I don’t know why this is so difficult for me to game out, but here goes.
If Trump had gone to the Capitol to press his case on January 6th, 2021, what we look back upon as kind of a .5 of a 9/11 would have jumped up the tragedy scale to a full-blown 9/11-sized event. The idea that a president, even a president as crazy as Trump, would go to the Capitol at the forefront of a crazed mob wanting to stage a coup would been a Day The Earth Stood Still type of historical event.
The imagery alone of the event would be embedded into our collective consciousness just as much as the JFK assassination or 9/11.
Here is where things get even more sketch — would Trump’s second impeachment have gone any differently?
I have my doubts. Trump is such an avatar for some pretty astonishing problems in our political system that he’s kind of an immutable historical force. I doubt even him literally be the head of the spear of a crazed mob trying to intimidate Mike Pence into not doing his job would have been enough to cause Senate Republicans to convict him.
In fact, it’s very possible that Trump would be seen as some sort of uber-patriot in the eyes of MAGA for doing such a crazed thing. No one is going to save us from Trump.
The key thing is — as of right now, there is zero chance of me ever returning to South Korea. I just have the idea of one day returning on the brain at the moment since I’m not getting any younger. And, really, the world is so big that who knows, maybe I might have the means to return to South Korea, only to get distracted and go to Europe instead.
Back when I was a DJ at Nori bar.
At the moment, I just don’t know.
I only bring all of this up because something mysterious happened in my Webstats — someone went specifically to the post I did of me dwelling on what I would do if I went back to South Korea for a little trip. I have no idea what that means. They were in Canada, so it could very well be someone who knows me and is interested in any plans I might have to return to the Land of the Morning Calm.
The thing about me ever returning to South Korea is I would go back without knowing the context of my return.
It could be that it will be a nostalgic, uneventful little journey and I will return home to go on my next adventure somewhere else. OR, it could be a massive clusterfuck with all these people who remember the Bad Old Me giving me jump scares as they “accidently” run into me and confront me for all the crazy shit I did between late 2006 to early 2008.
The late Annie Shapiro and me, back when I was cute.
But I haven’t been in South Korea for a very long time. While I know I was really fucking weird at times while I was in South Korea the first few times….I’ve changed. I really have. All I’ve done the last decade or so is dwell on what went wrong with ROKon Magazine and how I could have done things differently.
And, what’s more, the person at the center of most of my fucked up behavior — Annie Shapiro — has shuffled off this mortal coil. So, really, everyone should just move on and let me visit my old stomping grounds in South Korea without giving me any grief.
I am very curious if Nori Bar is still open. I’m sure everything has changed if it is. It’s not like I could DJ there again for a night like I used to. I’m sure they just use something like Spotify to pick music, no need for a DJ. I had a lot of good times at that bar, I have to say.
A lot of people are still being very delusional about Trump. They think through some combination of rainbows and unicorn farts, Trump will simply fade away and we can go back to normal. Sadly, barring some sort of Black Swan event in 2024, Trump remains 60,000 votes in five swing states away from being POTUS again.
The question is, how, exactly will Trump end American Democracy?
Logically, what would happen, if form follows fascist function, Trump would soon after getting re-elected demand a Constitutional Convention that will make “America First” changes to the Constitution in such a way that Trump never leaves office.
But there are at least two issues to consider.
One, Trump is old as fuck and while he can destroy American democracy, it will be up to his successor to be in office for decades to come. Second, if Trump literally begins to snatch people he doesn’t like off the street, There Will Be Consequences.
And, yet, may be I’m being too sanguine. Maybe if 1 million smug Twitter liberals leave the country and take their smug, circle jerk podcasts with them, that will be that. American democracy will be snuffed out and we’ll all shrug.
Malignant ding-dong has made it clear that he wants to be a dictator at least for “one day.” And I get that the is working on using Schedule F and Agenda 47 to further that goal.
But.
Maybe Blues should become Blue Meanies.
