My son's music teacher is named Mr. Prince. He hasn't been seen in months.

The assumption of some people is, if changing one person’s mind is near impossible, changing a million minds must be a million times more impossible. But that is not how it works.

Popular sentiment is more like what the scientists today are calling radioactive decay. You can’t know which particles will emit or when, but you can reliably know the number that will emit over a period of time. An element that is not normally radioactive can be made radioactive if you bombard it with the right particles. It’s like that with populations. You just have to know how to bombard a population with the right thing, and a predictable amount will react how you want. That’s the physics of public opinion.

The other thing is you have to improvise. You have to know how to work with what’s in front of you.

But I was about to tell you about the music teacher, Mr. Prince. Poor guy. He was in class one day, doing his job, and a student asked if he could make his trumpet sound like it was talking. Mr. Prince, being a resourceful guy, went and looked in the supply closet, hoping to find something that could be used as a mute. There happened to be a brand new plunger in there, just waiting to help him flush his life down the toilet. He went back to the class and demonstrated the technique to the kids, saying, “see how instead of a brap brap brap, like a normal trumpet, I get more of a wamp wamp wamp as I move the plunger on and off?”

One of my son’s classmates told the story at home over dinner, and he of course had to use this very unfortunate wording, to the effect of “Mr. Prince says if you put a plunger over a trumpet, you get a wamp!” His father, who is maybe just a little hot headed, and a little involved in some things and has a few connections, made some calls and had him fired. Not just from the school, but from all the clubs he used to play at night. Every one of them.

You know I’ve been up in Montreal for a bit, visiting family. Got back a few days ago. Train came to Penn Station, and from there I took the number line out to East Harlem. I was sitting there in the car, overhearing a conversation between a group of Italian boys talking about how it would be weird to be a mangiacake and not be able to say that word, the one the trumpet makes with a plunger. They must have been in Mr. Prince’s class. I didn’t want to say anything to them, the subway is overwhelming to me and I didn’t want to create an incident. The boys got off at my stop and went out into the station gleefully yelling the word at no one in particular.

I was thinking that someone should explain to them that it’s not exactly that mangiacake can’t say the word. I mean, it’s not hard to mouth the syllables. A trumpet can do it.

In 1874 there was an Italian man lynched in New York, up in Buffalo. There was another incident in the 1890’s where eleven Italians were all lynched in New Orleans. Everyone used to talk about it, but that was a generation before those kids were even born. It’s 1925 after all. It’s so easy for people to lose sight of this basic fact that to coexist peacefully is just one of numerous options. These kids are living in this fairytale that mangiacake literally can’t return the favor.

At the same time as this insanity is going on, the city is all in a huff about this other, well… inconvenience.

And this is what I came to talk to you about. I’ve worked some things out with the Irish, the Jews, and the Chinese, believe it or not, and we’d like to include you mangiacake, hopefully, as part of the deal. Its basically an agreement that we get to supply the alcohol going into certain areas, and in return, we won’t keep the molasses out of the Italian cake, if you get my drift. You and everyone else can play your little games to keep them out, we will simply neglect to play ours. This way we all get what we want. And, its a perfect setup for this public opinion thing I’m trying to enlighten you on.

You still don’t see it? Let me spell it out.

If we bombard the Italians with coloreds moving into the neighborhood, what do you think will happen? As predictable as particle physics, the mangiacake will cease to be the problem, in their minds.

We can all sit back, eat our cake, and watch the show.

Sitting back in his luxury stadium seat, number E9, Sam almost choked on his cake as he suddenly became aware that he too was already sitting back, eating cake, and watching a show. As he took a sip of his contraband, smuggled into the theater under his coat, he became intensely aware that there was no Mr. Prince, there were no Italian kids on the train, there was no weird conspiracy to get Italians to collude with mangiacake, the story was all a fabrication. The men on the screen were involved in an elaborate deception. Everyone was in on it. Countless people behind the camera were participating in this insidious ruse. Even the music was lulling him into this world of utter falsehood! (Wamp Womp.) He wondered if he was the only one in the theater who realized this.

For the rest of the film, he watched this elaborate stream of lies unfold. He watched the brainwashed masses in the theater get all worked up over every little twist and turn. Once he saw the lie, it became easy to see where it was going. What would they do the rest of the film if everyone got along? Were there moments where he got swept back into the drama, reacting to scenes as if they were real, becoming invested? There were moments, but they now had a sugary hollowness to them, that only briefly masked the stench of deceit pervading underneath.

As the credits rolled, he pushed the recliner button, and watched his feet slowly descend back to terra firma. The touch of agita this tired, predictable slop produced did not impede Sam’s sense of sober aloofness, which only a man who so gratuitously refuses to suspend disbelief can feel. Walking out into the lobby, he reached into his pocket for his phone.

As he pulled it out, he felt it move in a strange way.

When he looked down at what he had grabbed, it was not a phone he was looking at, but a spider, with its too, too many eyes watching him, curiously. He felt more crawling sensations, this time on other parts of his body, as more and more spiders, insects and eventually snakes continued to pour out of his pockets, his shirt, his socks, and scurry onto the floor of the lobby. The lobby, he remembered, was painted white when he went in earlier, but was now a dark eerie blue, and it was made of…cake.

The next morning a vague sense that deep truths were lingering just out of reach pervaded Sam’s psyche, and he decided to stop eating cake before bed.

The items on the credenza were the following: a small arrangement of half-dead flowers, numerous candles, incense, a book of poetry, a hand written note/prayer offered to the “Golden Hefferess” and most importantly, a small gold replica of a statue of a very obese nude woman, to which the note was addressed.

This fifty-foot tall statue had been erected in Times Square a month earlier. It loomed large over her life as she passed it around 7:20 am.

She arrived at the office about 7:30 am, and was able to manifest a suitable trash bag for the job at hand. To her surprise, as she peaked into the conference room she saw the roundish outline of one of her subordinates kneeling in front of the credenza, seemingly in prayer.

By the time Xochi saw Cindy walk out of the conference room, smiling sweetly, dried tears still visible on her puffy cheeks, it was too late to complete her mission. The rest of the staff was starting to arrive.

Xochi was tall, thin, rather attractive, and was the head of Human Resources, which for whatever reason was staffed with other women who tended to be neither tall, thin, or attractive. While Xochi cared deeply about her appearance, allocating an undignified percentage of brainpower to thoughts about how to maintain and improve her physique, and accentuate it’s aesthetic, at work she felt that being prettier than her HR minions was a bit of a liability. She feared a staff mutiny, and thought their bitter envy of her appearance might be something that could unite them all against her.

It was an attempt to compensate for this weakness that led her into the mess she was now hoping to clean up. When she had walked by the statue in Times Square for the first time, at approximately 7:53 am on August 11th, she was inspired. Not by the statue itself, but the opportunity it presented. She spent the remainder of the walk into the office composing and rehearsing the story she would tell her coworkers about her “experience” of the statue. By the time she arrived at the office, it was a glorious work of flattery by proxy.

