I woke up at 4:30 so I guess I needed sleep. I guess things have an excuse to be cold and dark and depressing with Thanksgiving next Thursday. It had stayed so warm up through October that it was like a switch was flipped and now it's winter.
I think I've been losing some weight because I've wanted to lose weight to handle heat better. Back in Hawaii I'll have to really watch my weight because it's not just warm there but humid. Of course every time I've stepped off a plane there my body has felt the atmosphere there and reacted something like, "I'm home". So maybe having grown up in that particular climate makes it natural to me. I've even had a Cambodian co-worker say they didn't like that climate, but much preferred California here where it's a lot drier.
I did some singing exercises last night they are indeed working. Like exercising any muscle, I guess.
The election is still up in the air and I guess the way the 'Rump is playing things is, it's a great way to fund-raise from his brain-damaged followers and at the very end he can do a sort of Foghorn Leghorn bow and step off stage. And if, though it's a small chance, he's able to install himself as dictator then that's even better.
Not better for we in the 99% though. And, if the latter case occurs, I've decided I need to step up my schedule to go back to Hawaii because I'd expect travel restrictions to become a thing. Things are so much worse now than they were 4 years ago, that 4 years from now there may be no plane travel for anyone but the elite, or we may be in a low-level civil war something like "The Troubles" in Ireland which would certainly complicate travel.
I'll certainly have time to study no matter how fast I leave, so thanks to u/happybadger on Reddit posting this:
https://hyperallergic.com/313435/an-illustrated-guide-to-guy-debords-the-society-of-the-spectacle/
I've ordered Debord's Comments On The Society Of The Spectacle which is a later book and supposedly easier for the new student of Marxism/Situationism to digest. I want to study this because I think I've got the basic gist: Capitalism makes you miserable and one of the modern ways it does so is to make you obsessed with baubles you don't really need.
I remember in my college days being obsessed over HP calculators and had a small collection of them that I worked hours I didn't need to to obtain. And I was obsessed with having a motor scooter and then motorcycles and of course now I know that any motor vehicle is a huge money-drain. I remember also in college being miserable because I was obsessed with having one of those military watches with little radium vials in it - they'd been cheap and the price of them had started skyrocketing. A stupid watch.
The whole idea of moving to the mainland was *supposedly* things were cheaper and I could work and have a car and a house ... all false of course. And I thought it'd be easy to finish my degree, again, wrong. And I thought I'd be able to pair up with some life-partner like used to be normal and with both of us working, all these things would be possible. All I found was a couple of gold-diggers.
My whole life was described in terms of things. A car. A house. You're a good person because you've got a car and a house. You're a success because you've got a boat and scuba-dive in the Caribbean like Ken and his family can do.
Even when I was a kid I found Eastern/Asian ideals strange and even repugnant. An older guy, perhaps ex-British gov't service? - treated my mom and I to a sort of lecture and slide show on Eastern art ... those patterns... lattices... beautiful but no individuality, no artist's signature on that stuff. I was turned off. It seemed a prison-art, with no artist thumping their chest and saying, through their work, "I am I!"
I also read books about meditation and yoga and such things, and I'd be infuriated, thinking, "Why doesn't that guy get up off his ass and build something?" The idea of living a good life in terms of doing as little harm as possible and living lightly on the Earth is completely inimical to the Western ideal of "Progress!".
But now the idea of being a minimalist is becoming more popular, at least a perceptible underground murmur. And I understand now. I started to realize how this all worked when I still had my apartment and my Prius and my own little business, and one day ran some quick numbers through my head and saw that I was essentially working for the Toyota Motor Company and the company that owned my apartment, and several credit-card companies and Ebay, and was living, myself, on as little as I could spare.
Progress is as dead to me as the Republican Party. About all a person can do is try to do as little damage as possible as they get through life, and I already feel like a genius for not having kids.
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