The New York Fucking Knicks Making The NBA Finals Explained Through Moby Dick Lines

 

The Knicks seem to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that darted through my mind last night while taking in the denouement. I might proceed with several more examples, one way or another known to me, of the great power and malice at times of the New York Knickerbockers. Full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert Durer. Investigate it now with the sole view of forming to yourself some unexaggerated, intelligent estimate of whatever battering-ram power may be lodged there. How far beyond all utterance are their linked analogies? What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! A chasm seemed opening in the playoffs, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned us to leap down among them. The Cavs lived like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs. Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; Harden would think the deep to be hoary.  

The pressure of the finals is immense. Can they ascend to the heavens, capering upon the astral plane. Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of them if they lose? So you suppose Jalen Brunson is afraid of the devil? All these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without. The gale that now hammers at them to stave them, they can turn it into a fair wind that will drive them towards home. During the violence of the gale, they had only steered according to its vicissitudes. Fix your eye upon this strange, crested, comb-like incrustation on the top of the mass of the playoffs—this green, barnacled thing. Ye gods! It's a trophy. Do you hear those faint caterwauls, whispering of a conqueror's parade sweeping down through the canyon of heroes? Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!

 

 

meet da met, step right up and greet da met

I saw photos from the met gala the other night. What is the point of the met gala? I don't understand it's appeal to the wider world at large. Is it because it offers the public a glimpse at pure uncut celebrity in it's natural environment (a red carpet)? I don't understand why celebrities dress up in weird outfits. Is it as simple an answer as they are addicted to fame, and that they want people to talk about how zany they look? Heidi Klum's casper outfit, pictured above, was.....odd. How did she sip a drink, or eat her portion of the delectable 12 foot hoagie I assume they had catered for the guests? Call me persnickety, but its fucking lame to go to a party solely to do or be art. Or is this just me not understanding or properly respecting the importance of gonzo fashion? Is this a personal blind spot? Is the patriarchy to blame for me not getting it? Anyway, it's definitely another trivial thing that I shouldn't get worked up over, and yet, here we are!

These people at the met gala, who have no problem with it being hosted by jeff bezos, one of our precious oligarchs perfectly fine with wrecking the world to avoid paying taxes, are the people we hold up on a pedestal as the best of us? The people we take our social cues from? These are our american arbiters of what's cool? I don't get the appeal. I mean, sure, actors, musicians, athletes, they can be hotties, or good at their specific vocation, but that doesn't make them a good hang, or smart, or interesting. They probably are so singularly focused on their profession that they kinda suck to be around when it comes to everything else. A job shouldn't be what defines who a person is, or whether I would like them personally. If anything, I think it matters more what a person does outside their job (okay, one caveat, what politicians do at their jobs is the only thing that matters about them, and I would prefer to never know anything else).

This whole spiel goes along with something I've been bandying about in my head for a while, the idea that the richer you are the more boring and tasteless you are. The rich are too insulated from the real world to actually develop any individuality, let alone empathy or compassion for other people. They just don't have a wide enough assortment of experiences and interactions with all of the stripes of the rainbow to be an interesting piece of humanity. Why does every rich person's home look roughly the same? I think these people at some point unlearned or never had to learn how to think for themselves, the money dampened their spirit, and now they all follow some standardized paint by numbers guide for how to look and act wealthy. Its tacky, if anything, and normal people shouldn't look to them as paragons of how to live. You can't purchase personality, or charm, or bigheartedness, or comedic timing. I guess money can buy "friends" as long as what you think a friend should be also bares a striking resemblance to a toady. It doesn't seem very fun to care more about cultivating an image of success than simply living in whatever fashion suits you. And I think that is why I don't understand the met gala, cause to me it's the boiled down version of rich people thinking they're doing something cool when it's actually dreadfully gauche.

A Burning Man Polemic

 

In my experience, burners talk about burning man too much. I find the conversation annoying in the same way as having someone talk at you about their fantasy football team or their gambling addiction confirming 9-team parlay. If they kept all their playa chatter to themselves I would probably not care about it one way or the other. But since I've been forced to hear about it for 15 years now, I have formed opinions on something that in the grand scheme of things is relatively harmless. So indulge me as I let my inner hater out for a spell.

 

Famously dumb guy, elon musk, once boasted, "burning man is silicon valley." Honestly, that simple statement is more damning than anything I can drum up, I should probably end this here and move forward with my day. But we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the garishness.

