if you haven't heard this, btw...

sit down, first.

if you have a system, use it; if you don't, at least find some good headphones.

please don't listen to this on your phone.

on second thought, it was too cold to eat, so i just showered.

i'm going to put off eating until a little later, when the air's off.

it's not nearly as bad as the previous apartment, but it is unpleasant during the day, when we're in this middle point of around 26-28 degrees, which is what it's been the last few days. any cooler than that, and i don't really notice it; any warmer than that, and the outside air overpowers it. but, it can get shivery in here at that mid point, when it's on. if i sleep in the day under the covers, take a hot shower in the evening and then stay up all night, i think i can largely avoid it.

it should warm up on the weekend, and i don't know what i'm doing, yet.

so, where am i on the rebuild?

i've posted all of the damaged cds. there's a few more days of setting the apartment up, but a lot of what is left is the scripts, so i think i should run through it a little quicker when i get back to it. i start reposting inri000 at the end of the month, so i should get some liner notes up for the october and november journals, and when that happens i hope you'll see what the actual point of this is.

as mentioned previously, i'm rebooting the alter-reality, so the notes that come up for now will just be for 2013-2018. it wasn't initially clear how i was going to do this, but it now makes sense for me to say that i can and will stop this process, for now, at the beginning of 2018, with the end of the fifth reconstruction phase. i guess i'll want to do a quick archive, but i can stop the rebuild there, until i get done the next phase.

i'm going to get through this before i start making more calls about the report, which should be in the mail.

for right now, i'm going to get something to eat, watch the debates when i'm eating and take a hot shower to warm the place up a little bit.

you're not really pitting left v right here when it comes to this; there's not anything particularly left wing about "new families for all!", and there's not anything particularly right-wing about staying at home until you're 50.

what you're really pitting against each other is a concept of dour rationalism against the irrationality of consumer capitalism. it's logic vs impulse. and, in a way, it's consequently intelligence v stupidity.

my parents were not intelligent people, and i've suffered for that. i would hope other people take more benevolent approaches to their kin.

this whole "leaving the nest" thing is a creation of bourgeois capitalism.

as we live in ubiquitous capitalism, it's easy to understand why self-identified leftists may not realize that they're propping up capitalist ideology by criticizing people who stay with their families past a certain age. but, a thorough deconstruction of capitalism would have to address this as an issue.

why do we insist that kids move away from their parents, using the model of birds? are we not primates, rather than birds? do primates not live in kin groups? do they not practice kin selection? and, what does the individual gain by moving away from their family?

the reason we insist that kids move away from their parents is that it drives the housing market and props up the rentier class; it's a way to maximize the extraction of rent, to the benefit of the property owners and the expense of workers. that's how capitalism works, kids. yet, we are certainly primates, and primates certainly practice kin selection, so this is acting against our nature and our evolutionary impulses. so, why do we buy into it?

it is the answer to the last question that the issue really pivots around, and it depends on whether the specific individual gets along with their family or not. somebody with a very strong, close-knit family relationship would probably not benefit from moving away from home at all, whereas somebody that sees the world substantively different from their parents potentially would. now, if we move very far into the leftist project, we get to the point where we collectivize housing outright, and the debate kind of evaporates. call it a kibbutz. cite plato. whatever. but, the family as a feudal concept breaks down when you eliminate the property relationship, and that does need to be the end goal. yet, even then, you don't necessarily physically move away from your family so much as you allow for people with more distant biological relationships to take on roles that we currently delegate to close family members; it's less a physical separation and more of an emotional separation. in the mean time, if somebody can get along with their family then it would clearly make financial sense for them to maximize their resources by staying at home as long as they can, pooling their resources into the existing family finances (house, car) rather than into a new one and eventually inheriting something that's been paid for rather than buying something new. that's not ideological; that's logical. and, that is of course the trick of the social coercion - don't inherit your folks' house. buy a new one.  then, the bank wins and everybody else loses.

