Friday Ramblings

Not another piece of autofiction. Not another blog conceived with delusions of grandeur—aiming to upend the world, shake out its lint-filled pockets, scrub it down, hand it $20, and send it staggering toward salvation. No, the world doesn’t need more hollow gestures. What it craves, perhaps, is a way to interrogate itself. And maybe that’s where I fit: offering ersatz cultural criticism, my Twitter-primed hot takes, my counterintuitive positions tossed off as immutable truths.

But even that feels insubstantial. Right now, I’m 3,000 words into an essay on the disappearance of MH370. It started as idle curiosity, but it has since metastasized into something unwieldy. I haven’t even touched on what truly fascinates me—gravitational anomalies, the shadowy maneuvers of the deep state, military contractors operating beyond the purview of oversight. At this rate, it’s becoming a book. But do I really want to write a book about a missing plane? I’m not an aviation expert, not a physicist. I’m not even certain what I am.

And yet, the act of writing persists. I think of Galbraith’s The New Industrial State, where he dissects the technosphere—the vast machinery of progress—and how something as miraculous as flight could only emerge from the rigid capitalist division of labor. And Tocqueville: “The art advances, the artisan recedes.” These reflections lead me to question whether our technological achievements—outside of what Ivan Illich so elegantly described as “convivial tools”—are worth the cost. From a humanist perspective, I suspect the answer is no. But then I ask myself, who am I to pass judgment?

There was a time when I called myself a heterodox Marxist with anarchist tendencies. Now, I find both Marxists and anarchists intolerable. Perhaps I’ve drifted into some form of humanism, though even that label feels fragile, inadequate. A friend wants to take me to Mass, to guide me toward Catholicism. Maybe I should let her. Maybe what I need is not another intellectual framework, but something older, something rooted in faith and ritual.

Writing is supposed to provide clarity, but for me, it often feels like a labyrinth. I want to write polemics—that’s where I feel most alive. I have an intuition about how things ought to be, and I’ve always excelled at diagnosing what’s wrong. But this talent is double-edged. Like Hamlet, I “lose the name of action,” paralyzed by the weight of my observations. My sharpness keeps me perpetually on the brink of beginning, never quite crossing the threshold.

Occasionally, I think about writing essays on my parents, my childhood—the things I’ve carried silently for years. A kind of exorcism. But I’ve never been good at journaling. Writing for myself alone feels contrived. Why labor over fully formed sentences if no one else will ever read them? Why not let my thoughts spill out as raw, unfiltered fragments—misspellings, fractured syntax, the purest distillation of my inner voice? But of course, I’d never want anyone, including myself, to confront my mind in that state. The chaos of unpolished thinking is too revealing, too unforgiving.

Even engaging with the writing of others feels fraught. On my desk is the $egirl zine I picked up at Sov House. Nick Dove’s essay is the only piece worth reading. The rest—Bronze Age Shawty, Peter Vack, Delicious Tacos, Cassidy Grady—are steeped in the kind of irony poisoning I can no longer endure. Perhaps this reaction says more about me than them. Or perhaps not. Actually, no—it doesn’t: they suck.

Still, I wonder if my judgment itself has become a kind of prison. Writing is supposed to be an act of discovery, but too often it feels like a performance. And the weight of that performance—of needing to be sharp, incisive, right—keeps me suspended in a state of inertia.

Anyway, I have Doomers rehearsal on Zoom in thirty minutes. I think I’m mostly off book. That feels like a small victory, and for now, small victories will have to suffice.