I come back to journalling on here so infrequently. I have a script in this directory called `journal.py`. It starts a new journal entry and appends the link to it to the gemlog index. The title of this entry is a reference to that script. I ran the command `cat journal.py` because I forgot how to use the script, so I needed to read the Python to remind myself how it works. I did this the last time I wrote a journal entry, on April 24th. I recall doing it when I wrote the previous entries, as well. I remember how to speak Python, and I remember how to remind myself how to use the script, but I don't actually remember how to use the script.
I promised you another tits update. The titular update is: they're bigger. Modestly so. I have A-cups. Real A-cups, not AA-cups that I tell myself are A-cups. I stopped wearing the bra shortly after I was dismissed from my last software job, but I happened to wear it today, for the first time in a while. It's much comfier now that my tits are actually big enough for it.
My body has responded very, very well to estrogen. My testosterone levels are in the normal range for a cis woman, and my estrogen levels are just a little over the normal range for a cis woman. I still look in the mirror and notice a little stubble, when I haven't showered in a day or three - I shave in the shower. My legs still have more hair than I wish they did. But all my friends tell me, apparently quite earnestly, that I look like a supermodel. Everyone wants to bang me. I'm the hottest girl in the friend group.
The imprints of Christianity run deep under the secular façade. People no longer believe that Jesus was literally a divine being with magical powers. But traces of the psychological structure of Christianity live on. Millenarianism, the idea that human history is approaching an inflection point, an event or transformation that will radically alter the conditions in a destructive act of eschatonic catharsis. You know, like the Second Coming, from the Book of Revelation. It seems particularly relevant today. Perhaps because of the coming consequences of climate change, the Anthropocene Epoch representing Mother Terra's spiteful retribution for the defilement perpetrated upon her by phalluses of rock-hard tungsten carbide and synthetic diamond, an unwanted Promethean ravishment waged upon her by the ruthless logic of capital. Or perhaps it's the future shock of experiencing the Great Acceleration as one of the accelerants - we must be approaching an asymptotic historical moment, the limit at infinity where the tangent line goes vertical and the derivative becomes x/0, an unbounded undefinition that must be close at hand, where any news that's as much as a week old is not worth the pixels it's displayed on. Or maybe a spectre is haunting the internet - old Karl "Told You So" Marx getting in a tearful, bitter laugh while the Soviet Union recedes into the past and the New Millenium has "Made in China" printed on all the cheap plastic junk, what reactionaries proudly declare to be made "by capitalism" as a fearful rebuttal to the sullen young communist half-heartedly suggesting that we could choose to do better while working the ninth hour of their shift at fucking TJ Maxx. It is the Mass Extinction; it is the Singularity; it is the Revolution; it's all these things and more, simultaneously, a Gordian entanglement of lines of flight that snarl together on the hapless confrontation between the material and the metaphysical, now known as the real and the virtual.
Another imprint of Christianity is much simpler - the virtues of confession and repentance; the assumption of original sin; the self-reinforcing logic of dogma, a word that was not always unambiguously derogatory. I consider those three separate things, which are not the same as each other, to be aspects or representations of a common, guiding principle. This, I call, the "trinitarian mode of being". It's not just a mode of thinking, it is a mode of being. Consider the phenomenon of YouTuber apology videos. The YouTuber has done something wrong (sin), because they aren't perfect (original sin). But they want to do better (salvation). So, they create a video where they tearfully (repentance) give an account of what they've done (confession), addressed to their audience, who provides for the YouTuber and watches over the YouTuber at all times, and whose judgement must be satisfied by a demonstration of the YouTuber's earnestness before they are forgiven in the eyes of their viewers.
You know what really sucks, is how *being aware of a psychological thing* doesn't make you immune to it. I'm still quite capable of being brought to tears and blaming myself as a response to verbal abuse let upon me by someone whose expectations I didn't meet. As if another person's expectations of me are my problem, and not theirs. Similarly, it's great how I compulsively try to answer the question "why should I care about anything? what's the point of it all?" while being fully aware that the very question itself was planted in my head by the apocalypse cult that created my native language. I think it's incorrect to say that the search for meaning is a fundamental human tendency - the *need* for an ultimate purpose, I think, is a socially constructed need, one which even the most hardened atheists don't usually think we can escape from.
