulfillment comes from hard work, and that getting what we want will only lead to misery. But here’s Bukowski describing a life of utter self-indulgence, and saying he never got tired of it. Profound.

A bunch of us kids were hanging out one day, with the radio on. One of the boys was flirting with a girl named Caroline, and just as he sat down next to her, Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond came on.

This isn’t a winnable argument, it’s a statement of genocidal intent. Engaging with this is worse than a waste of time. It provides legitimacy to evil.

Oh dear. Every time I think I’ve finally achieved the correct degree of cynicism, another evil like this raises a fin, and I have to recalibrate again. I really hadn’t put that together about the money and the poison. Makes total sense, though.

This is heartbreaking enough for those who became chronically ill during covid. But LC is (almost certainly) a subset of myalgic encephalomyelitus (ME/CFS or ME,) an illness that has reduced a great many formerly active people to mere shadows of our former selves. People can live for DECADES feeling like shit, hardly able to get out of bed. Doctors have dismissed us and told us our suffering is all in our minds.

As covid-19 began, we ME/CFS folks knew what would happen. We were going to be joined by a huge new cohort of this sad club that nobody wants to join. As terrible as the prospect was, the silver lining was that it offered a hope that our illness would finally be taken seriously. With so many newly disabled people, surely research money would flow! We dared to hope that at least we might all benefit from the medical breakthroughs that could result. But no. Once again heartless, unscrupulous people would rather let millions rot than allow government and science to help us.

It’s ruined art for me. Someone posts something, and I don’t know if it’s real art or a theft of other people’s work.

7. I don’t know why, I’ve just been using them my whole life, and they’re comfortable for me. The platonic ideal of Pen. Especially the blue medium.

What a great lineup! Judy Mowatt is one of my favorite singers, a criminally underrated talent.

Honor Raconteur sells her books on her website, I believe. https://www.raconteurhouse.com/

I brought a little boa onto a plane many years ago. Cargo pants were in back then.

I believe that all things happen in love and in war, usually because of rotten bastards who exploit human vulnerability as a sport.

Go to bed early so you can get a good night’s sleep. I have heard this so many times, and I’m convinced it was the cause of many sleepless nights. It’s probably great advice for people with a normal circadian rhythm, but it’s useless for those with a non-standard chronotype. That shit is baked into your DNA, and medicine currently has no idea how to change it. Especially since it’s so much easier just to blame the night owl.

Years ago, I was working on a house where there were several nests of these wicked looking red wasps. I had been working around them all morning quite safely. At lunch, I drank half a beer, and was almost immediately stung twice when I went back to work. I don’t know if it affected my timing or my scent, or something else.

When certain people have the freedom to hurt others, no one is safe.

My favorite part of this is “Real people are suffering…” Oh no! Real people, you say? I better take that seriously, unlike all those fake people whose suffering is both imaginary, and completely justified. Who the hell cares about any of them?

Here is an excellent video that goes into the matter. https://youtu.be/O5xMpsYdzgg

No other drugs, just my bare, natural brain.

Whippets. I had this awful sensation of being frozen in a horrible moment of eternity while my friends looked on in amusement, not realizing I was experiencing timeless hell.