“A beach house isn’t just real estate. It’s a state of mind.” – Douglas Adams, ‘Mostly Harmless’
Warm weather always helps. Not shivering when I wake up, the ability to be comfortably barefoot in my house, the increased willingness to leave it. “Let’s go for a walk,” becomes so much easier at even 65 degrees, let alone 75. So is, like, sitting at my desk and motivate myself to work. I keep reminding myself that spring is the worst, most capricious season, and that it will end soon. All bad moods end. Of course, I’m not necessarily in a bad mood. I’m bummed about the state of the world, man.
It’s exhausting, engaging with the overwhelming amount of shit. Twitter’s AI has been programmed to spout white genocide conspiracies, unprompted. ChatGPT and CoPilot are spitting out transphobia thanks to RFK’s Health & Human Services Department declaring transphobia cool. Meanwhile, employers are using unholy GenAI holograms (or whatever) to interview candidates. Society is sleepwalking into a planet-killing technology that actively makes us stupider and more eagerly indoctrinated. Meanwhile, ICE continues to run amok, as the US fully embraces its Gestapo era. If you need whatever the opposite of a pick-me-up is, genocide and settler colonialism in Gaza continues apace. Not that Joe Biden ever cared (yes, I know he has cancer, sure, that’s sad, people in Gaza are eating leaves to not starve to death. People old enough to happily lunch with Strom Thurmond get cancer all the time). The Democratic Party, instead of fighting any of this, are about to be civil warring over whether they should be the Party of Cryptocurrecy or the Party That Fights Oligarchy.
This, as I said last week, is not a society worth participating in.
As Miyazaki said, I fear that humans are losing faith in ourselves.
It helps to log off, even though I fear logging off is sort of like cleaning your room by shoving everything in your closet. So I try to re-center. I turn to music, I turn to poetry, I turn to horror novels and movies, I turn to cooking. Those things make sense to me. My problem is that it’s easy to get distracted by the world burning, which I resolved not to do during this administration. There’s a pressure that comes from the Rod Serling idea of a writer being responsive to their times, but I think too much of that can get distorting.
What am I saying with this blog? I suppose I want to state publicly—and maybe for anyone else who needs to hear it—that you don’t have to comment on every little thing. The bad people are going to do the bad stuff, regardless of what The Shipwrecked Sailor Blog has to say about it. So idk. If you start seeing a bunch of writing- and music-related posts, it’s not because I’m not paying attention. It’s more like, this blog’s mission is not politics. It is, like the podcast, the deliberately vague life from the writer’s perspective. Sometimes, that’s commenting on what’s happening. AI is a lot of what’s happening, and AI is a direct threat to art and nature, so it does concern this blog. But again, I really don’t need to comment on every new development, every new dystopia.
Shall we end with a reading from Studs? Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Henry Threadgill:
An artist can’t live on an island. Sometimes this information is not translated to people. We can’t stay in these little small worlds. What I do in music is exactly what should go on in our natural life. I can’t just listen to American music; Americans are not the only people in the world. We’re not the only people that have something to say. I can’t just listen to music. I have to see what’s going on in dance. They might take the direction further, they might open me up to a great sensibility. Opera, film might open me up. Music will only show me so much. I have to look at the accompanying arts and see what they have to say.
Sorry you will eventually get this in an email,
Chris