My writing creativity comes to me with the strength to move my fingers only at times when I am supposed to be writing something else. Computer code for a job. Academic prose for a class. Optimized buzzword salad for a cover letter. So, so, so much of what I spend my time on, is things that someone else told me to do. Not something someone else really *needs* me to do. This machine organizes itself on the principle that I need it, it doesn't need me. I am replaceable, the machine is not. No, I don't even like to call it "the machine". That word choice profanes the word "machine", which should be a sacred word. No, I'll call it what I mean - I mean capitalism.
I'm *always* saying this. Fucking capitalism. The C-word is on everyone's lips. It's "late stage". It's "in crisis". It's "cronyist"; it's "corporatist"; it's fascism; it's imperialism. Yes, of course, it *is* all these things, and worse. It's a power exercised by metaphysical abstractions; it's equally a power exercised by very tangible bullets, and riot shields, and missiles. But, no, it's not going to fall *tomorrow*. The sun will rise and the sun will fall, and the only thing that will put a conclusive end to capitalism during that time would be nuclear war.
It's quite mistaken to think that the risk of nuclear war decreased significantly when the Soviet Union fell. The actual risk of nuclear war right now is about the same as it was in the 1960s. The only difference is that we don't talk about it anymore. You don't duck and cover; if you try it now, you may find that your knees hurt, your head bumps against the table and you get gum in your hair. The kids these days do active shooter drills. Unlike a nuclear war, the stakes of a school shooting are low enough that you can endure the fear of it without resorting to heavy use of alcohol and barbiturates; therefore, we can think about it seriously enough to have a plan for it.
Nikita Krushchev was an atheist and a materialist. If a proud American is vaporized by an atomic blast, he goes to Heaven, provided that he is a good Christian. If a weary Soviet citizen suffers the same fate, what comes afterward is eternal unbeing, a dark void that you aren't around to witness, a planet where communism was never built and there is not even a person left alive to lament it. Krushchev must have thought about this when on October 26th, 1962, he wrote:
I don't know whether you can understand me and believe me. But I should like to have you believe in yourself and to agree that one cannot give way to passions; it is necessary to control them. And in what direction are events now developing? If you stop the vessels, then, as you yourself know, that would be piracy. If we started to do that with regard to your ships, then you would also be as indignant as we and the whole world now are. One cannot give another interpretation to such actions, because one cannot legalize lawlessness. If this were permitted, then there would be no peace, there would also be no peaceful coexistence. We should then be forced to put into effect the necessary measures of a defensive character to protect our interests in accordance with international law. Why should this be done? To what would all this lead?
I don't agree with all of Krushchev's political views. But as an atheist and a communist myself, I feel a sense of compassion with him. In what direction are events now developing? If we posed half as much of an immediate threat to the ruling class as the reactionary wing of their political allies claim we do, we would be rounded up by the police, be found guilty of treason and conspiracy to insurrection in a show tribunal, and sentenced to execution by firing squad. Why should this be done? To what would all this lead?
I genuinely believe that a new Red Scare is coming. Not Red Scare the podcast, that show is trash. I mean "Red Scare" as in, if you posted a guillotine meme on main, you get blacklisted. It will probably blow over after a few years, I hope. But during that time, I will have to find a way to feed myself. When basic necessities are luxuriously expensive; when anyone with the class status equal to or greater than a general manager is gripped with anti-communist hysteria; when the temperature outside is 110 degrees, no, not just "feels like" 110 degrees, but actually that hot according to a thermometer, to say nothing of the humidity. A lot of us are going to be shot. A lot of us are going to be treated with open hostility in public. All of us are going to be accused of being funded or controlled by Beijing.
Funny. I went to Beijing, once. I spent a small sum of money there. I enjoyed the glitzy architecture of a bustling hypertropolis. I pointed and laughed at billboards advertising the Communist Party of China right along billboards advertising Pepsi. I was impressed by the high-speed rail service. The People's Republic of China is actually a place, not Commie Mordor. Xi Jinping is a politician, no more or less duplicitous than any other. He is unelected and not democratically accountable to the general public, just like the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, or the Secretary of State, or every Supreme Court Justice.
I'm not going anywhere with this. I'm spewing my thoughts on a sheet of paper and pasting it to the wall. If you found a coherent meaning or structure in it, good job - you are better at reading than I am at writing.