Here are my current theories as to who in the general Queens area keeps checking this site repeatedly during the day.
Someone who knows me from my time in South Korea This makes the most sense. I was kind of crazy in South Korea and it would make total sense for someone to continue to want to keep tabs on me, even 15 years after the fact.
Someone from the Kermit & Friends Community This ALSO makes total sense. I seem to recall one specific young man who was completely obsessed with me who was a part of the KaF community.
At the moment, I continue to drift towards my goal of being a traditionally published author in a delusional haze. But there is going to come a moment when I begin to query this novel when the cold, hard metrics of reality are going to come crashing down on me.
What I’m thinking about specifically is the due diligence that literary agents are inevitably going to do on me. Given that I’m 100% extroverted, I really have been out there on social media, being my drunk crank self. And that doesn’t even begin to address the various things I’ve said on this blog that could very easily get me “canceled.”
I’ve repeatedly been what some “woke cancel culture mob” people might say is “fat phobic” when I called Trump’s former Sectary of State Mike Pompeo a “fat fuck.” But not only did he deserve it because if he was ever POTUS, I’m the specific type person he would come after, but I would like to think such low brow political rhetoric is protected political speech.
But, no, any literary agent who sees that will probably just roll their eyes and move on.
That the thing about being a drunk crank who’s a loser who aspires to be a success — you just can’t win. The only difference between a drunk crank loser and someone who is “unique” is just success. But the transition from drunk crank loser to being “a colorful, unique eccentric” can be almost impossible because, generally, people are judgement assholes.
It all boils down to — I can’t help who the fuck I am. I just can’t help how old I am or that I’m a smelly “CIS white male” who likes to drink and spout off on various forms of social media while intoxictaed.
Even though I have been in a VERY idyllic situation for writing my first novel, it’s still taken me far, far, far longer than it probably should have. I think some of it comes from I’m doing this in a vacuum and so all I have when it comes to how I want to write this novel is my own sense of storytelling a lot of arcane, arbitrary rules.
The ideal title for my first novel. It would help a great deal if I had a wife or a girlfriend who could not only be my “reader” but who also might encourage me. As it stands, I have to self-motivated through a combination of anger at how no one takes me seriously and spite.
All of this is complicated by two things.
One, is, of course, my age. Even if I somehow stick the landing with this novel, I will probably be in my mid-50s before I see any sort of concrete success. If I wrote a break out hit novel that changed my life the way I feel I deserve, I will finally be in a position to settle down and have kids….just as all my peers are empty nesters with one eye on retirement.
The other complication is the fucking “Fourth Turning.” It definitely seems as though Something Bad is going to happen to the United States in late 2024, early 2025. What that “Something Bad” might be, I don’t know. But I’m working on the assumption that just as I’m ready to query my first novel in the fall of 2024, there is a good chance that there will be either a revolution or civil war in the United States that will make all of my hard work moot.
But there is also a chance that America will slip peacefully into a MAGA-themed autocracy, which would help me long term, given that the point of this projected six novel series on a macro, subtextual level is me ranting about how much I fucking hate extremism in a general and MAGA specfically.
I can’t predict the future. I have no idea what is going to happen. But I do need to wrap this first novel up soon rather than later.
It seems as though the bio-pics of Queen and Elton John have been proxies for the big prize — The Beatles. To date, the whole subject of the rise and fall of The Beatles simply has not been addressed by Hollywood.
I don’t know how much of that is the lingering cultural significance of the band and how much is the remaining living members are very protective of the group’s legacy and simply won’t sanction any sort of attempt to document what happened.
But here, just for fun, is how I would structure a movie about The Beatles.
Beginning You open with where the four future Beatles are just before events cause their lives to become intertwined.
Inciting Incident: John Lennon meets Paul McCartney.
You spend much of the first act showing the lead up to the formation of The Beatles. Crucial points of the first act would be Brian Epstein becoming the bands manager and Ringo joining the band. You would linger on John, Paul and George’s time in Germany.
The band appears on Ed Sullivan. Middle
This would be the “fun and games” point of the story where you see how the individual members of the band reacted to Beatlemania.