as an anarchist, i broadly reject the idea that i have any right to tell somebody how to live. as my interests lay in art, and i consider paying for shelter to be an annoying burden, i would have rather stayed with my parents until the end; my parents did not care about my art, but rather expected me to go to school and get a job and start a family, things i did not actually want, so i was forced to leave against my will and go out and carry through with this contrived exercise in capitalism that i consider to be a waste of existence. i ended up working part time jobs, just enough to pay the rent, mostly avoiding any kind of social life and focusing as much energy as i could into my art. there was a fundamental breakdown in understanding, there - they didn't understand why i didn't want a good job, why i didn't want a car, why i wasn't interested in starting a family and why i "wasted" so much of my time on art and writing, and i didn't understand why they didn't just fucking support me in what i told them i actually wanted. so, we made no sense to each other. but, if i could have found a kind of benefactor, which is how they did it in the enlightenment, i would have happily moved into their basement. in the end, that's kind of what happened - i live in somebody else's basement, and pay rent with government subsidies. and, i focus on what i care about, and spurn what i don't.

i would have rather just stayed home, and if i had just stayed home then i'd have a lot more work done, too.

if other people have families that they're able to get along with better, then power to them. they have something i don't. and, i have no interest in criticizing them for that or trying to coerce them back into capitalist orthodoxy.

i want to say something about how i ended up in the wrong group of activists, though. it goes back to a kind of common error i've come up against over and over again, which is that i tend to base my primary means of learning on written material, and it often ends up contradicted by reality.

probably the first time i noticed this was when i realized i could spell words i couldn't pronounce correctly, and that this was kind of endemic, actually. i guess it was some time near the end of high school, when i found myself in a social group for really the first time in my life. in the midst of conversation, i would repeatedly pronounce things in ways that would get strange glances, or requests for repetition. "oh, you mean..." and then they would present the pronunciation that they'd heard. this often had the effect of challenging my credibility on the topic, because i was using all of these weird pronunciations. how well could i understand a concept if i couldn't enunciate it?

well, the truth is that these are things i'd been reading about in books and online for years, but that i hadn't actually heard anybody talk about before. my father was a jock, and my mother was a drunk - they didn't and don't have large vocabularies. i grew up desperately poor for the first ten years of my life; when my father remarried, he married into the middle class, but it was into a conservative section of the middle class, and it didn't meaningfully increase my exposure to people using larger words. so, i was reading at a university level when i was 10, i was in the 95th+ percentile on all of the standardized tests, but i had no exposure to anybody actually using any of these words. in english, spelling it out only goes so far, too - you can't just figure it out.

i often found myself explaining this, but it was rarely actually effective, because people are shallow idiots. i more often found myself written off, despite usually being the most knowledgeable person in the room. it's how people are.

likewise, i suspect most people probably end up in a political movement by meeting people, rather than by reading books. if there's much of any intellectual component to it, it's usually going to come after the fact, and have little meaningful effect. the normal way that people are going to do this is that they're going to go to a protest and ask the people there what's happening and determine if they like the people or not.

i did this the exact opposite way - i read up on a bunch of leftist writers, and then i went out looking for leftists, only to find that they didn't really uphold the ideals i'd previously read about. then, we get into this definitional debate: is the left this thing that exists in front of us all that calls itself the left, or is it this thing that exists in these books? and, i want to point to the books, and they want to point to themselves.

if you look at the literature closely enough, it does make some sense. what marx criticized as "utopian" came from conservative origins. in a sense, both marxism and conservatism are reactions to liberalism. and, it's not exactly easy to extricate yourself from capitalism, while existing smack in the middle of it.

but, that's not what you're thinking when you show up at one of these protests for the first time. you want them to be what you read about, and it takes some time to assert the empirical fact that they aren't, and try to figure out exactly why that is.

i would probably start an instagram account, even if it was purely trolly (like the twitter account), if you could log in with a browser on a regular windows computer. but, in order to use instagram, you need to have a phone and download an "app". i do actually have a phone at this point, but i'd have to flash it with a custom image before i felt safe actually using it, and i haven't gotten around to doing it, yet.

i want to be clear about a point.

in 2019, when you start pulling out words like "intersectionality", there's no predicting where you're going to actually go with it. it's a buzz word - it means everything and nothing at the same time. that wasn't yet the case in 2013.

so, i'm going to want to hear what you actually mean before i react. and, i'm ultimately going to want to see what your policy actually is, before i rip it apart as orwellian doublespeak - because i can't know beforehand if you're actually going down the rabbit hole, or if you're just being vacuous and trendy.

but, i will hold by my argument: any legitimate attempt at intersectional analysis that i've seen has in the end been a corollary of burkean conservatism, and has never made any sense in an actual socialist context. and, it's usually trotted out to uphold some kind of neo-liberal identity politics.