 

As much as people in the tech bubble probably think that their presence is a good thing, because they lack even a modicum of self awareness, I do not agree. These boring lizard people being such a large part of the scene actually sounds like one of dante's circles of hell. If I was conjuring a "this is gonna really fucking suck" scenario, I'm not sure I could come up with something as dreadful as attending a burning man festival full of jaw grinding ai hucksters. 

 

Let's start with the locale, you're in the middle of the desert in the summer with no running water, surrounded by a bunch of maha faux-spiritual crypto ravers that are mainlining drugs and booze. Instead of having to interact or have a whole ass conversation with any of those people for one single minute, let alone a whole week of that inanity, maybe just shoot me in the face. 

 

Have you ever gotten stuck talking to someone coked to the gills, and they're close talking you and aggressively yammering about god knows what, and all you want to do is back the fuck away from them, well, what if everyone around you was like that, and again, you're stuck in the desert, loud terrible music is pummeling your psyche into the ground, and you can't leave easily. Woof, no thanks, kinda sounds like the basis for an m. night shyamalan movie.

 

Also, the outfits, you know, the futuristic steampunk sci-fi amalgam of whatever it wants to be called, well it gives off theatre kid vibes, and offends my midwestern sensibilities. You're not Blade, actually you're way closer to the goofy looking dreadlocked matrix twins.

I understand the founding principles of the festival probably weren't what they are now, but eventually every hyped up "cool" thing gets co-opted by the tacky scenechasers of the world and it turns into a rich people playground. Nothing says community and togetherness and living in harmony like tiering out which campsite you can be at by the obscene amount of money you're willing to spend. As far as I can tell what burning man is now, and has always been really, just with considerably less wealthy and deeply wack people, is a drug orgy rave cavorting inside a sandstorm that camouflages itself in a thin veneer of art and oddity. I think I would respect the idea of the whole thing more if people were just real and honest about wanting to be hedonistic out in the desert instead of whatever mumbo jumbo gets spouted about it being some life changing, perspective altering experience. Having taken my fair share of concoctions, anything can seem transcendent when you're riding the lightning.

 

The Sexual Dexual Trade Explained Through Moby Dick Lines

 

 

What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you are telling me? Sexterous Dexterous, a Bengal? The mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they enthrall me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep. I am crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I am composing. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget. No suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor. Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?

 

Then again, you cannot sit motionless in the heart of these perils, because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and you are pitched one way and the other, without the slightest warning. Both ends of the line are no longer exposed. Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of whoa, fuck yeah. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan Dex thrusting forth his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell, deboning the opposing team's quarterback. Amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn foes, he will swim out of the white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight. A tone so strangely compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed so calculated merely as a spice to the fun. They gonna caper about most obstreperously, stuntin onto the steelers. You gettin kicked by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg.

 

I can’t quit this team, here ye strike but splintered hearts together—there, ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses! I’ll chase them round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give them up. One most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, forever and for aye. Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe? 19-0-1.

 

Affirmations

The other day a friend of mine told the group chat that he loved and missed us. I'm always curious what prompts that sort of message, so I asked, and he said he had just watched the John Candy documentary. I totally understood where he was coming from. If you haven't seen the doc, you should change that, because it's a lovely portrait of how beloved and kind he was to seemingly everyone in and out of his orbit. And a lot of the interviews are Candy's friends, Catherine O'Hara, Dan Akroyd, Bill Murray, to name a few, talking about how much they missed him or wished they had gotten to tell him how much he meant to them before he was gone. All of that is to say, don't leave things unsaid, tell your people you cherish them. It's a kindness that gets overlooked. I've been pretty laissez-faire about doing so in the past, and I know I need to be more thoughtful and present about what my friends mean to me. I don't think it has to be some grand gesture either, sometimes just showing up is what's needed. You have to treat them as an incredibly precious and finite resource. They're vital, as an outlet, a sounding board, a support system, and as people that you may desperately need to check you when you're wildly out of pocket.

Being cooped up the last couple weeks because of the snow and bitter cold reminded me of 2020, and how much the isolation drove everyone completely bonkers, and how we're still dealing with the ramifications of this growing collective derangement. People just love being mad now, at everything, it's their kink. I also think that this specific madness goes hand in hand with the much talked about but also wholly avoidable male loneliness epidemic, which to me is just unchecked delusions of entitlement. I, personally, don't love spending time with people that, as their entire personality, think they deserve every little thing gifted to them on a platter, and then squawk complaints like a helpless baby bird when they don't get their way. I doubt I'm the only one that avoids those sorts of people. They might not be so lonely if they worked on themselves and developed some social skills, or at least made an effort to be a normal person. One of my favorite sayings is, "If you run into an asshole in the morning, well you ran into an asshole. But if you run into assholes all day, well maybe you're the asshole." 