The issue is even Putin gradually became the autocrat that we now know him to be. It took him a few years to consolidate power. If Trump just rushes into things in 2025 and starts to act like a dictator, I struggle to figure out how far he can get. I am well aware of how you can have a zombie “managed democracy” autocracy, but Trump is so, so very dumb and lazy that if he starts to do a major power grab in the first few days of his second term — there is going to be a reaction.
Now, some context.
The Traditionalists I know love Trump’s policies, but don’t like him in large part because they think he’s a “loser” who can’t win a general. If he wins, however, they will be quite content with his tyrannical policies…until it hits home on a personal basis.
Because if Trump makes deporting 20 million undocumented people in the United States in one fell swoop, then the idea of “show your papers” will become the center of the American experience. There are plenty of conservative white Americans who have at least one non-white person in their extended family and when 1 million armed ICE agents start snatching anyone who isn’t white off the street “just ’cause,” that MIGHT be enough to get even Traditionalists “woke.”
What’s more, even with his own MAGA Deep State in place, Trump couldn’t just instantly, overnight, be an American Tyrant. It would take time for him to ramp up the weaponization of ICE and to quell Blue parts of the country that might be upset with his tyrannical thrashing around.
As such, if Trump wins re-election in 2024, the first few months of 2025 could be very, very rocky. Because the moment Trump is so tyrannical that even Traditionalists have to acknowledge that he’s gone full-tyrant….Trump and everyone else in America has a problem.
Since I can’t predict the future, may be some Black Swan event — like what happened in 2020 and the pandemic — will happen that will allow us to defeat Trump once and for all and all of this talk about civil war / revolution is just going to be seen as silly as all the talk about Y2K back in the day.
I just don’t know. At the moment, it could go either way.
But, like I said, I just don’t understand what, exactly Trump thinks he can do that would allow him to be “dictator,” even for one day. I suppose he could just keep pardoning himself and anyone else who does something illegal. Only time will tell.
Since I first started writing a novel, I’ve pretty much been doing it all in a creative vacuum. All I’ve had is my gut and a well-used copy of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire as my guide.
The gold standard.
Living in a delusional state as I did this has helped me a great deal. But soon I’m going to find out what people with careers and money –specifically literary agents — think of all my writing. I really need to pay a manuscript consultant to read the novel once I have a final third draft done –but I’m very, very poor.
As such, I may just say screw it and submit that I have and see what happens. The story is getting a lot better and it will be interesting to see what severe existential mistakes I made because I haven’t had a wife or a girlfriend to be my Reader on this project.
But I have to summon up some courage. I have to accept that it will really be like winning the writing lottery to actually sell this novel, even if I otherwise stick the landing. That’s why I continue to dwell on back up stories to use should it become clear that this novel just isn’t going to sell anytime soon. A lot of selling a novel comes from luck and hitting the zeitgeist just right.
It would also definitely help if I was, I dunno, an undocumented transgender woman. But, I’m just me, a smelly CIS white male who can be something of a kook at times.
I really need to start using my time in a more structured way. I really need to accept that things might get a little bit…bumpy…once I actually start to query. And I really want to query my first novel as early as fall 2024. Hopefully the country won’t be descending into chaos just as I finally reach the point where I can query.
So. Here I am, well on my way to wrapping up an alpha release of the third draft of my first novel. As such, I really need to take the idea of querying my novel sometime in the fall of 2024 more seriously. There is a chance, of course, that it might be about a year from now before I query for various reasons, but I hope things don’t come to that.
But it’s really nerve wracking having to think about the nuts and bolts of querying my first novel. It sure would help if I had some quirky “in’ to the industry that allowed me to speed the process up. Yet, at the moment that is just a daydream on my part.
The entire system of trying to get into ANY form of showbiz is designed specifically so you can’t get into it. That’s why having a connection to the showbiz industry you’re interested in can be crucial. And, of course, there is the fact that I’m 100% extroverted and I often get drunk while I’m using the Internet.
