Return from Exile
I eat seaweed while pulling Roxie back from the shadow’s edge
Sometimes a mango is just a mango
Today I got into a testy exchange with an old friend who was one of those lovers in the past who transitioned into friendship rather than having hurt feelings and a breakup. It is friend centric. Sometimes when I’m in the city we go to lunch or for a walk. She brought me a mango last week. I looked at her innocent face and understood that sometimes a mango is just a mango. We decided to go to Pacific Catch and eat coconut shrimp musubi. It is like a taco except the the wrap is seaweed.
I took the above picture of it and sent it off to Adelia Ritchie because she is trying to sell me on the idea of seaweed as the solution to the food problem. Huba huba and ding ding, that seaweed’s got everything. All I can picture is Bob Dylan on the Bringing it All Back Home album cover, and what I hear is Maggie’s Farm. So I associate seaweed with a dirty hot dog, which is trash of the wurst kind, and will never become a tribal totem. It would look ridiculous and the fertility rate would plummet. But here I was, eating seaweed and enthusing over the genius of combining the coconut shrimp with pineapple, and texting a picture of the seaweed. I wanted Adelia to know that a man has to come to seaweed of his own volition, in his own time.
Dying to go to terrarium
I was troubled by Roxie. She’s a bright spirit and I love her, though some of her friends are probably in q-anon. A long time back she posted something without knowing what it was. I didn’t know q-anon from al-anon but I knew this was probably Russian propaganda. As a hypnotist I know some of the techniques by which you move suggestions past the critical faculties. When I pointed them out one of her friends pounced. “It’s all true,” she said. “You’re the dupe.”
Once you’re down the rabbit hole, you’re like a bug in a jar. Sure, there are a lot of other bugs in there too, and behind the glass you are safe from frogs, with their sticky tongues, but this is a small place, even with the gorgeous view. Rumors are flying about the jar being just a transition on the way to Paradise, aka, the terrarium. “Look at the inkblot and what do you see now?”
“Hillary is playing a flute and the children are following her into the bowels of a pizza parlor.”
“She is a pizza pied piper? Or just an ordinary pedophile? Choose.”
“Does medicare cover this?”
This is the door through which one moves from sanity to insanity, from genteel society into the clutches of a Romanian Count
She was Lucy, being boned in the graveyard by Dracula while the family bumbles along, mother removing the garlic because it smells like Gilroy in here, and nobody, not even Keanu Reeves, is taking the most obviousl precaution of checking the women for bite marks before they go to bed and when they come down to breakfast in the morning. “Let’s nip this in the bud before it gets too dramatic.”
Today she sent me a link to something that was from Sinclair Broadcasting, about freedom to get COVID, and I snapped at her to never send me anything from Sinclair. She was shocked at my response, because she had no idea Sinclair is an instrument of control over millions of people, wielded by one conservative family, like almost all right wing media. You don’t get a community newspaper that begins with a political agenda beyond things like planting trees, improving roads and bridges, regulating zoning, parks and recreation, that sort of thing. The far right political agenda belongs to an individual, and as often as not the individual is clinically insane.
I recall interviewing a psychiatrist at a state mental hospital, when there was such a thing, who said that the greatest danger he faced was getting sucked into the alternate reality of a paranoid schizophrenic. It seems they construct realities which have a very logical structure, so it’s easy to get sucked into it and lose your bearings. Conspiracy pulls people in just like religion, and the grifters who peddle it in the media retreat as soon as they are sued for defamation.
When somebody is brought to court the defense is the same:
“My client is an entertainer, and the things she says are obviously not true. They are performance art. No rational person would believe this kind of horse shit.”
Do not investigate crazy
I know that every conspiracy theory has a logical structure, and that you just can’t help admitting when logic is logical. “Must be true because it all adds up.” So these liberals are the crazy ones because they don’t follow the logic. They dismiss it out of hand as absurd.
And that is exactly right. My quoting Hume on nonsense too often might by now be an old man repeating his stories, but it is apropos. He wrote, “Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.”
This is the nut of it. If it sounds absurd on the face of it, divorced from reality, like the Arizona recount for example, it’s just going to get crazier on further investigation.