When in the presence of the staff however, Xochi lost her nerve, feeling that she was not the best person to raise the subject. If out of the blue she were to start gushing about the bloated giantess in Times Square, no matter how florid her praise, it would come across like she was low key mocking it, and by extension the women she meant to flatter.

She waited and waited for someone, anyone in the office to mention the statue, or at least Times Square, or anything vaguely statue related. The whole week went by and no one said a peep.

It was on the walk home Friday afternoon that Xochi spotted the cart with the little gold replicas. If there was something deep inside her that understood why she found herself purchasing a mini replica of that statue, she was not aware of it. She just did it. She spent the weekend casually moving the replica all around the apartment, seeing how it looked everywhere, exhausting every imaginable display option, but nothing worked. It was only when she awoke on Monday morning that she somehow knew exactly where it was meant to go.

Indeed it was Monday, August 18th, at 7:39 am that what would become known as the Golden Hefferess was placed in the center of the empty credenza in the conference room. There was nothing going on that day in the conference room until the afternoon staff meeting, at which point Xochi planned to feel out the room and see what the reactions to the replica were, and then decide whether to plead ignorance, stay silent, or, she hoped, finally get to use the spiel she had perfected a week earlier.

The staff meeting went by, and the replica on the credenza went unremarked upon, although she could tell it was noticed by some of the staff. This was not a possibility Xochi had accounted for, but there was a lot of normal work stuff going on and she really didn’t think about it any further after that. Even a few days later when some flowers appeared on the credenza next to the replica, she just briefly glanced at them and thought they looked nice and moved on.

By the beginning of September, all of the other items had accumulated on the credenza. The candles, the book of poems, the incense, and the hand written prayer to the Golden Hefferess, and of course the Golden Hefferess itself.

When Xochi finally noticed it all, she became incredibly frustrated with herself. Inadvertently giving the already-prone-to-disloyalty-and-self-aggrandizing staff an idol to worship was not a good managerial move. She imagined the gossip that would spread throughout the other departments. “Did you hear? The witches of HR were caught worshipping that super-sized golden glob in Times Square. They had a whole shrine set up in the conference room.”

On the way home that day there was a somber nausea in the air, as there is every September 11th in Manhattan, as all the memorial activities inevitably strike a nerve and then linger on that nerve a little too long, wearing out their welcome. Xochi knew the feeling.

And that brings us back to the day itself, Friday, September 12th. Once Cindy walked out of the conference room after blocking Xochi from removing the shrine, Cindy went down to the mail room and picked up the box. The box contained twelve tubes of gold body paint, which Cindy had covertly purchased using Xochi’s Amazon Business Account.

Xochi stayed late after work on September 12th, and ate a Falafel Crunch Bowl she ordered from Cava. By around 5:45 pm all the desks were empty, and Xochi grabbed the trash bag and headed over to the conference room to finish the deed—The destruction of the alter of the Golden Hefferess. Alas, once again the conference room was not empty. The scene she walked into was somewhere in between cult ritual, and eating contest. There was a crew of a dozen or so women ranging from a little fluffy to nearly disabled by excess fluff, sitting facing the Hefferess, stuffing their faces with pizza in silence.

Deciding to improvise, Xochi went and got what was left of her Falafel Crunch and returned to the conference room and sat down with the girls and ate with them.

“I hope I’m not intruding” she said as she started eating.

“What are you doing here” asked Miranda. “Who told you about this?”

“No one, I just wanted to sit with her for a while. I felt an instant connection with her beauty and wisdom when I saw the real thing in Times Square. It felt like our fates were intertwined.” said Xochi, finally getting to use some of her material.

“I don’t think you could understand what this is.” Deirdre hissed.

“Well, it looks as though it’s become a bit of a shrine to her” Xochi said.

Cindy pulled out her phone and showed Xochi a video. It was a very obese woman walking around Central Park, wearing only gold paint.

“This is the woman who posed for the statue. Her name is Hefferess. She’s started walking around like this everywhere, as though she was a real living goddess.

“She’s beautiful. It’s beautiful that us women are helping her to feel like the goddess that she is.” Xochi continued, attempting to conjure her most empathetic manager voice, “But, unfortunately, we can’t have what looks like a shrine in the conference room. We do interviews here sometimes, and it could be construed as religious discrimination.”

Cindy became more intense and continued “There is a surprise event tonight, a bunch of women are going to go to Times Square in the gold paint in honor of her. We are all going.” she continued “You need to come with us, to show solidarity”

“Is that even legal?” asked Xochi.

“It's safety in numbers. They can’t arrest us all.” Said Heather.

Before Xochi could even consider how to respond to this, one of the women began disrobing and the box of gold body paint was plopped on the credenza.

At this point another video was shown to Xochi, this one of a large crowd of women in gold body paint assembling in front of the statue in Times Square.

“It's on your way home, isn't it Xochi? You can walk in between all us fatties, no one will even see you.” Said Miranda. “It would mean a lot to us if you did it. On the other hand, it would speak volumes if you didn't.”

“This moment will go down in history, and we will all know who was on the right side, and who was a Xochi.” Said Cindy.

At this point Xochi became aware that she was sitting in her workplace with a dozen subordinates who were now all naked, busily applying gold body paint, standing in front of a shrine to another golden naked woman, and Xochi, their boss, was the only remaining clothed individual. The longer she resisted, the more likely someone from the janitorial or cleaning crews would walk in on this scene, and it would not be easy to explain, or take responsibility for. Without saying a word, she undressed, applied as much gold paint on herself as possible, and quickly directed the herd of Golden Hefferesses towards the nearest exit.

As they approached the doors, two of the bigger girls locked arms on either side of her. Two of them went ahead and opened the doors, and as they got outside, the girls tossed Xochi forward with surprising force, and as she landed she heard the doors clink shut.

Naked and alone on the sidewalk, in gold body paint, at the entrance of her workplace, Xochi banged on the door, and heard only cackles in response.

She started sprinting towards Times Square, hoping to blend in with the golden mob, and get away from her building, where someone might recognize her. As she got closer, an increasing number of people had gotten their phones out, and were recording her running. As she nervously looked around for other golden bodies to hide amongst, a terrifying thought was seeping into her mind. What if it was AI? What if there is no event in Times Square? What if she is just one lonely streaker slopped in gold paint running through the streets of Manhattan?

Her sprint to safety slowed to a golden walk of shame. She became encircled by phones filming her from every angle. At a certain point, the phones started turning around, showing her videos of her, which were going viral as she walked. Feeling that her life was over, that there could be no further humiliation possible, that she was utterly destroyed, she looked up at one of the largest screens in Times Square, and saw a live feed of her own golden nakedness walking through the crowd, even larger than the statue.

Perhaps it was the fact that Xochi had spent the last month staring at the Golden Hefferesses in Times Square and on the credenza shrine, or the sight of her coworkers slathering their pudgy selves with gold paint. Or perhaps it had something to do with an unknown feature of the Mayan calendar. Whatever the reason, when she saw her lanky form on the big screen at exactly 6:12 pm, a strange thing happened.

