18) Satanic Ritual Performed at The NFL Half Time Show
I read stuff like this and am disappointed by how ordinary and free of conspiracy and magick my life is. I think it would be better to be paranoid and sort of crazy.
I know some people approach this sort of thing and think: "Oh, well, if you really think about the person who wrote this, you have to sort of feel sad. There's so much fear in this. There's so much loneliness in seeing monsters in every closet and under every bed."
But this is the thing about the internet: these people have found each other. They are all out there, and they are all finding each other. And though once these people—alone in their fear—used to suffer alone and disappear into themselves and cut themselves off from community, they don't do that so much now.
They meet now. (On the internet.) They gather now. (On the internet.) They commiserate now. (On the internet.)
Spend time watching Christian/Alien/New World Order conspiracy theory videos on Youtube, and you discover that they all have a deeply hopeful tone to them. These people are excited. They are ready. They expect to live through the coming apocalypse. They dig it. They dig each other.
They get to be characters in an action movie.
Which is, frankly, why I think creative people—choreographers and costume designers—are there, behind the scenes, doing their best to feed into our need things like "Satanic Ritual Super Bowl Halftime Shows."
I think it IS all intentional. I think that WAS staged to appear like a Satanic ritual. Because someone in Madonna's camp really wanted to give people something to support their paranoia, and in doing so, support their hope.
Bless them.
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19) NOTHING: A Portrait of Insomnia by Blake Butler
I've mostly just been reading Blake's book for the last couple of weeks. And I haven't been sleeping. On HTML Giant, Impossible Mike wrote a short piece called "I Like Hypnotism A Lot" (20).
In it, he asked if anyone had been hypnotized. I was reading sections of Blake's book, which is full of repetitious sentence structures, and those pairings of words that are unfamiliar and unpackable and sort of beautiful when you spend time with them. And long, long chaining meditations of sentences and paragraphs. And all this streaming consciousness.
And it's hypnotic. And it's a walkthrough to his sleeptime, up-all-night thoughts.
And I was reading the book, and sometimes reading it in bed, and then going to bed and trying to sleep.
And I really do believe that living in the space of a book is giving away one's own thought process to someone else's. A brain is wired using language. Strong voices can rewire.
Blake's voice rewired my thinking. And so, in bed, I could feel the places where, say, my leg touched the bed, and the skin felt more alive in those places. The sense of touch felt stronger in those places. Too strong. Too alive.
I couldn't stop thinking about those places on my legs. (I am a side sleeper. I am also a three-point sleeper. Shoulder, hip, and the inside of whatever knee happens to be on top. So, right shoulder, right hip, inside of left knee; or left shoulder, left hip, inside of right knee.) And then I couldn't sleep.
Hypnosis.
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21) Slow Writing? by Gabriel Blackwell
It's Gabe's birthday! Happy birthday, Gabe.
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22 - 24) About half of five novels that were submissions to a Nanowrimo contest. A couple were very good. I'll only count it as two.
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UPDATE
25) DC's: Gig #14: Les Légions Noires
Dennis Cooper's daily roundups of whatever happen to be on his mind are always worth the time it takes to pore through them. This, for obvious reasons, is my favorite recent one.
