round trip on the Q, with a Masstransiscope sighting and Brooklyn Bridge crossings
:^D
Lunaball 20220331
As a puppy, Luna created her own game called lunaball. 3+ years on, she continues to refine and perfect her championship form.
The rules of lunaball are opaque, but the core challenge is to kick around a big ball while keeping a small ball in your mouth.
Chaos Reaction Thoughts
A few of the finite things you have complete control over in life:
How clean your home is
How made your bed is
How tired your dog is
Whether or not your passport is current and active
All of this adds up, really, to the one and only thing you have control over:
How you react to chaos.
The paradox of safe environments is where vulnerability becomes currency.
Violence is a subset of laziness
No place is “public” if you have to log in.
In the end nowhere will be the sole “public” space.
Most days, I see a picture or read the name of one more missing person.
Are there any colonial overtones in the “East versus West” dynamic? Isn’t the whole notion that Russia and China are in “the East” predicated on a European looking at a compass?
I stopped consuming porn because in the end it just saps your battery.
“Hey, Westy, why don’t you write about music for once? Or better yet, just shut up and play.”
We’re getting there, Kid.…
continued...
Warring Thoughts
the trick is to get paid for just being you
to “turn a trick” is to be paid to be someone else’s “you”
adopting war terminology for sports (“bomb,” “shotgun,” “blitz,” “strikers,” “defense,” “offence,” “flanks,” “attack,” “sacking,” etc) turned war into sports
Now, those not fighting are said to be “on the sidelines.” As if there are teams. As if there are fans. What of those who want no tickets to begin with? Who would have the world just grill dinner and play tennis?
Nothing comes out of nowhere
But everything came from nothing
I don’t believe anyone I’ve ever spoken with on a helpline or a chat has used their real name
lol if ppl refuse to raise prices, there will be no inflation
history is arbitrary
the sole “historical context” is the present
the cold war weaponised fear and destabilisation
the now war weaponises loneliness and alienation
The downside, and upside, to globalisation is to turn Earth from a planet into an island
LOL the john is actually the whore. The John needs to pay to be themself, even though appearing to pay for escape
kinda how in the end ppl vote for who they’d rather lie to them
Allowing others to lie to us gives us air cover to lie to ourselves
lol in the future you’ll need birthright to bbq
just so strange how there’s still war when the world has the means to feed and house everyone
everywhere lies truth
There’s no such thing as “living a lie.” You live your truth and only your truth, and enjoy or suffer the fallout, whatever your truth creates.
The phrase isn’t, “you’re living your lie.” It’s, “you’re living a lie.”
At the very least, if it was your lie, you’d have some agency
If there are lives “lived in lies,” then life itself is devalued
The “problem” today lol isn’t that everywhere there’s lies. It’s that everywhere lies truth
“The sky is blue,” and “The sky is clear,” are both true
ngl
savvy / powerless
“The weirdest,” Luna piped up at the midpoint of our daily walk, “is how everyone now is so savvy yet so powerless.”
I absorbed the thought. “Ignorance is bliss, Kid, indeed.”
Storm Chaser
sniff log
Prospect Park, NYC / 20220304.1437
Random 20220506
a week of scattered thoughts
Grass is a reflective, not euphoric drug. That’s why it was made illegal
Fwiw, nuclear power is a form of solar energy. Stars are just big AF reactors.
In a way, every nuclear plant on Earth is a man-made nano-star.
Nuclear bombs explode microscopic suns.
there’s only so many times you can say, “I’m being taken out of context,” until your actual context becomes questionable
Let’s pitch Name That Tune except you have to ID songs behind white noise at varying intensities – (vacuum cleaners, hvac, subway entering station, side of a highway, etc)
No Justice = No Peace also means No Injustice = No War.
That’s the real jam in the sandwich; that’s why we never get there.
A world that coddles war will never know justice
Just curious: When was the last time you used the phrase “super absorbent” in a conversation?