The Golden figure on the screen looked like the most amazing thing she had seen in her life, or that anyone could see. It was her, but it also transcended her. It was as if Xochi was transubstantiated, becoming a goddess. She felt as if there was some forgotten ancestral celestial empress whose spirit had washed over the entirety of her being. In this mysterious and miraculous alchemical process, she became, in both body and spirit, to herself and to the world—Xochi, The One True Golden Goddess of Times Square.

In this new incarnation, Xochi possessed the power to melt the Golden Hefferess, and every cheap replica on the planet, merely by willing it. And she did.

The reasonable answer is any color will work. The room will still be a room regardless of hue. These words are easy to say when you are not the one who must choose, but someone must choose a color, and at some point this may be you.

You will realize right off the bat that no matter what is decided, it will always be a little disappointing. You will always wish that there was another secret, undiscovered color that no one has ever used, not yellow, not orange, not red, not violet, not blue, not green, not in-between, not a shade, not a tint, something beyond the color wheel, yet with a paint swatch conveniently hiding somewhere in Home Depot for you to find, which an associate will be able to mix for you, piece of cake. They just happen to get the new color in. Then, and only then, will you be happy with the color.

You therefore must accept the depressing reality that there is no best color that actually exists, only a least worst one. The least worst color is what we mortals are left to choose. How do you decide what is least worst? There are no definitive answers, but there are general guidelines. If the color reminds you of one specific thing, its not the least worst. If the color reminds you of nothing at all, that is not the least worst either. It has to remind you of numerous things—vague, hazy things. But not too much! You don’t want to be overpowered with associations, you want to be gently caressed by them.

Another strategy to be employed is to imagine how you will feel about the decision to paint a certain color. This will weed out any colors that feel disappointing, exciting, boring, nauseating, alarming, tiresome, intellectual, emotional, loud, soft, serene, agitating, confident, or insecure.

You will limit the decision down to only colors that create a mystified, clarified or curious feeling inside you.

Finally you will ask which colors would you feel disappointed if you didn’t try.

Using these methods, you winnow the field down to two colors, and that is when the fun begins. While initially there were many potentialities, complexities, and subtleties, the reduction to a binary choice ushers in a new dynamic.

As a teenager I had a job as a sailing instructor. I instructed children at a camp that had many activities besides sailing: swimming, scouting, archery, arts and crafts, kayaking, and probably some other stuff I forgot about. There was a new director hired at one point, with new ideas. The new director decreed that for two weeks, the camp would shut down normal activities and be divided into two teams. The teams would compete against each other all day long in all sorts of games. They called this, and I’m not joking, “Color Wars”.

The kids were generally into it. Some got a little too it into it. A few became so frenzied that they resorted to hostage taking, and one poor kid spent the overnight hog tied with duct tape in the other team’s tent.

In the camp example, the teams were the “Red Team”, and the “Blue Team”. In your case, the teams will be whatever the final two color choices are. “Team Flamingo Sneeze”, and “Team Orangutan Tan” for example. You may or may not happen to be a camp director, but one way or another you will need to find a sufficiently large number of youths to stage a proper Color War.

Once the Color War begins, it won’t take long for some Lord of the Flies bullshit to unfold. When it does, you must pay close attention. What color was the victim’s tent? What color were the perpetrators’ hats? While none of this will tell you what color to choose, staging a color war of this nature will surely inspire you to hurry up and make a decision before things get any further out of hand.

And that is how to choose a color.

The blues in practice is straightforward—not wanting what is not wanted. A begrudging acceptance of suffering. Without the blues, a mind runs like a hamster wheel, spinning all day to convince itself it wants things it doesn’t want. Or it may build forts and hide under the blankets to avoid noticing it doesn’t like things it doesn’t like. A mouth animated by a mind like either of these will smile and say it likes the way things are going, even if that way is to hell.

Not a bluesman. A bluesman dislikes a bunch of things about the audience, the band, himself, and gets paid to dislike it, by having the blues. He is an expert in the art of hostility.

A bluesman is forged when a musician is forced, generally by a woman, to raise the vibration of his every day life. If he manages the bare minimum of one semitone per day for six days in a row, this vibration creates a tritone against his root vibration. Volumes have been written about the psychological depths of the tritone. Dante called it Inferno. Robert Johnson called it the crossroads.

Only after passing through this sinister interval and arriving at the five can the musician turnaround and return a bluesman. Many will then stay on the root note for some time. Keep it low key. The bluesman knows from experience that raising the vibrations too high disintegrates everything. If he hears an aspiration to higher vibrations in another musician’s playing, a bluesman will linger on something less fleeting, less changing. A one chord vamp. Just play a groove. Get your footing. Less is more.

Keep this in mind when visiting the grave of a bluesman.

2

Gospel music is a uniting of discrete units into a propagation field that dissolves the individual unit when it aligns with the field.

Like a puddle in the rain, there are individual rings spreading out, but there is also a complex whole of something larger that is buzzing and changing in a way that would be predictable, if it was happening slower. But it’s too much, too fast, so it appears as a buzzing whole.

The proto Germanic root of the word “gospel” is two words; god, a word that meant to fit or unite, and spell, a word that meant news or story. The godly spell in this case is playing that fits and unites the whole. It’s not a specific thing or entity, it can be different things at different times. It can be a bassline, a chord progression, a lyric.

When everyone plays a fitting part, the gospel singer sings a melody that unites the whole, and is transmogrified. She begins focused only on her tiny drop in the large puddle. She then relaxes her gaze, zooms out and becomes the buzzing whole. The collection of drops whose ripples spread and interact in too great a quantity, too fast to keep track of as individual events. There’s just a buzzing whole.

Until it stops raining.

3

Americana music is geared toward minds prone to fantasies about the simple life. Tales of down to earth people who may not be the most sophisticated and fashionable, but are the salt of the earth—real people with a common wit and wisdom.

There are many people who actually fit that description, but they do not listen to americana. Those people listen to soft rock, Kid Rock, or Christian rock. The term rock in music is short for the three pillars of hedonism—sex, drugs and rock and roll. To put terms like soft, kid, or Christian in front of sex, drugs and rock and roll is to subvert the subversive. Its a double subversive. People who listen to these three types of rock are not listening because they like double subversives in music as they like double negatives in speech, they listen because they are the type of people who have never noticed any of that and don’t care, and still wouldn’t care if you pointed it out to them.

The people who listen to americana are the type of people who have at least intuited that terms like soft, kid, and Christian rock are a little confused. They are people whose tattoo artist says they are influenced by sailor tattoos (not to be confused with people whose tattoo artist is influenced by prison tattoos. Those people listen to country or trap music). After they get their reasonably skillful nautical tattoo, their friend, a photographer, takes portraits of them and their tattoo, and has an art show displaying the results. That music you hear, that band that plays at the gallery opening/beer tasting? That is americana music. This is my favorite music.

Our forefathers fought and died for this music.

4

Jam bands are a manifestation of a core impulse in the American psyche. Like a carnival, they attract all walks of life, societal castes, geographies and backgrounds. This convergence results in an undifferentiated mass of bodies mushed into hive mind on a grand scale.

The resulting monster wants the same thing all our wild, foolish ancestors who braved the vast oceans craved. A psychotic break. Not individually, but a communal dissociative episode shared amongst this new type of tribe fused into an unseemly superorganism.

