I miss here. Facebook sucks. :o)

I have been getting poked about my various crusades from an unexpected quarter. Over the years I’ve cross-posted a number of my Serious Entries over to my much more neglected LiveJournal account, just because I had a couple of friends over there on LJ who weren’t on OD. (I could never bother to crosspost everything over there. I don’t know why. Just, I have lived in OD. So, only some things that I really wanted people to read made it over to LJ.)

Now and then, lately, I have received a LiveJournal notification in my email telling me that someone has commented on one of those LiveJournal entries.

And… it has always been spammers commenting.

The entry “Fear of environmentalism and the use of shut up” has gotten five such bogus visits. One fooled me briefly into thinking that it was legit: “Gosh, I’ve been looking about this specific topic for about an hour, glad i found it in your website!” When I followed up on the commenter, no, it wasn’t legit.

“An experiment in Constitutional reasoning” also has a pile of bogus comments.

A couple of others. Oddly, these are scattered thinly through a barren sea-floor of other Serious Entry posts that are completely neglected.

I see only a single unexpected ray of light: an anonymous comment on “The ethics of Salvia prohibition” that says “Well done, brother.” Thanks. I wonder whose brother I am.

***

The spammer comments … I am pricked. It points out my failure to actually transmit my thoughts, and my unhappiness about it brings up the Great Pause in my quixotic writings.

I might as well have been dead in OD, the last little while. On two levels. The writing impulse, to get down this or that circling thought, has been very far from me. And the urge to Establish things, to take up arms and nail something for possibly no more reason than to make it true that the universe contained a me who did nail it… oh, I have been out of the saddle. It does feel like death.

I’m going to disengage from Facebook, I think. It’s been nice re-meeting or reconnecting with people. But now the experiment has played out – and the discussions are in a lull – and I have posted little mention-links about the things I have been thinking about instead of writing about them, and it is as though I have been… I can’t even find the right metaphor… as if, instead of gestating offspring, I had been taking a “shortcut” and simply opening my veins to the uncaring sea. “The more efficiently to get my DNA out there.” With the result that no one really even sniffs at the blood, and it doesn’t even tint the great waters. While I feel I am thinning out.

Trade-offs: oh, I might have said something about more interesting or dire squiggles in the news in Facebook than I would ever have gotten around to diarizing about. But – I need to write. To complete thoughts. To get back on the horse.

If no one is going to read what I write, I should write well. Does that make sense? Sort of, it does. If writing has the relation to thinking and being that it has with me, it does.

And, now and then, someone actually reads my OD entries.

***

Not writing makes me feel much more glum. At least when I’m writing, I feel I am being a memory – being awake – being one of those out-of-step points of light that I myself have been delighted to discover and assemble into new and unrecognized constellations. When I’m not writing, there are only the empty spaces – there are the beauties that I am aware, with a sense of true tragedy, can almost never be successfully shared, and there are the urgent things hanging fire that are important for real describable reasons. Both categories are worse when I’m not trying to do anything about Rome burning, even if I can’t really do anything about Rome burning.

What is going well in the land of topicalia? Not much. This would be the second category above, in which motion, good or otherwise, is possible. In the range of things that are actually on the front burner in the public mind, right at the moment my confidence is probably lower than it has ever been that we are collectively likely to end up effectively sorting through our options, or that we collectively are even capable of it. In the range of things that are not on the front burners, or on the back burners even… the questions of population, of ending the War On Drugs, of intelligent valuation and pursuit of science and R&D and space efforts, of just about anything I might have talked about… it appears that it will be possible to keep sounding brilliant about all of these things with very little chance of that brilliance, by me or anyone else, having any actual effect. On any of these things, if you have an excellent reference book on your contentious topic, hang on to that reference book, because, even though, by all reason, books on the topic should be becoming obsolete at a respectable clip, nothing much is moving. Even where treating “where things are at the moment” as a comfortable status quo seems completely insane.

Well, gay rights is slowly, grindingly making progress. So that’s something. But that’s one thing.

(And even there… the lesbian couple that I wrote about awhile back, that was going to have to leave for South Africa, the country of origin of one of them… is still going to have to leave. They’re fixing up their house to sell now. Man, I liked writing that “well” exception about gay rights. So tempting to jump at that complacent generality about something.)

Keeping track doesn’t sum up where I need to be, in writing or otherwise. Because the group guides you into the things it has stopped at, even with the best sources. What I need to be doing… what we all need to be doing, maybe… is to be imagining and getting into the questions of where we need to be going. To some degree, doing so as if the Grand Dybbuk Lack-of-Interest was not so abroad in the land. The right picture, the right structure, the right way of approaching things is what’s important. And the question of whale intelligence and its actual level(s), too. That’s in there.

This is not a promise to return immediately, virtuously, and at full bore. When that happens, it’s happening, and there is not much more to say about that. But I miss what I used to be up to in here. There is a heaviness in thinking about taking it up again – a deadly unhappy motionlessness that comes over me when I read an impassioned, detail-hunting assemblage of facts on a controversial (why????) subject that are the exact same facts that I have assembled with the same optimistic vigor perhaps six or seven times in the past – you poor beautiful hopeful naive bastards!… but it’s the thing. It’s life. It’s time, it’s always time, to draw things up.

Write about the world that’s worth writing about. And cede the alternative no space that it doesn’t deserve.

(*smiles, after reading back over this* It has been awhile since I have read such a dour, non-optimistic call to arms.)

“Hello. I’m Flugendorf. And if you have ever read through any of the old Whole Earth Catalogs, you know where my expectations are.” Or some such closing note. If you want something more abstract: Utopianism may be unrealistic and utopias may be impossible, but someone with no utopian impulse at all in his or her thoughts and speech about the world is aiming at nothing and is pulling on the bowstring meaninglessly.

***

This is a lot of rambling with no content, isn’t it? Tidbits: Here is a link to a debate at Brown University on the question “Should the U.S. legalize drugs”, with Glenn Greenwald (a hero of mine) debating ex-drug-czar John Walters. And here is an article about octopuses and their intelligence.