The Great Spectacle Exodus
Tomorrow’s event:
Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie. Every Sunday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
Newly posted events:
Diaflogos w/ Tyson Wagner. Every Sunday @ 8:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 min. Starts on January 17th.
Existential Kink w/ Carolyn Elliott. January 20th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Soul Shivers: Stories of Regeneration from Women Near and Far w/ Freya Yost and Luea Ritter. February 9th, 16th, 23rd, and March 2nd. RSVP here. 90 mins.
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January 2nd, 2021
Yeah, I know. I said I was going to take a break from writing here, but man, something feels alive and I am inspired to write, at least for today.
I was talking to Saint Christoph before the new year. That crazy motherfucker. He is in Vancouver at the moment, and he is so going to make me fly out there and slap some existential sense into him, as he is getting into thumos-inspired trouble again. But man, I love that man so much.
He reads these journals, and I am tempted to break the fourth wall right now—if there is indeed a fourth wall right now—and wave bromantically to him, but I am writing to my tribe to be, and I do not want you to feel left out. He told me how much my journals mean to him, and he told me this right after the recent entry where I was uninspired to keep writing. I was very touched by that share, and it made me want to write, and lovingly say fuck ‘em to all the haters. I am not writing for haters anyway.
Lots of awesome people read my journals. Malcolm Ocean reads them regularly, and that guy is something awesome. I do not know how to describe him, that is partly why I like him. If you have the capacity to break my super tight pattern-matching social categorization schema, then we become insta-friends.
He shared something recently with me, something that showed him expressing his truth in a unique way, and it made me like him even more. What is the “je ne sais quoi” of Mr. Ocean? We cannot know that obviously, but it is something like this: he is in it.
In what? I do not think even he knows, and he probably knows he doesn’t know. He is earnestly swimming in the mystery in the right way, which is the way that inspires me to keep swimming. He is another one of my people.
Daniel Kazandjian sent me something about type 8’s in the Enneagram this morning, as I am a type 8 in that typology. It resonated:
Healthy Eights have highly developed intuition, although it is usually focused externally, toward the environment, Eights get hunches; they see possibilities in people and in situations that others do not recognize.
I enjoy being playfully pretentious, and I like to call this “listening to the daemon,” but you can also say I often get a case of the hunchies. I get intuitive hunches often. It’s like: boom, there it is, time to go. I can get all galaxy brain about this, and float up to the propositional skies to explain this, or justify this, or make it replicable.
But nah fam, I am not called to do that. I sense enough people get what I am talking about, and those are the people I am writing to now. I have reclaimed all this mental real estate, and pushed back against the invasiveness of the spectacle, and a creative bubbling is now occurring. So many ideas are popping up. It’s like idea, after idea, after idea …
What idea do I act on? I do not know, nor do I care right now. The fire is here though, and the heat is back. It feels warm, or maybe it is just my belly that feels warm, as I am drinking whiskey right now. It will probably be my last whiskey in a while, as Camille and I are fasting tomorrow, then starting Whole30 on Monday. I will soon ask the most profound rhetorical question: New Year, new body, who dis?
All this Stoicus Pater stuff was getting too serious anyway. Maybe it is the whiskey talking right now, but all I want to be is a Stoic cowboy, and skillfully fucking play, during the meta-crisis. Is that too much to ask? That pretentious daemon just said no.
In all seriousness, a line from yesterday’s journal really stayed with me: This exodus from the spectacle, during which the memetic tribes become embodied tribes, has just begun. I am probably biased, but I felt like that line was pretty dope. Yes. This is the “Great Spectacle Exodus” we have all been waiting for.
There is no more waiting though. We are in 2021, and the normies have lost. We are in the great weirding, and now is the time to make the spectacle our bitch. We’ll have to combine all of our gifts for this to occur: the endless thumos of Saint Christoph, the mystery-swimming of Mr. Ocean, the hunchies of the steward. Your gift needs to be in the game, and combined in unexpected ways, with the gifts of others.
Heaven yeah, baby. Stoic cowboying in 2021. Let the great exodus begin. Everyone is invited, even the haters with Stoic Daddy issues. I am back on my saddle, the thumos is locked-and-loaded once again, and this time no plan is in my hand. We cannot have a plan where we are going.
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