Lol that brain implant will need OS updates.
“Sorry, Westy, your neural network is a Late 2023 and will not support these sunglasses…”
Double-lol if neural implants run on open source code
“Here’s everything that happened,” is journalism.
“Here’s what you need to know,” is commentary.
All commentary is journalism, but not all journalism is commentary.
how long until you can place DraftKings bets on tomorrow’s google doodle?
most of what you see and hear across media is designed to create mythology, not history
Lol it’s World War “3” because “The Great War” (a.k.a. “The War To End All Wars”) was rechristened as “World War 1” after the U.S. entered what FDR termed “the Second World War.”
Like lol during the 2nd one, everyone agreed that, “Maybe we need to start counting these…”
Remember, Parking Enforcement Officers have nothing else to do. That’s what they do. Yelling at someone doing their job is the essence of pointlessness
One grand paradoxical irony is that if not for NATO staying together after the Cold War, Russia would be less threatening to most individual NATO members.…
continued...
Another Post About Peace
medium mirror: https://westyreflector.medium.com/…
It’s absurd that war is just “declared,” whereas peace requires “negotiation.”
Peace, for some reason, always requires a “process.”
Sometimes you have to “sue” for peace. Taking someone to court, in a way, makes you an aggressor, so, in a way, litigating the end of a war turns aggressors into defendants, and defenders into plaintiffs.
Once achieved, of course, peace becomes “fragile,” as though war is the default state.
Peace as rhetoric becomes defined as an absence of war.
War brings “fog.” Peace requires a “roadmap.”
For most of recorded human history, peace is the space between wars. Peace interrupts war.
“Resting in peace” means you’re dead. So, then, “resting in war” must mean you’re alive.
Peace is passive; war is active.
War plans.
War schemes.
War seduces.
War’s seduction is erotic, from the network-news money-shot first-strike explosion, to the post-war economic “stimulation” (war is how to have your Keynes and eat it, too). For many a freewheeling government (democratic or otherwise), war solves way more political problems than it creates.
Not only does war eliminate “enemies,” it staves off (or pulls a country out of) recessions and depressions, advances technology at hyper-speed, and offers convenient good v. evil rhetoric to use as a cudgel to keep people on board with state-sanctioned violence.
As a cherry on top, war coddles despotic daydreams to burn enemy firehouses.
War abstracts the world beyond war. War commands your full attention, whether you’re in the middle of it or just rubbernecking on Twitter. War survives because the idea of it – a total and final way to get your way – is alluring enough to risk its destructive reality and wanton abandonment of one’s humanity.
Taking its cue from evolution of the fittest, war is the mosquito of human folly. It always ruins a good time, in the backyard, say, or at the beach, or by the pool.…
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Rainbow Needle / Tennis Thread
Words are my thread; music is my needle
I haven’t written too much on the internet in the last few years because I am afraid of what…
- …was
- …wasn’t
- …will be
- …is
This internal poll will be open for the rest of eternity, or until eternity runs out of time, power, or storage
To run out of storage is to run out of time. More storage means more memory, so more memories for your future feeds. The future opens ever wider with every cloud upgrade.
I had a colonoscopy yesterday. Lol if anesthesiologists didn’t exist.
To cede control of consciousness is the highest level of trust and faith.
Two other operations in my life required me to go unconscious: In 1987, I had all four wisdom teeth pulled, and in 2006, hip surgery saw an orthopedic surgeon remove a pelvic bone fragment that was shredding my right hip joint.
I didn’t know what to expect in 1987. Pretty sure the knockout drip was Demerol. I recall making it to 7 after being asked to countdown from 10, then waking up with chipmunk cheeks.
In 2006, the anesthesiologist for the hip surgery didn’t even bother to dare me to count down to zero. He just laughed, and said, “You’re under.” The last thing I saw, just off the inside of my right foot, was a winch with a big crank on top. Being pushed towards my foot. When I awoke in recovery, the surgeon handed me a sealed biohazard bag to let me see and feel, through the plastic, the bone fragment he extracted.