If you look around at America, there is so much hatred and cruelty to wade through, that whatever is a buoy in your life, you should cling to as a life raft. That buoy, to me, is enjoying the company of my people, be it family, friends, or possibly even a stranger that I share a knowing glance with while out and about. Shooting the shit, someone making you laugh unexpectedly, is a great feeling. What's better than being out with friends, stumbling into some ridiculous situation, and being able to marvel at the absurdity once it's over?  

On the flip side, it seems like so many relationships are transactional, or based in competitiveness. Who has the best life type shit, or I need to be close with this person because it will help further my ambitions kind of skullduggery. That just ain't it. That ain't friends. Those are stepping stones. You should never treat people like that. Speaking of ambition, my friend wrote a treatise the other day about where he envisioned his future self would be when he was younger versus where he is now, and him being fine with where he landed. I agree with him, cause in my head success is being happy in your life, wringing every drop of joy out of it, and not worrying about what other people are striving towards in their own. It's a longer way of saying what John Candy said to Steve Martin in a fraught conversation that started to unknot their problems in Plains, Trains & Automobiles, "I like me." If you can't like yourself how can you like and be liked by other people?

ai is a pox on all our houses

I'm not into ai. I don't use siri, I figured out how to  bypass the google search ai overview. I don't use predictive text or autocorrect (my texts be CRAZY sometimes). My only brushes with ai are the endless slog of ai commercials during sports, which remind me a whole bunch of when capital tried to force feed crypto down our throats a couple years ago. You'd think they wouldn't need to do that if ai had a groundswell of support. Makes me wonder...

Anyway, here are the reasons I don't fuck with it.

It is bad for the environment. The data centers are making surrounding communities sick, they're basically a Saruman mining orcs in Isengard Two Towers kinda situation. They drain an obscene amount of water, which certainly won't be a problem in western parts of the United States. It drives up our utility bills - which if we're being real, is reason enough for some of these buildings...and I'm trying to do this in passive voice like the new york times talking about cops shooting unarmed black people...these buildings could become irreparably harmed in a fire involved incident.

On a person to person level, its bad for people's brains. It replaces critical thinking skills with a poor simulacrum of smarts and reasoning. Its benjamin buttoning people back into being helpless babies that have no idea how to do anything for themselves. Where are people's pride? You're gonna trade on your value as a person so that you can shirk a little bit of typing or reading? Pitiful.

There is also this whole thing where scumbags and far right incels are happily using grok and other programs to create deepfake child porn. Vaya con dios, y'all. This alone should be enough to deposit the whole ai project into the Pacific.

Whether you like it or not, it's now shoehorned into every product you use on the computer. I don't need gmail's ai to summarize a fifteen word email from a friend. Honestly, an email from a friend is the best kind of email you can get, why the fuck would I want to outsource the pleasure of reading whatever it is someone I know and like sent me?

 

It has killed google search. Those little ai overviews people take as gospel at the top of your search query, well those are wrong, like, a lot. ai just be sayin shit sometimes. As someone who loves bullshitting, I don't appreciate when my computer tries to bullshit with me. We aren't friends, computer, youre a tool. We're aren't doing repartee.

Between ring cameras, which have always been hilariously stupid considering who will eventually have access to the footage (they sell it to law enforcement), and ai facial recognition, we're now in a permanent surveillance state. I, for one, think you should be able to get away with a non-violent caper from time to time. Unfortunately that is no longer an option with ai on the case. And then imagine you weren't involved in said caper and ai hallucinates that you are. I don't like the idea of being on the hook for a crime I didn't commit because of a half-baked police app that wrongfully thinks it maybe recognized my face.

 

The commercials for ai are incredibly condescending to the project of humanity. Especially the one about claude planning out your road trip. Why wouldn't you want to pick your own spots to stop and sightsee. I would prefer to look up and figure out which restaurants look good along the way. Some of us are real eaters that barely trust other humans to make food recommendations, you think I'm gonna listen to some robot tell me what the best mexican restaurant is cause it gleaned some inaccurate info from a deranged yelp reviewer? Also, I want to pick my own fucking music for the ride. Why skip the part of the process that is literally you finding and getting excited about all the details of the impending adventure? Why not just have claude tell you how the trip went instead of doing it.