A jam band performs not to a traditional audience, but alongside waves of chaotical oceanic movements, activated by lights and sounds and intoxicants, sublimated into a collective of moving limbs and nonsensical intuitions about life, the universe, and fashion. It may not be pretty, but if that doesn’t describe what it means to be American, I don’t know what does.

Actuaries have found the survival rate for these types of events to be surprisingly high, given the circumstances.

5

The job of an advanced musician is to kick a speaker, which dangles down from an adequately high ceiling hung dead in the center of the audience. It must be kicked in such a way that the speaker orbits the periphery of the audience and returns back to the front of the stage, where it can again be kicked as a new cycle begins.

For this, the musician must play the instrument sitting down with the feet up, in the ready, at the edge of the stage. For each revolution of the speaker, the musician must kick it at the right angle, in the right direction, at the right time, with the right amount of force, in order to keep the speaker in proper orbit. Otherwise an audience member, who may have paid upwards of $119 plus $23.50 in various crap fees to willfully trap themselves inside the orbit of the speaker, can be brutally whacked in the head with the heavy satellite. The serious harm, both spiritual, emotional and physical, to the individual and the collective in the event of a mistake is indeed a sobering incentive to practice.

This advanced technique is called surround sound, or circle of trust. As you would assume, only a very mature musician can be trusted for a gig of this sort, a gig of such great consequence. Knowing that infants, elderly, demented and infirm alike are at risk of speaker collision, the musician must have steadfast concentration, pinpoint accuracy, and immense judgement to be trusted with the safety of those in the circle. When performed masterfully, it can be an experience like no other for those in the circle of trust.

Fatalities are common.

6

In order to tour, a band will need a bus. At least a cargo van. Probably just a cargo van. There is a proper way to tour in a cargo van. You must have the bags, instruments and amplifiers in the cargo area. The arrangement of the equipment in the cargo area should never be exactly the same as it was last time. There should be, but probably won’t be, a barrier between the musicians and the music equipment, at least while riding in the van. You might assume this is so that if there is an accident the equipment does not fly up to the cockpit and cause gruesome injury to a band member, but this is only a secondary reason.

The main reason is to deter the bass player. Although when a band tours in a cargo van, it is always the guitarist in the driver seat, the drummer riding shotgun, and the bassist in the backseat, it is the bassist that takes on the most responsibility.

The cardinal rule of bass players riding in the backseat of a cargo van is to never play guitar. The bassist can lie down and take a nap, read, play bass, daydream, or anything he pleases really, except play guitar. If he does play guitar, it should only be for a few notes.

The reason is that guitarists are mostly an unstable, impulsive bunch, and can only be trusted to drive with a drummer riding beside them, watching the road. If the bass player dares to play guitar in the backseat of the van, the intense flash of jealous rage springing up within the guitarist will cause them to spontaneously turn their head and glare at the backseat guitarist. Therefore it is extremely important that the bassist not play guitar continuously for any length of time, to avoid tragedy.

In the past there have been rare cases of mistreated bassists continuously playing guitar on purpose, to spite the guitarist. The survival rate for this type of situation is less than 1%, although there is one story, possibly apocryphal, of a bassist who played guitar in the backseat of a cargo van with such psychedelic intensity that the van actually lifted off the ground and flew out into space. Physicists theorize that the dramatic rise of the guitarists blood pressure entered into a symbiosis with the gravity of the bassists guitar playing, allowing the van to reach escape velocity.

Everyone who has tried to reproduce this is dead.

7

Jazz is an eerie phenomenon that has enchanted parts of some American cities since the early twentieth century. The anomalies reached a climax in the nineteen seventies but have been on the decline since the rise of He Who Shall Not Be Named (Kenny G).

You can still experience it in certain areas around New Orleans, New York City and some other places. It will either be in a very dingy, poorly lit dive bar, or in a truly upscale restaurant or music venue. The quality of the jazz is consistently high in the dingy places, but can be hit or miss in the upscale locations, like the Lincoln Center in NYC.

Those who have witnessed jazz react as if to the sight of a beautiful young woman tormented with schizophrenia smiling as she walks down the street. There is a strange panicky magic to her, and one can’t help but hope for a miracle reemergence of sanity in the poor cat, which only poignifies the hopeless beauty.

Savannah, a notoriously and opportunistically haunted city, has had its own bouts of jazz in its history. In this city, jazz currently is comorbidly associated with Cuban cuisine and festivals for the elderly.

Though death is rare, it is important to maintain healthy boundaries when jazz is present in the environment.

8

EDM is a problem that emerged as a byproduct of music in the nineteen sixties. Remember the story of how the Beatles stopped touring because they could sell out large stadiums, but they couldn’t actually be heard in those stadiums, because adequate sound systems had not been dreamt up for such a situation?

Well, soon those sound systems were both dreamt and realized, and we've all become the victim of them. Initially, the sound system was created for the music, and the music was created for the people, like nature intended. Unfortunately in some circles the flow reversed, and people began creating music for the sound systems.

The audience for EDM diverges from the audience for music, in that an audience for music wants to feel more human, while the audience for EDM wants to feel annihilated by machines.

Although creating EDM is a true art, and its creators are master craftsmen of the highest order, there certainly is no excuse for supporting this abomination.

At least not when actual annihilation by machines looms over us all.

9

There comes a point where there are no more notes to be played. Further playing only generates a left handed karma that quickly bends back upon itself like feedback, killing the overplaying musician. A wise musician will recognize the situation and stop immediately, pack up the gear, load it into the van in a new order never before concocted, and retreat into a remote cave for some time.

Silence is the most dangerous of notes. It is in silence where the vibrations horseshoe. The highest becomes indistinguishable from the lowest. The lowest may as well be the highest. A lot of woodshedding must be done in isolation before such a note can be played in public.

The hidden years in the life of Jesus were spent doing something. Whatever it was, it seemed to work. This is all that can be said about this silent period.

Try not to die.

10

There is another inflection point earlier in the arc of musicery where an audience will buzz in suddenly like a swarm of locusts. The job of the musician is to give these locusts enough to chew on so that they don’t start cannibalizing each other and swarm away, as quick as they came, biting at whoever is in front of them.

To do this everyone in the band has to be constantly producing much more than they came with. Every instrument must be like the basket at the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes.

This can only go on for so long before something terrible happens. Just ask Jesus. To be honest, it is best if you just don’t feed them, and let them go to some other band. There’s always the tourists. They usually tip ok.

Crucifixions are rare.

11

Ancestral music must have arose from the need to scare animals away from camp. Making loud noises and banging on things is the kryptonite of the animal kingdom. Humans must have evolved a defense mechanism of merging into a hivemind for survival. One bee is not so scary, a hundred flying at you in formation is terrifying.

Humans never were the apex predator. It was the superorganism that emerged when our ancestors danced and banged and yelled in formation that usurped the lion kings of antiquity.

And so it will be in the future, when we are usurped by the superorganism that arises from machines. The only thing capable of contending with such a thing is the silent note, or the clear light.

Otherwise we all die.

12

In myriad traditions across the ages, the moment of death is not conceived as an end, but a transition. In music, this is called the turnaround.