Those few seconds floating away under anesthesia, at the hypnogogic point of no return, where you’ve given away conscious hold on life, are terrifying in concept, but quite peaceful in execution. You are strapped in as the Space Mountain coaster climbs into darkness.…
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metaphor / material
I have quite a bit of fun losing tennis matches as long as I take a ton of risks
Lol to outlaw screenshotting is a subset of outlawing memory.
Every day, there are fewer and fewer tools for journalists to map political and social accountability, and for citizens to map journalistic accountability
“On the record” is meaningless in an age of constant re-issues and re-masters
Eventually context clicking (especially “save as…” or “delete” or “share”) will require two-factor authentication, and maybe even permission
One raging meta-battle now pits those who see everyone’s reality as parallel, against those who see everyone’s reality as intersecting
A corollary current meta-battle pits those who see reality as metaphor against those who see reality as material
A Brooklyn bus stop sign around the corner from me used to warn of impending arrivals and display estimated times to the next bus. It was eviscerated sometime last Spring, a victim of gutter-dining shed construction directly below. Walking underneath the compromised sign for almost a year, one wonders if no one notices the sign’s condition because no one ever used it? New Yorkers are infamous for not looking up as they city-walk up and down the avenues, so for sure a fair number of people passing by everyday wouldn’t even know.
The most curious (and perhaps dystopian) aspect of the sign is that it appears to still work. The LEDs inside continue to blink in patterns, and so one can assume the sign still communicates with an MTA CPU at headquarters. If the sign has no idea, however, how to explain to the network that it’s been flayed and rendered unusable to humans, a mainframe will ping it all day and believe it’s functioning fine.
Perhaps reality is metaphor and material all at once…
NYC’s been broke before, but now it’s broken
hand-cranked thoughts 20220215
A society run on batteries is kinda non-biodegradable, yes?
In due course, billions of bricked iPhones will need to be shot into space
At some point, everything will be hand-cranked
lol the hand-cranked car was the future
Is half-baked… a moment of potential or decay?
No one ever says they’re “half-baked” as the drugs kick in. Understandable, since how do you ever know where 1/2way-high is?
Then again, no one ever says, “haha, I’m still half-baked,” as the drugs wear off on the way down, even though it’s probably a pretty identifiable moment
And only in retrospect, can you know the exact moment of your mid-life (i.e., “half-dead”).
On plug-in, “rechargeable” batteries are not reanimated, so much as repaired. The power that sustains a rechargable battery is also that which saps its life force. Every charge brings diminished capacity until a battery has no memory of itself as a power source
Rechargeable is a subset of disposable
Also LOL any battery plugged into a power system entices that system to draw power from the battery. So, rechargeable batteries have to work extra hard to draw and retain power from a system whose very goal, profitability, and existence depend upon electronic devices not retaining any power
I haven’t worn a graphic T-shirt since last September. It’s been solids, with the occasional stripe.
Walking Luna today, I saw three people sneeze into their masks. Is there some benefit to that that I don’t know?
All kids are a product of sex. But not every kid is a product of love. This does not imply the latter kids are unloved; only that they were conceived via unhealthy unions.
lol the true American political battle right now is between those who believe the country is a product of sex, and those who believe the United States is a product of love
Children as products of two people, in-love or otherwise, will be an outmoded concept when creating people is outsourced to efficient and innovative brands in the life-design space.…
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first / final
lol on the internet, first drafts are final drafts
writing online is changing light fixtures in a house with no circuit breakers
Last Night Of The World (Sarsaparilla Sessions 20210201)
A fav track by Canadian artist Bruce Cockburn, performed last year during a rehearsal for a live stream from my apartment (at the time) in the old Hood’s Sarsaparilla Factory Lowell, MA.