Midpoint: Brian Epstein dies.
Crisis: John Lennon produces the “How Do You Sleep” diss track towards MacCartney. End
I’m a child of the Cold War, so everything that’s going on in the Middle East right now reminds me of what was going on in the background of The Day After before everything went kabluey.
I’m well aware that I’m prone to “hysterical doom shit,” as this may just be more of the same. But it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine things escalating if Israel struck targets inside of Iran for their involvement in what has been going on.
And Israel is one of a few nuclear powers so, yeah. The whole thing is rather unnerving. I only even suggest any of this because this IS the Middle East we’re talking about and the whole region as been unstable for a long, long time.
What’s more, we have the whole fucking “Fourth Turning” to worry about in the United States at some point between now and early 2025. I still think the whole thing is astrology for dudes, but the point the theory makes is still relevant — it definitely seems as though 2025 Is It.
We’ve collectively, on a global scale, enjoyed peace for too long and a lot of idiots are itching to burn the whole post WW2 global order to the ground. I don’t know what to tell you, folks.
While I seriously doubt this particular “hysterical doom shit” on my part will amount to anything, I am a little bit concerned that if there are two major long-term regional wars going on at the same time that the two events will be linked under the rubric “World War 3.”
What’s more, if the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East are joined by a massive clusterfuck in central Africa then, yeah, the nattering nabobs of negativism may start to throw around the term “World War 3” simply because it would be “cool” and an easy way to explain a very complex situation.
Of course, I have long believed that if the “Fourth Turning” really does happen starting in late 2024, early 2025 that we are going to be royally fucked and World War 3 really will break out. That could happen either because the United States pulls out of NATO and South Korea as it becomes an America First MAGA autocratic state or because the USA has descended into civil war or revolution because of “vibes.”
But that’s very speculative hysterical doom shit. It’s possible that somehow we’ll just punt all our problems down the road and nothing will come of any of this.
The point of photography, in my opinion, is to capture a moment of the human experience. As such, I’m growing more and more frustrated with the growing popularity of AI generated photography.
What bothers me is there is all this AI-generated celebrity soft-porn floating around on social media that is getting so good that it’s difficult to notice that it’s AI generated on first glance. We’re probably just a few months away from a deluge of AI-generated celebrity porn.
Now, I will note that I’m not so upset with AI generated art. If something is stylized and is clearly an effort to generate art rather than photography, I’m rather indifferent.
But we’re reaching a moment in the development of AI generated photography when it will be impossible to determine if it’s real or not. We’ve already reached a point where some people get really excited by near-hyper-realistic photos that are good, but not so good enough as to not to be clearly AI generated.
Since I’ve staked out that particular pet peeve, I have to accept that there is going to come a point where not only will most photographs be AI generated, but most movies, too. I suppose still photography is more dear to my heart than movies — which I love — so the sting won’t be as great when a AI-enabled TV screen scans my face and shoots out a two hour movie that exactly fits my mood at the moment.
Or, put another way, in a sense I’m just being an old fogy. AI generated everything is the future and no one — least of all me — will be able to escape it.
It is so curious that America’s lurch towards either MAGA-themed autocracy or civil war / revolution is happening in broad fucking daylight and no one seems very concerned. It’s all rather unsettling.
All I can compared it to is how apparently the Western Roman Empire just kind of gave up in its later years. An air of defeatism took over the collective and at one point it just become a matter of time before some barbarian put the Western Romans out of their misery.
I guess what I’m trying to say is there are some macro historical forces at work when it comes to the United States’ future. I can’t predict the future, so I have no idea what the fuck is going to happen. But, in general, I would posit that Something Big is going to happen in the world’s only hyperpower in late 2024, early 2025.
What that “Something Big” event might be….I just don’t know.
But, in general, all the conditions are there for a political event at least equal to WW2, if not the French Revolution. Something — whatever it is — that fundamentally changes not just American culture, but that of the entire world. It’s going to be scary and disruptive and there won’t be any ready endgame while it’s happening.
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