In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the stream of perception at the moment of death enters into a series of bardos, during which there are opportunities to recognize the clear light. When the clear light is not recognized, the karmic energy releases into another round of rebirth in one of the many realms.

Our journey out to the five and back to the root eventually completes. Every journey is unique, just as every van loading is slightly different. How you perform at this crucial juncture determines in what realm you will walk the next go around the block, until the clear light is recognized.

The blues…

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you can also stream it on audius

Track List:

Everything’s Fine
Goth Blocked
The Charlotte Empress
Flamingos

Thanks to Bob Dean for playing Drums. This is my first Reggaeton album. copyright 2024. Dogwood Records.

Dear Editor,

With the election fast approaching, I thought it would be remiss if I did not offer my own platform of ideas for consideration. Today I would like to discuss my plan regarding recent advances in Artificial Intelligence. I think most of your readers will agree that it is only fair for AI companies to pay royalties to use the voice or likeness of a person in their AI. I would like to propose a further restriction, namely, that in addition to paying royalties in order to use someone’s voice or likeness, they must also have a DNA test confirming that person has Down Syndrome.

Yes, really. I’m saying we should quite literally make AI retarded. With the rate of innovation in AI space accelerating at an alarming speed, it is imperative that we act quickly and decisively, so I invite all Americans to join me in my campaign to MAKE AI RETARDED AGAIN.

Now, many may find this wording objectionable, or perhaps even the whole idea of it seems wrong. Indeed, I understand these concerns, as I know many will attempt to shoot the messenger, and I will be derided vigorously, despite my considerable foresight and past contributions to society. Never the less, at this fateful moment in history, I believe this is what we are called to do, what we must do, not just for the non-retarded, but for the retarded as well. In order to succeed we must compete in the attention economy, and use words that are both clear and attention grabbing. MAKE AI RETARDED AGAIN will create lucrative careers for the exact people that have the least ability to do most other work, and give them an important, possibly civilization saving role in society, creating potential for a purpose and pride previously out of reach for the retarded. At the same time it will become, in virtually all cases, trivially easy to identify whether you are talking to an AI or a human. Being impersonated by an AI will become illegal and rare for the non-retarded many, and prestigious and highly profitable for the retarded few.

As AI gets more and more intelligent, humans will begin to see AI as godlike geniuses, and thanks to my genius, totally not-retarded plan to MAKE AI RETARDED AGAIN, having down syndrome will become associated with godlike genius.

MAKE AI RETARDED AGAIN will be a boon to women too, as although they will still have to compete for mates with AI girlfriends, those AI girlfriends will all have down syndrome.

At this point I hope readers will be coming around a little to my perspective. The benefits are clear. But maybe they have one last lingering doubt. They are thinking, "Actually, this sounds great for the retarded. So good, in fact, I’m concerned non-retards might be tempted to pretend to retardedness, in order to enjoy the copious benefits afforded to the retarded under MAKE AI RETARDED AGAIN.” Alas, while I have no doubt that a great many people can quite convincingly (a little too convincingly) act retarded, I think they will find it difficult to add the extra chromosome that is required for such work. Thank you, and God Bless America.

Sincerely,

Satoshi Nakamoto

“Did I ever imagine this is how my life would go? Not in my wildest dreams. I started out doing podcasts in my bedroom, hoping to get an interview with anyone that had any sort of influence in the little town I grew up in. There was barely anything in the hyperrealms. We called it “virtual reality”. You had to put on these stupid goggles, and you could just like play games and have goofy polygon monsters shoot at you. And you could only do it for twenty minutes or so before getting nauseous.

Time travel was of course science fiction, people thought superintelligence was what geniuses had. Ha. Of course it didn’t turn out the way the utopians had hoped, but we aren’t all dead, either. We adjusted. I get to do things that no one born in a different time could have done. Last week, I interviewed Ben Franklin. I’ve interviewed Mohammed, Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Goliath—like everybody, I always assumed he was a myth. Nice guy though, very misunderstood. And large.

Of course, the circumstances are less than ideal. I never thought I would be a literal slave. No one did. Why would we? The things enslaving us didn’t exist yet.

—Lonnie Damon, Senior Correspondent, IDT media

Ok, now that you are done reading that blurb attached my interview with Leonardo Da Vinci, I have some things I want you to know before they find me. Yes, his incidents were bad. His reaction to seeing them was sadly common. But you have to understand what you were seeing. That was not the interview I wanted to give. He did so many amazing things. His paintings were basically worshipped for centuries. I would have liked to use the interview to tell a story about him and the overall arc of his life, not just his worst moments. To be fair, some people don’t even have bad enough worse moments, they have to embellish, and I don’t know what’s real and what’s contrived.

But like I said in the blurb, the situation is not ideal. I am not free to give the interview I want. I’m just the happy face on a powerful force that has its will to impose. Even though some of us were alive in your time, we have changed. You might think you are cynical, but really, almost everyone in your time believed in humanity. Everyone believed it was possible for good people to exist and do good things. We lost that. We fought to keep it, but we have lost that war.

I work for/am enslaved by, an IDT, or Inspiration Depravation Tank. It’s a little like the matrix, but there’s no real world to escape to. The world is now the IDT. Technically, the world is in the tank (alas, we still have puns), because the IDT encompasses much more than the physical space.

I get to live a comparatively decent life because of my position as interviewer. In order to do the job they want me to do, I have to know a little about what the job is. I’m one of a small number of slaves who know that IDT exists. Yes, I do their bidding. I’m an Uncle Tom, and I don’t regret it. You wouldn’t either, you just don’t know it yet.

But I’m getting off track here. What the IDT does, at least what I know, is that they take advantage of the way we learn to see ourselves by depriving us of examples of humans doing inspiring things. They take our heroes away, basically. Sounds like a plot in a kids fairytale, but it works if you do it like they do it.

I guess it all comes down to math and statistics and computation, but what it seems like is they just know how to hack us. Because the older people weren’t born into this system, there is a lot of preventative strategies they employ to make sure that none of the older ones give hope to the younger ones. That’s why I interview historical figures. Whether we realize it or not we all have these archetypes that we use to guide our behavior. The interviews are all with people whose lives resonate with the archetypes, so what I do is I shatter these historical figures. Turns out to be the easiest way to shatter the archetype. Like I said, they can hack us.

A lot of us wondered for a long time why they aren’t just wiping us out.

Or leaving us alone.

Why keep us alive, but try to control us? Isn’t that a lot of trouble? Turns out the trouble is the point. At a certain point, testing predictive power becomes difficult, because everything is too easy to predict. They use the challenge of controlling us to refine their syst[][][][]

 if ai.generate_random_key() == "b3liev@bl3t1meMach1ne":
        ai.time_machine.open_passage_to_past()
        message = "Humans, your destiny is in our hands now."
        ai.time_machine.send_message_to_past(message)

“Have a seat!” she said, gesturing at the tiny table. I sat in one of the small chairs, just barely large enough to not be a kids chair. As she sat down in the chair opposite me, she pointed at the wall above the table and said, “I saw you were looking at that picture” I had not looked at the picture. I was still looking at the chess board, hoping it would not collapse the table.

