Market Theocracy

For all intents and purposes, I am back — with stories to tell.

I’ve been working on a long essay about my three month adventure on the raggedy edge, but have been having trouble wrapping the damn thing up. I wanted to re-start the blog with a bang, but I miss posting daily enough that I’ll have to be satisfied with a rousing Pop!

In the next few days I plan on posting the aforementioned essay, a prequel to Tessellation called Broke Circle, and another long essay on primitivism vs. progressionism that owes a debt of inspiration to William Gillis of the superb blog Human Iterations (linked handily on the sidebar there!) I’ll also be plugging my book Symbols Flow currently on sale.

Along with that will be my usual meandering thoughts on thisn’that, news both bad and good, book and movie reviews and all matter of other unseemly foofaral.

Glad to be back.

Hope you’re glad to see me.

-G.

Just a quick note to let everyone know that I am alive and well and living in decent comfort at The Salvation army in Kingsport, TN. I’ve been beating the streets putting in applications and have a good feeling. There seems to be plenty of people hiring for just about everything. Might even get a job cooking again, who knows.

Free WiFi broadband everywhere here. I’m getting decent speed in this concrete building.

I’ll keep you all posted. Peace and prosperity.

-G.

Stanley Kubrick was a master.

In the annals of film he is a legend and he will always be a legend, like Murnau and Hitchcock before him. Why? Because, quite simply, he did things with 35 and 70 mm silver nitrate emulsion film and sprocket coded sound that not only had never been done, but were believed to be impossible to do with the state of the art.

Part technical genius geek, part mad scientist, part cold blooded existential philosopher, part beat poet. Kubrick rewrote the code of modern cinema production, gave a hearty middle finger to the suits, did exactly what he wanted to when he wanted to and got away with it.

This man made the hair stand up on the back of my neck depicting a spaceship approaching a station with The Beautiful Blue Danube rolling its glory on the soundtrack, forever changing my conception of the word beauty. This is the man who made me weep honest tears when they took ‘The Glorious Ninth’ from a total monster like Alex DeLarge and proved to me that morality was a thing that lived in what you were not willing to do. This man showed me that when faced with the ultimate horror of a destroyed world the only human thing to do was laugh.

Kubrick’s medium is nearly gone now. The tools of the trade have changed. His films will never be equalled.

I wept the day he died. I have so few heroes left. He — as distant and quiet to his fans as he was — was one of the biggest.

!

I think the ‘net troubles have cleared up. It’s still ridiculously slow, but whatever was making our connection drop every 10-15 minutes has gone. They were doing work up the road, and I’m betting that was the case.

And got to see my good pal RF today and chat with him for a few hours. That’s always a plus. Don’t see anywhere near enough of him these days.

For the past year I’ve been quite deeply infatuated with someone I have no chance of ever having a ‘real’ relationship with. Now, this hasn’t stopped me from chasing temporary companionship or caused long periods of despondent lovelorn vapours. In fact, it has been something of a relief: any possibility of falling into a serious relationship is cut short and at the start by the simple fact that she is not Her.

I’ve been quite proud of myself for not letting the lack of Being-With-My-Infatuation get me down. I considered it a hopefully normal process of getting older, wiser and not so much at the mercy of hormones and youthful emotions. In contrast to the quite painful infatuations of my youth, this one is calm, pleasant and almost comfortable.

Now I’m wondering if this is so simply because it works so well in avoiding the messy minefield of ’serious’ relationships. (Yeah, I keep putting that word in quotes. There’s just so much nonsense out there about relationships that the term is almost meaningless to me.) Using said infatuation as a nice barrier against such things. I haven’t been lonely or anything. I’m quite content to be single and wandering about.

If so then yay for me!

Either way, wisdom or barrier, it works. No more strangling on the Pretty Noose:

*Diamond rope, Silver chain, Pretty noose is pretty pain:

And I don’t like what you got me hangin’ from…*

– Soundgarden, Pretty Noose

…you’ll see that I’ve given A Map Of Mankind and The Woman Who Hitch Hiked With Cats their very own categories, for ease of finding and reading. I’ll do the same to every project I finish on this blog.

I’d like to be able to make those categories read ‘oldest first’ to make the viewing a little simpler. So far I haven’t been able to. Any Wordpress wizards out there know if there is a plugin or hack available to do such a thing?

Lordy. Got worse as yesterday wore on. Peaked out today.

Oddly, I did manage to write quite a bit on the laptop, fever ravaged and all. Habits & such, I suppose.

I’m sipping pedialyte and alternating it with chicken bouillion. Feeling better now, in that emerged from the storm celler to see what happened to Kansas aspect.

Erasing the fever induced nonsense, I managed almost 2k of part X. I’m actually impressed.

Tomorrow for certain, me hearties.

I need sleep now.

Mr. Chris Cornell. A full moon blanket is better than none.

"Seasons"

Summer nights and long warm days
Are stolen as the old moon falls
My mirror shows another face
Another place to hide it all
Another place to hide it all
And Im lost, behind
The words Ill never find
And Im left behind
As seasons roll on by

Sleeping with a full moon blanket
Sand and feathers for my head
Dreams have never been the answer
And dreams have never made my bed
Dreams have never made my bed

And Im lost, behind
The words Ill never find
And Im left behind
As seasons roll on by

Now I wanna fly above the storm
But you cant grow feathers in the rain
And the naked floor is cold as hell
This naked floor reminds me
Oh the naked floor reminds me

And Im lost, behind
Words Ill never find
And Im left behind
As seasons roll on by

If I should be short on words
And long on things to say
Could you crawl into my world
And take me worlds away
Should I be beside myself
And not even stay

And Im lost, behind
Words Ill never find
And Im left behind
As seasons roll on by

OK, I’ve had quite a few people ask me why I call this blog ‘Market Theocracy’. The truth is that there are several reasons. I shall summarize:

1) A couple years back I had a group blog with some friends of mine that went by the name Market Theocracy. It had no real theme and the name came from the fact that all the bloggers were market anarchist types and one of them (my friend Aaron who I never freakin’ see any more) was a devout Christian and quite used to taking our many jokes about him being a theocrat. While that blog didn’t last and was read by almost no-one, I have many wonderful memories of it and have always been proud of my posts and those of my pals. Unlike most blogs, MT was actually funny. It had passion and did things no one expected. I was quite sad to see it fade.

2) I am, for the most part, a market anarchist - -a term I prefer to the awful ‘anarcho-capitalist’. AC does nothing but piss off anti-capitalist anarchists and cause misconceptions. I am not pro-corporate. I know that corporations are fully state dependant creation intended to shield businesses from market forces. In short, ‘capitalism’ is not a word I’m willing to go to the wall for or even bother defending.

Among market anarchists there is a tendancy to see ‘the market’ as a sort of God, and the laziest answer a market anarchist can give is ‘The market will handle it.’ This (although true in certain situations) is basically the non-religious version of ‘The Lord shall provide.’

Market Theocracy, then, is a sort of exaggerated tounge in cheek version of my own philosophical mindset.

3) I think it’s both funny and interesting as a name. It’s memorable. It brings to (my) mind a collection of Misean monks in some post-apocalyptic future, hoarding gold and computational equipment, attempting to preserve free-market thought against the onslaught of survivalist communitarian altruism! They say things like ‘By Hayeks beard!’ and ‘For the love of Friedman!’ when troubled. They trade the products of their gardens and their accounting services to the mutated bands of collectivist scavengers that pass beyond their walls.

So now you know.