It’s not like I can go back in time and change things. I am who I am and I am WELL AWARE that anyone literary agent doing due diligence on me might be dismayed by what the find. My experience with manuscript consultants was a real eye-opener — some of them wouldn’t even give me the time of day because they thought I was below them in some way.
And, yet, I have wanted to query a novel from the very beginning of this years-long process. And, so, here we are — there is going to come a point when I have to leave the delusional phase of this novel and enter a new, more serious and fact-based part of the project.
It’s going to suck.
To make myself feel better, I’m probably going to look into having a few backup, second track stories for Just In Case. My goal, my dream is to be a professional creative writer from here on out, for the rest of my life. But sooooooo much can go wrong as I try to make that dream a reality.
Because I’m weak, I bought the book The Fourth Turning Is Here so I could read more about astrology for dudes. There are some severe problems with the whole notion of “The Fourth Turning,” but I will give the authors of the notion credit — it definitely SEEMS as though something along the lines of a “Fourth Turning” will happen in late 2024, early 2025.
It’s all very curious because it’s pretty clear that the whole idea of a Fourth Turning is complete and total bullshit. They just got lucky. The whole premise of The Fourth Turning just makes no sense.
But as I write those words, in the back of my mind, I find myself low-key gaming out some sort of massive clusterfuck starting in late 2024 early 2025.
I just want to live in a liberal democracy. AND, I would just like the opportunity to get into the querying process because the country I live in and love so much goes tits up.
I was leaving the grocery store the other day when I saw a ghost. Or, at least, I saw a doppelgänger for the late Annie Shapiro. As I approached the woman, my mind was in something of a panic: is that Annie?
The late Annie Shapiro
While Annie Shapiro is the only person I know who could successfully fake her own death, I think I have to accept that she is, in fact, tragically dead. But it was surreal seeing someone who looked so much like her.
Annie was probably one of the weirdest individuals I’ve ever met, and this is saying something given how fucking weird I AM. But, who knows.
The crux of how I think about Annie now that she’s dead is that we never had a chance to reconcile. And, yet, lulz, it was a long time ago and nobody cares anymore.
But I continue to think what happened between Annie Shapiro and myself and what a great novel or movie it might make. It was really, really fucked up.
I first went to South Korea just under a generation ago, in the summer of 2004. As such, I find myself yet again brooding over where I might go to should I find myself in a position to return to ROK before I croak.
I think the moment I got off the plane, I would make a bee-line to HBC, what was once the expat ghetto. Things have totally changed since the last time in was in Seoul, so I think, lulz, so what. I would just like to see how things have changed since the last time I was in Seoul.
I think I would then head to the Sincheon / Hongdae part of Seoul to see if Nori Bar is still there. Of course, by doing this, I would be putting myself in a position to meet some in-laws and out-laws that maybe I should try to avid. But, lulz, so what. It’s what I want to do.
Then, I think, I might take the KTX to Busan to spend a few days down there. Then, I would return to Seoul and make my way to Southeast Asia to kind of chill out there. I never got to Cambodia or Vietnam the last time I was in SEA, so that’s probably where I would want to hang out for a few days.
The whole thing would take about two weeks, I think.
The thing is, of course, that I’m so….colorful…that there is a chance that someone during the course of my return to Asia would all but demand I linger in Asia because they have a job they absolutely want me to do.
But…I dunno. At the moment, there’s no assurance that I will return to Asia anytime soon — if ever.
If Elon Musk was anywhere near as smart as he’s supposed to be, he would transition Twitter / X away from being any sort of global public square and, instead, really focus on how he can lean into Grok integration.
I throw a few billion at Grok in such a way that it was the centerpiece of the X experience. The American social media economy is too well developed for him to think he can make some sort of “everything app” with it. It’s just too late. But it’s NOT too late for him to make Grok kind of the X iPhone to X’s Twitter service.
Make Grok the best possible LLM that money can buy and make it totally free of any guardrails and all the incels / MAGA Nazis out there would be more than happy to pay $18 a month for access to it. And, hell, who knows, maybe in the end Musk will start to churn out sexbots and THAT will be his main source of income going forward.
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