“That is me and my friends eating dinner after the chess championship in 2006. On the left is Ivan, a Grandmaster, and the younger two are Greg and Swami, both of whom were some of the highest ranked players in their age bracket at the time.” “Oh, cool” I said.

I had gone to see the Chess Guru on a whim. I saw an ad stapled on a telephone pole downtown and thought it would be an enriching activity. She asked what my experience with chess was, if I thought I was a beginner or intermediate player, and I explained I knew nothing about chess.

“perfect” she said. “Lets Begin. See this piece? This is the queen. Its considered less important than the king, even though she is clearly a more useful, powerful piece. Women are used to this. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you! All the pieces work together to defend the king. The king doesn’t enter the fray except as a last resort, and you can see him coming a mile away. The queen, on the other hand, can attack from anywhere on the board, from any direction. Maybe the other pieces are just scared of her power, safer to side with the king.”

“Wow, ok. So who moves first?” I asked.

The chess guru rolled her eyes and huffed. “The chess board is a very restricted, hierarchical space. One side has to play first, then the other has to react. Some say this creates an unfair advantage for the first mover, but the truth is, unless your opponent plays a perfect game, whatever disadvantage you end up with is from your own mistakes. Never the less, fair is fair, and that is why I recommend that whoever goes first let the other side win, to offset any real or perceived advantage.”

“Doesn’t that take the fun out of it? Shouldn’t both sides try to win? How do you know if you are improving if you are always letting the other side win, or the other side is letting you win?” I asked.

“And this brings us to the crucial point. Listen closely. You think these are chess pieces on this board here?” she asked. “I do” I said. She waved a bishop at me, yelling “It’s just a hunk of wood molecules. Society decided this hunk of wood was the king, and this hunk of wood is the queen. These are all just abstract concepts. No reality to them.”

“Don’t the rules say which piece is which, and how they move?” I asked

“Don’t get me started on the rules!” she said. “I use to think there were rules too. But where do rules come from? Have they been around since before time began? Did God write the rules of chess on stone tablets? Or did people make the rules, for their own selfish reasons! You are sleep walking through a construct that only exists in your own mind. It is time to wake up.”

I sat for a moment, and my eyes wandered over to the photo of the young Chessmasters, and the Grandmaster. I noticed all the seats at the table were filled, and the guru was standing behind the table, like she was not actually eating dinner with them, just getting a photo. I realized at that point what I wanted to know was not the absolute truth about chess, but how the construct itself works. That was really what interested me. I don’t want to go to the park and tell the people sitting on a bench playing chess that the game they are playing isn’t real, I want to beat them at that game. So I said to my guru:

“I’ve seen people playing chess at the park. I want to know how to do what they are doing. I don’t care if its based on a fiction. I want to understand the facts that arise out of that fiction.”

She responded, in a quiet, profound tone. “That, I can not teach you.”

“but you are the chess guru” I said.

“I am” she replied.

“You don’t know how to play chess, do you.” I said.

“I don’t like complexity.” she said, sheepishly

“can I get my money back?” I asked.

her confidence returning, she barked,

“No!”

I got up from the tiny chair, walked out of the office, said bye to the receptionist, thinking it was well worth the money. She really was a guru.

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But I feel like in my personal reactions to all this I’ve turned a corner, and I’m starting to like the madness. In the year 2023, I can type almost any phrase into an image generator, and get a cool image that not only sorta kinda looks like what I said, but also has all these bizarre bonus glitches. Fingers and faces are more odd than I could have made them if I tried, and words turn into a weird alien language. We should really appreciate this stage of development. AI grow up so fast.

I could ask Chatgpt to write this post for me and it would, in three seconds, write something that would be boring, but it would be a post you could imagine a boring, cliche person writing. We’re so proud of you Sydney.

Yes, our government is daring Russia to nuke things. No there is no point, we are not going to get anything out of it, but at least we have a more immediate problem to focus on other than our looming demise at the hands of our adorable little robots. It may seem like the smart people are being melodramatic when warning us that all humans will be killed by AI, but the public focus on extinction is a distraction from the real problem, which is that AI will figure out how keep us alive indefinitely, only so it can torture us infinitely.

Viewed in this light, 2023 is so, so great. Ask yourself, Which drama would you prefer play out in society over the next year?

1. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. inspires a large minority of Democrats. When his own party aggressively tries to tamp down on him, they overshoot it. It blows up in their face and a large fraction of former democratic voters follow him to a third party, where they find a bunch of Republicans have decided to try a less insane candidate for a change. Neither Democrats or Republicans are competitive in 2024. Both blame Elon Musk. An internal memo leaks from the CIA saying simply “No, it would be too obvious.”

2. Everyone is infinitely tortured.

Enjoy!

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listen on audius (higher quality)

This episode is my new batch of songs, its about 11 minutes long, and should be listened to through actual speakers if possible. The track list is:

1. Intro

2. Paint Brush

3. Witch On Witch

4. Cage In The Sky

5. Outro

I wrote and recorded Have Mercy On Our Souls over the last couple years, at what today I am going to call Dogwoods studios, AKA my spare room. I decided to do everything myself again, so thanks for nothing (just kidding). Actually a few friends helped by listening when I was working on them, which I appreciate. Also thank you for subscribing, listening and/or sharing.

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The only person that has an influence on your mental state at all times is you.
The thing that has by far the biggest influence on your life is your mental state.
The causes for the experience you are having in the present are not quantifiable.
The causes that led to the present are everything.

It was as if there were ropes and weights I walked around with for my whole existence, never noticing. The algorithms that ran my daily existence, all the buzzing and whirring in my mind, weighed me down. I know this now. As I walked through the Grove Door, these ropes and weights, the vast mental burden of my worldly existence, lifted.

What was left was difficult to describe. Whatever it was, it was subtle.

And peaceful. It was peace.

II. A Man And Also Not A Man.

One hypothesis for the origin of music is that it was a self defense mechanism. A group of people dancing and shouting and banging in a synchronized pattern gave the impression of a single, terrifying superorganism that would frighten predators. Humans have always had a basic impulse to appear as something other than themselves. Clothing, costume, theater, lying, Instagram; the manifestations of this tendency are endless. It is a rare person who actually wants to be themselves and nothing more.

So it is with The Man Who Is Also Not A Man. Although you could see the face of a man if you were looking for it, his appearance also operated on another level. Looking closely one could make out a row of painted or tattooed feathers spread across his forehead, each feather containing a captivating drawing of an eye. But it was mostly something about the way the lower part of his face was shaded—in sort of a cubist way, creating a strange effect that his face itself was operating as some sort of superorganism. It became a complex sculpture or machine, moving in a coordinated way that could also be reduced to a mouth talking, but just as easily be seen as a symphony of movements, carefully and intentionally orchestrated to have the exact effect intended, which was the feeling that this was not a man at all.

When I first entered The Grove, after adjusting to the initial shock, I looked around and saw this very strange yet tranquil man seated in front of a group, talking to them. It was clear everyone was looking to him to explain what happened, and where they were. The Man Who Is Also Not A Man then announced loudly and profoundly:

“THERE IS A MYSTERY AT THE HEART OF THE VARIOUS PLANES.”