 

Big tech wants you to think that the all-encompassing prevalence of ai is some inevitable outcome, that it's futile to resist. I refuse to believe that, mostly because these tech titans have been shown time and again to be grifters and hucksters, lyle lanleys selling a new-aged monorail. Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried, the WeWork guy. Were they all on the up and up? Or were they just selling magic beans?

 

Ever wonder why the tech overlords are so gung ho about ai? Outside of all of them wagering a lot of their and other people's money on it and desperately needing it to succeed, its also because the bosses want to use it to weaken an already vulnerable labor force. The idea that ai can take all our jobs is tantalizing to them. They would love to put us all in a more precarious position so that we will accept shittier working conditions and paltry wages and not be able to complain. These motherfuckers' idealized version of the workforce has everyone pissing in company store bought water bottles sitting at their stations. If you can lean you can clean ass outlook on employees.

I would suggest we not go along with an idea that was spun wholecloth by a couple morally bankrupt tech companies as a new buzz word cash cow. Just because ai is being trumpeted by a pot committed media as a fait accompli, doesn't mean you have to believe it. The bubble will burst, and the tech and finance world will move on to their next con. I'm not gonna be holding the bag.

MLK's White Moderate

 

"I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice." - MLK - Letter from Birmingham Jail

This isn't about republicans per se, they're evil pieces of shit, what else is there to talk about with them. They can fuck right off. This is about the side I begrudgingly align with when it comes to representative democracy.

I regret to say it, but national democratic leadership, basically the "white moderates" MLK was talking about 60 years ago, and the same ones that have been in control of the party for my entire lifetime, by and large aren't meeting the moment that our current world demands. Instead of trying by hook or by crook to halt ICE's rabid stance towards our neighbors and communities, they talk about more training, or QR codes to identify agents (LOL GTFOH), or other uniquely piddling shit that is more demoralizing than anything. Instead of inducing impeachment proceedings against the drunk on power, or just drunk, idiots responsible for starting a predatory oil war and kidnapping a head of state, they opine about how it wasn't carried out through the proper channels. Instead of cutting off the money tap to Israel, they have tacitly and bipartisanly approved the genocide of Gaza every step of the way. What they're misguided about with their piecemeal response to these horrifying events is that you can't heal a varmint with rabies, you have to put it down. There are no compromises left.

What's the difference between a democrat in congress or a republican in congress? I can't really tell. Is it all just civility politics now? Undoubtedly Kamala getting elected would have prevented some of these constantly unfolding atrocities, but when she was making her case, did she really offer a compelling vision that was a striking contrast from the virulently anti-immigrant stance that republicans were running on, or was it more of a status quo take it or leave it pawn shop broker knowing you don't really have a choice and you're going to leave pissed off but what can you do about it ass platform. 

It's really disheartening to see Chuck Schumer's only solution to the seemingly infinite problems in the U.S. is to take back the senate and house, and then step two is ??? How about saying what voters will see happen if legislatures get flipped? Put some fucking policies out there that might galvanize people. Like razing and salting the fields that ICE grows in. Promise to send them all to jail, from the fascist bosses having their unhinged fits on teevee, all the way down to each and every one of the roving bands of masked subhuman shitbirds chungling out of their SUV's to terrorize non-white people just trying to live their lives. 

One of the most frustrating things about the democrats is that they refuse to stand up for immigrants. We are a country built on slavery, racism, and theft from the native tribes. Why can't we have some leadership that is determined to turn its back on those poisoned roots and embrace all immigrants as the heartbeat that keeps this country alive.

It's easy to forget that politicians work for us, we pay their salary, and we should be able to put them on PIP's if they can't get their shit together or are wrenching things in the wrong direction. They should be out here showing us why they deserve our votes. Unfortunately I've seen very few of them doing the "work" outside of sending a million spam texts a day begging for money and making sure the gears of capitalism keep grinding away ceaselessly until we're all dust. What makes them think they've earned our money if they're not offering any tangible ideas, or really doing any thing, to counteract what's happening out here. Give us something that isn't centrist bullshit to grab onto, like justice for the families broken by hate, or maybe permanent freedom from the tyranny of the small minded bigots currently running our country. 

It is heartening to see what communities are doing to protect their more vulnerable members, sticking their neck out in the face of state urged wanton violence, but they need help from the folks with access to the levers of power. Otherwise I don't think people will have many choices to seek satisfaction other than doing things that are better left unsaid on the internet.