I very much appreciate the offer. Part of it is that I’ve been wailing like Cassandra about the rise of autocracy since the CIA torture thing in the aughts (and hippies older than I have been noting the rising police state since the 1960s) so I’m kinda taking CECOT and the dismantling of federal institutions personally. But then a lot of personal life stuff happened about the same time, so here we are.

I’ve got a few friends left, a rugged protocol for when I am triggered,and I am rebuilding a support network. It’s not my first rodeo, but (to mix metaphors) I’m definitely playing hard mode now.

As Blue from OSP, an early example of self-insert fanfic.

I’m in the middle of a psychotic break (since November 2024, and yes, the collapse of the US is a factor) and off and on suicide watch.

Here’s an exchange I’ve actually had (more or less, paraphrased) more than twice these last three months:

🥼📋👓🩺: In the past week, have you been having thoughts about killing yourself? (Another version is “How recently have you thoght about ending your life: a) less than a year, b) less than a month, c) less than a day, d) today.”)

🐰🎩🫖☕: Oh sure. Every day. Hourly.

🥼📋👓🩺: What!?

🐰🎩🫖☕:Yeah. For me this is Tuesday. The brain is always considering heading to check-out. I have a numerical scale of one-to-ten for suicidality the way we do pain assessments.

🥼📋👓🩺: I…see?

🐰🎩🫖☕: It’s fine! Ambient unlife stuff is at a S-3, like “shit I need to get to bed so my boss can scream at me early tomorrow. If that bus careened through this crosswalk, that problem would be so resolved.”

🥼📋👓🩺: …This is normal for you?

🐰🎩🫖☕: Routine. At S-5, I may look around for wandering death opportunities. I don’t talk to anyone about it until about S-6 and start having fantasies of getting proactive, at which point I might tell my therapist if she isn’t squeamish. (A lot of therapists are hair-trigger and will start threatening involuntary committal with any noise of suicidal ideation)

🥼📋👓🩺: Maybe you should…

🐰🎩🫖☕: It’s gotta be an S-8 or S-9 before I’m going to inconvenience a hot-line operator or crisis counslor. By then I’m looking at chemistry sets on Amazon. A fun game is trying to cross a hundred busy intersections in two hours. I’ve won so far.

🥼📋👓🩺: You can’t just…

🐰🎩🫖☕: You can’t just charge death head on. A million years of evolution will drop you before you commit. You gotta sneak up on Death. Icarus, not Heracles.

🥼📋👓🩺: < 🎩 gibbering noises >

I get to enjoy that the reverse happened, when he made mocking jokes about Islamic jihad and the promise of 72 virgins, and I got to school him about the Houri and the more general (and often pacifistic) notions of jihad as a personal quest.

(I’m not Muslim, but researched them during the war on terror in order to separate functional culture from violent movements. It’s complex and valid criticisms intermingle with harmful stereotypes, like Christianity and vampirism)

I occasionally check in on /b to see where the trend is, how open the white supremacy is and how much everyone hates / loves Trump (the vitriol is distilled and corrosive).

Also how convincing the lifelike AI art / video is, which is one of those bleeding-edge hallmarks of cyberpunk. (Observing the rule that any new art medium will first be used for porn and then for malice before it drifts into the mainstream toolbox)

I get to enjoy that the reverse happened, when he made mocking jokes about Islamic jihad and the promise of 72 virgins, and I got to school him about the Houri and the more general (and often pacifistic) notions of jihad as a personal quest.

(I’m not Muslim, but researched them during the war on terror in order to separate functional culture from violent movements. It’s complex and valid criticisms intermingle with harmful stereotypes, like Christianity and vampirism)

This is possibly true. He seemed more left leaning as the mayor of San Francisco, and I didn’t realize he was actually a chameleon.

I assume the prohibition the there so that lovers can feel naughty when they participate in its violation.

Look at my traitor of a governor with the monarchist tyrant.

Is there gay in invisible parts of the spectrum?

Can I be cosmic gay?

Remember our oligarch masters have invested over a trillion dollars into a multimedia empire to fuck their brains in the first place using what is nothing less than mind control or brainwashing techniques.

In the old days, we regulated services that took advantage of common human bias (such as gambling). But in this era, even gambling is AOK in all fifty states (so long as it’s sports apps or lootboxes)

That 20-Minutes-Into-The-Future cyberpunk dystopia that scared Orwell and Stephenson and Gibson is here. (—1138)

The US is still supposed to regulate inciting speech, but not when it’s backed by a closet full of blue-haired lawyers.

Let go your shank painter, let go your cat stopper
Haul up your clewgarnets, let tacks and sheets fly!

I suspect this some kind of irony or satire like 100% of human diseases would disappear if everyone committed to a starvation / cannibalism diet

We live in a YAF dystopia that is way less cool than most of the storybook ones.

And while every kid’s story is their chance to veer away from the usual fate of becoming a corporate cog (laborer or soldier) in a billionaire vanity project, most will just end up stuck like Winston without his nook, or will get imprisoned or will just go homeless.

We’re pretty sure it’s the Monsanto pesticide and anyone who suggests it is hit with a litigation threat. Curiously, as we’re speed-breeding domesticated bees the wild bees are dying out faster, so as the bee population dwindles it also becomes more domesticated and less wild. I know that’s a bad thing, but I am fuzzy on the why details.

I’m a brown thumb, and plants wilt as my shadow falls on them, but if you’re a green-thumb, plant pollinators, which will help the bees.

Also plant milkweed for the monarchs.

Yeah, but the police don’t hover over us in Spinners as in Bladerunner. They still have to chopper from helipad to airport and ride off in air traffic, so less in our faces.

Their superfluous greenhouse emissions fit the cyberpunk vibe though.

The second situation is a fantasy until after we have a communist revolution.

Only because it was taken from the public by Disney, since the courts ceased recognizing the public as stakeholders.

But the Constitutional function of copyright is to create a robust public domain. As that is no longer the function of copyright, we can abolish it. And the only thing that is keeping us from abolishing it is the same obstacles keeping us from abolishing autocracy.

So revolution that bridges the way to socialized art may be more necessary in the immediate future than it appears (whether or not it’s easy).

It is possible I’ve never encountered a tankie. I was accused of bring one on a subreddit for mixing non-critical thoughs in with my criticism of USSR.

They also invented Catholocism.

But I dont blame Italians for any of these things. I might blame the specific people who invented these things.

I’m glad some ancient Italian figured out butter, salt, minced garlic and olive oil spread on bread is delicious, and would do sexual favors for them in sheer gratitude.

It my current state of five months into a long-term psychotic break, I have the joy of feeling lonely, walking to where people are, and needing to leave immediately, and feeling lonely by the time I get home again.

What a marvel the brain can be!