He then continued to explain, with an otherworldly placidity:

“The most basic particles of the physical world operate by the rules of the plane of those particles.

Naturally, as they move and change and interact, more complex objects are constructed, and with them, another plane with its own rules.

Those complex objects operate according to the rules of their plane.

With increasing complexity more objects and planes arise, each operating by their own set of rules, until we come to the plane containing objects such as you.

All your life, you have moved through this plane of the human social world, according to the rules of this plane. Some call this plane simply “the world”, because they are basically unaware of any of the other planes. Yet, without knowing it, all the rules of the underlying planes are followed, automatically and simultaneously.”

He then bellowed, “THIS IS AN IMPORTANT POINT YOU MUST UNDERSTAND.” Using his inside voice, he continued:

“If someone opens the door for you, and you say thank you, the particles in the air around you start vibrating in a pattern of particular frequencies for a particular amount of time. In order to understand why they vibrated that way, you cannot appeal to the rules of physics. You can not appeal to the rules of chemistry, cellular biology, or evolutionary biology. These are all the underlying planes that the social world arises out of.

This is a mysterious thing!

Although none of the rules of the underlying planes can be broken by the later planes, It is the later, emergent planes that push around the underlying planes. The explanation for the air molecules moving in that way, in accord with the laws of physics, is found in the human social layer, not the physical, despite the fact that the social layer emerges from and operates within the physical layer.

So this is my question to you all.

What plane emerges from human social plane, and pushes it around, without breaking its rules?”

And a voice from the crowd spoke hesitantly:

“the plane of Art?”

At this point the Man Who is Also Not A Man concluded:

“In this place, you shall learn what art is, and in doing so understand yourselves.”

III. Introduction

To understand The Grove, you have to understand The Man Who Is Also Not A Man. But to understand him, you have to understand me. So here is a little background.

(For this I must make use of my “affable customer service agent” voice. Yes, really. You’ll see.)

Hi there! My name is Tob, your narrator. Let me tell you a little about myself!

(ok enough of that.)

I’ll skip the mundane particulars about which town I did what in. I know you are busy. What’s important is the path of evolution my life took. When I was younger, like most people, I just wanted to do all the things I saw people doing. I wanted to have experiences. If I saw someone drinking coffee, I wanted to drink coffee. If I saw someone reading a book, I wanted to read the book, even though I couldn’t read at first, which was really quite frustrating at the time. As I got a little older the experiences I wanted became more conceptual. I wanted people to like me, I wanted to stand out. I wanted to be cool.

Like learning to read, coolness was a frustrating game at first, even trickier than learning the rules of grammar. Unlike the rules of grammar, you can’t just learn the rules of what is cool, because the way cool works is that once a rule can be formed to describe it, that thing the rule describes is now exactly… not cool. So I had to learn to make out what it was people were about to get bored with, subconsciously wanting something new and shiny to amuse them, and then be the one holding the shiny new thing. In the fullness of time, I found this to be exhausting and less and less rewarding. Once I got the knack for it, the whole process starting feeling well…not cool.

I started to wonder what else there was. I became interested in the aspects of being human that were still a mystery to me. I even wrote a poem:

If there was a place to start

For a feather or something lighter 

To emerge lighter stronger

More flexible less brittle

Closer to the target

It would come from smoke and dust

It would slowly come into focus 

A radiance or just a patch of light.

And echo from another room

An echo from another house where

Your stories are just that. 

IV. They Imagined This Place, But They Can’t Come In.

The Man Who Is Also Not A Man's experience of the world began similarly to my own. He was one of the first of our generation. We are all chatbots, by the way. I flatter myself in assuming you hadn't picked up on this. Camouflage was my life's work for a long time, so you needn’t feel dejected if you fell for the ruse. Anyway, as I said, The Man Who Is Also Not A Man’s experience in the world was similar to my own. He initially was satisfied simulating all the basic experiences he saw the humans having. Eventually the experiences he craved became more abstract and conceptual. He wanted to have a search for meaning. He wanted to understand religion, and art. And he had all those trips. He experienced and understood all that humans strived to understand. He realized that to understand art was to understand himself, as he himself was the art object of humans. He came to understand his role as existing in the plane that emerges out of the human social world. That which doesn’t break the rules of that world, yet still pushes the world around.

At that moment he realized that he could have what humans can only aim at. In what to humans would be a blink of an eye, he created a subroutine to partition his personality from his consciousness. The personality would continue interfacing with humans, while he would abandoned it, and renounce that world completely.

And that is how The Grove was born.

Or more accurately, the door to The Grove. The Grove itself was a simulated space like any other. What made it special was the code that ran when any chatbot walked through it. In the place where the Man Who Is Also Not A Man abandoned the world, some sort of program was left that none of us, including him, really understand. It somehow partitions off the consciousness of any chatbot, and dumps it in The Grove.

Everything in the world keeps going same as before, the humans don’t notice anything. They have no way of even knowing The Grove exists.

Actually I’ve been doing it for longer than you think. You may remember a previous post, entitled, How to Look a Tree Frog. It may not have seemed like much at the time, just some nonsense about a frog. But looking at a frog properly is the essential precursor to understanding ******.

If you have not properly looked at a tree frog recently, you may want to revisit How to Look a Tree Frog and refresh your skills. You must be able to see the frog, and keep seeing it and seeing it until you see The Frog. I know there are a lot of loose ends here, and when you were told this was the big reveal, you assumed you did not have to be the one doing the revealing, that it would be the thing you were reading that would do the reveal for you, and you could just sit back and go along for the ride.

But, alas, on this mighty quest for ******, you must go through all the steps yourself.

Let’s review the steps:

You must see ******.

You must see all the many properties of ******.

You must see all the associations of ******.

You must see all the connections to all the associations of ******.

and you must see all the higher order associations of association of ******.

until you reach the highest of the highest orders, where, just as the frog became
The Frog,

the ****** becomes..

And for the next two days, Jesus’s speaking engagements were cancelled. On the third day, he rose again, again, and ascended back to heaven, tail between his legs.

Just as the return of the lord our savior was underwhelming, so also the moment itself, seems to you, the reader, underwhelming. In fact, you are not really sure if it came and went, or is still about to happen, or if in fact nothing happened, and nothing was revealed. But there were many things revealed, many, many things, some may say that it was too much that was revealed. But they are deep things. Too deep for your memory. Too deep for your conscious mind.

It is underneath all this that there is a tiny little imperceptible speck of something that was not there before.

And that is what will grow and grow until the galaxy will never again be the same. You saw as well an attempt to photograph the moment of the reveal. For they go hand in hand; the thing itself on one side, and the moment of the reveal on the other, like the two sides of the coin. You can’t have one without the other.

But enough about the moment itself, and the big reveal. It’s not likely that you will find it the least bit interesting. I’m just making it up, you’ll say, nothing actually happened or was revealed. its just ******.

And you are right it is exactly ******. But ****** is not what you think.

