is anybody out there?

Imagine you look in the mirror and you’re me and, while I don’t look like Ryan Gosling, I’m a fairly handsome bloke. And I’m fit. Someone might say, “wow this is it, this is my life beginning” or something idk I’ve never been anyone but me. The thing is though I look in the mirror and my fitness my external appearance even the way that I’ve styled my hair to make it look nicer is not everything, hardly anything.

What it comes down to I think, is that being in shape (which includes getting a chiseled jawline (look up mewing (don’t go crazy tho) is not an end goal in life it is, and I’m sorry to say this, the basis of living a whole life.

I know I sound like a hater and I don’t intend to. I’m 100% sure that people with more body weight than they’d like to have live great lives and I’ve seen it, it’s just that to me the societal focus on fitness misses that fitness is more a prerequisite than anything else. Do literally all of the things, but be in shape, I’m telling you. Eat right stretch walk sleep and then do everything else, even get buckwild ya dig, just make sure that the following morning you eat organic chicken breast and not Mickey D’s.

Oh yea, the prices are 100% comprable as well. Buy a whole set of chicken titties and it’s essentially a fast food meal as far as $$ go. And then, and I’m sorry again, but buy a single avocado cut that up, get butter, and that’s a whole meal. You just have to cook it yourself. Dun dun dun!

But then, after you grub down and do your lunges, get out there and make it happn, cappn.

Here’s a counter proposition to Jordan Peterson’s concept of the leader monkey in a troop being defeated by the two next most OP monkeys in the squadron. I do not suppose that Dr. Peterson is wrong and of course there’s much to consider and talk about as far as this whole sort of mental playground set up by this scenario of say the conceptual alpha being out maneuvered by a sigma & an uber beta and if the whole “sigma” thing means nothing to you then two uber betas could make it happen right. Or a small group of individuals. Whatever. All I know about is tv shows and podcasts. This bit isn’t even about the positive of this proposition though, it’s about the negative. It’s about when the alpha broski and the next handful in line are tight like a tiger. Imagine that. That produces, and say it with me, an exponential boost in power allotted to número uno. No? If we for a sec don’t translate the analogy to the infinite complexity of human existence, human society, and just think about the primates, it works yes? Big man takes everybody from place to place kind of checks everything out and then sits back and everybody frolics and f– does fun things in general… while his buds look out to the perimeter. Or perhaps none of this is real and in fact Adam and Eve began our whole existence. History is such a maze.

Growing up memorizing the capitals of all the states, learning about expansion and the civil war and reconstruction, you begin to develop this magical feeling about our U.S. of A. Then you get older and you start to see more of it, and then more of it, and then if you’re me a lot of it, and the magic fades.

One seeks and expects markers of a place and a people that differentiate them from their neighboring cities, states, etc., but one finds the same, mostly, on different scales depending on population density or special status; i.e. college towns or capitals *Pennsylvania: Harrisburg!*

You look here and it’s a subway sandwiches, you look here and it’s a monolithic court house, look over there it’s the highway, round the corner a Vons, block over the Starbucks, just right over there is the ford dealership, few blocks is the entrance to the housing development, downtown is the Bank HQ, and a hotel, oh and there’s a hotel over there too, and oop just passed the McDonald’s, just a town over are the outlets, and ooh look a park, and there’s the high school, and it’s that again and then one more time and again.

Hollywood, CA thinks it’s one of a kind but it’s not, it’s only in a way a prism by which the whole conglomerate image is refracted into the abyss of middle America. The thing is with stuff like “Girls Gone Wild” the cultural habitus forms upward not just downward. LA is to middle America as an S Class is to a 4Runner. Besides that it’s the same thing up and down.

The deep tragedy is the waste of natural beauty (people and place). It’s not even the industrialization and the– civilization, if you will, it’s that we’re all living these npc lives. Culture is such an ephemeral thing but it’s out there. I’m so tired of this 21st century drab. I’m sick of Rick and Morty.

Parangui sings of “cleansing the rivers and healing the land,” and I do believe that is called for and we’ll be thankful we answer that call, but we’re fools if forget about the spiritual transformation necessary. I feel like I’ve been on a path and was set on it the moment I was struck that Christian faith in Christ’s resurrection and the prospect of eternal life in heaven is a psychological phenomenon. Since then essentially the whole apparatus has fallen out.

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An aside

Dr. Peterson, it’ll never happen for me; for us. Glad it happened for you I guess and good on ya for making lots of money and all that, changing lives, changing mine, all that; it’s not gonna go that way with everybody.

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The apparatus really hasn’t reconstituted. Maybe I blame California. No that’s too harsh. Being in LA is brutal though, people, I tell ya. It’s not that it’s so run down or whatever, ‘course last time I was there I was in the vicinity of the Physical Place Hollywood for about a minute– then away I was, it’s that it’s all twisted up in the people. The residents are scary, cyborgs, indescribable, and the tourists, are pilgrims that reached the end…..

They built it far out into the ocean, they demanded both a ferris wheel and a rollercoaster, they said we need restaurants and we need carnival games! It stretches out a ways, but eventually you walk to the end of the Santa Monica Pier, and there’s nowhere else to go. Only back.

Pray for us. Pray for me. Pray for you.

p.s. the capital buildings. They are inspired the ones I’ve seen but they are all aspirational of past architectural, and spiritual, elements. It would be quite a thing to see a just outrageous capital building. But no, because we’re serious people!

p.p.s. maybe this essay is in fact too self serious, the thing is I’m irked! I am stricken when I see an empty space where once was an Abraham Lincoln statue. It confuses me. Your revolution is for what? Gay day in the park? That’s what it’s for? What? Can we find no better alternative?

p.p.p.s. almost forgot about the prevalence of airports in the states. Isn’t plane so fun?!