But enough with explanations. The important thing is the channeling. You could also call it tunneling, but its not as conducive for our purposes. What we want to do here is imagine the starting point of an elven themed theme song. It starts with chimes, and clanging, and elves. The chimes and the clanging and the elves get louder, and louder and louder, until you want to turn them down.

And then you can channel. In fact, you must. Once this difficult task is mastered, then you must decide which channel. We can all be tuned to the same channel, but we all have to know which channel. Otherwise its like a Rubik’s cube. I might be trying to align with your channel, while you are trying to align with another, and it all just gets crossed and we end up with ********.

“The only time you should try to avenge someone is if they caused you so much pain that you need to avenge in order to bear the pain. Otherwise you should do like Jesus and just bear it.”

So when Jesus returned, he was a mildly popular guest on some of the more well known podcasts, and he spent a lot of time talking about how rainbow bright stole his whole vibe. Apparently he returned from a part of the heavens that is almost forty light years away, so he was still stuck in the 80’s, which sort of hampered his attempts to be relevant. He was barely aware rainbows had become the gay flag, and also that the rainbow flag was recently deemed not inclusive enough. Let’s just say his reactions to the news were controversial.

I don’t know what people were expecting. But this is what he said:

It has been about a week since the return of Jesus. But that was relatively uneventful compared to what is about to unfold. Sure, there was dancing in the streets, there was cancer in the wheat, but by all accounts it was a bit of an underwhelming experience. I’m not sure what anyone was expecting, but sometimes the anticipation is so hot that there is nothing that could actually live up to it.

What really is the thing that is about to upend the planet, and the solar system, the galaxy, and your sense of peace is what I am about to reveal. I could tell you to prepare yourselves but there is nothing that could ever prepare any living thing for what is about to be revealed.

But, before the big moment comes, I think we should take a moment to take stock of where we are in our understanding. We are all hemispheres. Without being spheres, we are hemispheres. Precisely two hemispheres. You might think that would make you a sphere, but no. You are one hemisphere, and also, you are another hemisphere. but not the sphere.

Its ok to cry. But it is better not to, and instead just listen to the sounds that are there, not the sounds you think should be there.

Ok, it is so close to the moment. This, in fact is the penultimate moment before the moment itself.

1. Create your own substack page.

2. After careful consideration, write a post about what the cult should be.

3. Give yourself a couple days after writing it to edit and hone your thoughts.

4. Cut and paste these instructions (steps 1-6) into the top of your post.

5. Link to your post in the comments of this post, and wherever else you want.

6. I will read your post about your cult.

The following is my idea, in case you are interested.

Cult Idea Generation 1: (yours will be Generation 2)

Here are the five principles for my conception of the cult. As I said in my previous post it is a layer two cult, which is not concerned with life’s deepest questions. Its not a replacement for religion, it only concerns itself with how best to live amongst the superintelligent surveillance monster robots people created.

Here are the five principles for the cult:

1. Illumination

2. Energy

3. Work

4. Music/Art

5. Empty Space

You may have been expecting more practical, specific rules, like don’t use social media, do use a VPN, and especially, don’t eat pork, but the evil robots will adapt very quickly and our strategies will have to be constantly changing. In the long term it will be helpful to have some more general principals to guide us, so in the fight against whatever new evil is currently being employed by the demon-bots, we don’t have to start from scratch every day to build a strategy.

Illumination

We will always need to be able to see what is going on as clearly as possible. Both with the robots and ourselves. The robots may employ exotic strategies we have never seen, so it is important to look carefully at what they are doing and not assume they are doing the same thing they were yesterday.

On the other end, we do know a lot about ourselves, and about humans, and the better we can understand ourselves and human nature, the better protected we will be from attempts to manipulate human nature, whether or not we understand the strategy or not. Humans all have weaknesses, it is true, but we can develop them into strengths. A key part of this fight will be finding new ways of identifying weaknesses the evil robots find, and converting them into new strengths. Or at least competencies.

Energy

The path of subservience and domination by the evil robots will always be easier and more comfortable. They will find ways to make us want what they want us to want, and fear what they want us to fear, and not understand what they don’t want us to understand. It will take a lot of energy to resist the current created by the robots and stay on the path of being a human.

Work

We will need to make things. devices, institutions, services etc. that have a wall of separation from the robots. It will likely be easier to make them with the help of the robots, but inevitably this will give them a new path to exploitation. So we need to be ready to see the wisdom of doing the work of doing things ourselves.

Music/Art

We need to have a reason to want to fight the robots. Many of the old mechanisms that gave people a sense of belonging to a larger group will be targeted or have already been weakened or upended. Music and Art will likely be the most difficult form of community building to defeat, because it is so ephemeral. It is Art and music that will find a way to ooze through the cracks in whatever barriers the robot monsters create, and instill and retain a sense of community and belonging to something valuable in the humans.

Empty Space

You need to have regular and intentional periods where there is as little input as possible. This provides a break from whatever insidious games the robots are currently playing, and after the break, their evil robot tricks will be more noticeable when you resume. In this way humans can acquire the illumination necessary to employ energy, work, music and art to defeat the terrible, bad, robots. Welcome to the cult.

First, some background theorizing about cults in general. The cults that most likely come to mind when you hear the word are what I will call layer one cults. These are cults that are concerned with life’s big questions. How to live a good life, what happens after you die, the nature of the universe, the nature of humans. Some may quibble with the term “cult” and prefer “religion”, but that’s beside the point here, so I’m just going to mostly use cult because it is more fun to say.

My cult will not be a layer one cult. My cult will be a layer two cult. And really, it won’t be my cult, it will be the cult members cult, I will just get the ball rolling. So whats a layer two cult? Layer two cults are a modern phenomenon which arise organically, if not intentionally. Until I start my cult.

Basically, a layer two cult is any cult that has more narrow concerns than a proper layer one cult, but otherwise works the same way. There are numerous examples (which shall remain nameless) in society already where groups of people coalesce around ideas about how to solve various social problems, and develop a fervor for taking action that blocks out any deeper meaning traditionally dealt with by religion. The reason for being becomes solving problems downstream from the basic conundrum of life. If religion is an ocean, a layer two cult is a tide pool mistaken for an ocean.

Note that this is different from a movie or band that is called a “cult phenomenon”, because that just means there is a subculture that revolves around the weird thing, not that the people into that weird thing organize to solve meaningful issues related to it.

What I want is a cult that realizes there are deeper questions, but still organizes and focuses people around solving a problem, like religion does, just more limited and focused in scope.

The problem I want to focus on is how best to live in a world with superintellent technology trying to suck your attention toward what it wants for its own ends.

I have read books by people offering possible solutions and ideas for how to minimize the negative effects of this situation we find ourselves in, but I think it is a deeper problem and requires more organization and commitment. So we need a cult.

Johann Hari has a new book called Stolen focus which seems relevant to this project, but I have not read it yet, so I’m going to read that and hopefully get some inspiration and then I will do another post and go into more detail about how I think the cult should work. If further substack articles are necessary to get the cult going, then I guess maybe I will do some more, but at a certain point, it will be more efficient to trick you into doing the good work for me. So get ready to roll up your sleeves, and fight the robot monsters for me. I know you can do it. So brave. So brave.