Imagining curving letters in a languid psalm, in abstract time. Full levity, rolling through intagible phantom mystery and the furnace of gentle dreams. A caustic womb, champagne light. After the sacred deep blue, majesty of dawn, naked and cordial and virgin.
For the first time in a while, I'm writing this blog post from work. After quitting my last job I found two others, the first one is a full time job as a custodian and the second is working weekends at a used video game store. There's other collectibles as well, plenty of DVD's and manga. Even a bunch of toys. I've always wanted to spend at least a little bit of time working in a game store. But, after watching a few videos relating worker's experience at stores like GameStop, I decided against it. Thankfully, this store doesn't require me to upsell memberships. I thought working 7 days a week would drive me insane but both jobs are consistently chill enough that I don't really mind being here. My job at the game store is quite easy, the only problems I have are trying to weasel my way out of buying used electronics that I know are going to sit on our shelves, unsold. It's interesting to meet other people with similar nerdy interests, and I like that we can listen to whatever we want on the store speakers. The only things I've selected so far are my favorite Slime Girls album and a 1 hour mix of Brazilian Doomer Music. Dusting off the DVD's while listening to chiptune felt right.
I'm a little annoyed, it felt like I was getting a lot done while I was unemployed but as soon as I started working again I felt like I've lost all of my forward momentum. While I was taking a break, I got quite a bit of reading done. Before I quit my job I finished my first reread of Nick Land's Fanged Noumena and it still ranks pretty highly as one of my favorite works of philosophy. Unsurprisingly because of his later writings he has a fairly negative reputation in Leftist/Marxist circles and yet I can't help but be captivated by his writing style. There's a few different books that I managed to read entirely while I was between different essays from A Thousand Plateaus. I think it took me just shy of a year to read that book in its entirety. After I got that done I shut myself out from society for days to start Anti-Oedipus, which I ended up finishing at a friend's house. God knows how many beers I had to get through the last chapter. It was overall one of the most annoying books I've ever read but I'll more than likely go back to it at some point because I'm a masochist.
My biggest problem lately is that I have no idea what I want to be reading right now. This could be due to working so much that I barely even have time to think about it. When I'm at my custodian job, I'm listening to audiobooks. Things I've already accumulated in the past. When I'm at the game store, I spend a lot of time just talking to my coworker while we sell things and take in items. Working here's at least given me the chance to think more about video games. For my first shift we spent most of it just talking about retro gaming and the different kinds of things we were into. My manager was more of a MapleStory guy during the same period of time I was really into RuneScape. There's a relentless barrage of items I'd be interested in owning, but I have to keep myself from buying anything. My roommate and I want to move out of state and we might end up living in a van, neither of us would have much room for too many belongings. That's why I want to try to stick with my handheld consoles for a while. If anything I might invest in a PS Vita with a good screen for general emulation. I want to use my 3DS more but I barely ever feel like I have the time. A few months ago we found it in my closet and I homebrewed it so I could put whatever games I want on it. Thankfully, there's a decent Virtual Boy emulator for the 3DS.
Honestly, I think our plan to move out of state in a van is really silly. We have a few different reasons for wanting to move. Our biggest reason is that we think that when climate change inevitably starts to get really bad our state will be one of the worst places to be in, not only in terms of being abysmally hot but the political climate as well. I don't want to end up a corpse in a mass grave after some bizarre pogrom. But, that might happen anyway so I shouldn't be too worried about it. Our second reason, perhaps the silliest, is that we both have sordid histories with previous lovers that we'd like to escape from. One of us has an ex-girlfriend to abandon and another, one to forget. My roommate told me they're okay with their life falling apart, they just don't want it to fall apart where we live. Personally, I can thrive anywhere that I can find a university to bum around at. True pseud scumfuck, all I need is a dirty library crevice to die in.
When I look around the store I think of Marx's opening line in Capital, how the wealth of capitalist society presents itself as an immense collection of commodities. I'm surrounded by so many games that it'd be defeaning if they all screamed in unison, a choir of cheap plastic. There's action figurs that've never been played with, nearly useless electronics that sit patiently to collect dust with a still and silent obsessiveness, a bunch of Retron junk and shitty third party controllers. I wish we had televisions hooked up to old consoles for kids to play with, so they can discover the worlds of wonder bequeathed to us by Shigeru Miyamoto. If I could, I'd get rid of all the god damn Funko Pops. Maybe we could replace them with a section for Retroid and Anbernic handhelds. There's enough video games and consoles that have been mass produced that I think there's enough for every town and city to have its own little video game museum, where we can work to preserve these artworks from the past, or play the shitty games that suck ass. Game stores should converted into celebrations of video games the way the Soviets turned the Winter Palace into a museum.
It's been difficult to write my blog posts lately. I think part of it is I've been spending more time writing more focused pieces for Liber Mille Verborum and it's helped me realize how little I have to actually say. It's as if I'm a translucent film that the intensities of books and video games merely pass through. I alter nothing of the original object, and I rarely have anything to add more than personal reflections. Funhouse mirror images that I imagine are as boring as listening to someone tell you about a dream they had. I want to lie and say I've been deepening the relationship to the things I've been reading. No, I just reread. The only reread I'm trying to commit to right now is going through the works of the CCRU again for a second time. Part of me think it's been long enough to once again be a productive journey. I was worried about my French starting to deteriorate so I went ahead and got through Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for a second time. While doing a bit of internet surfing I discovered that one of Philip K Dick's friends was hired to write sequels to the original film, which became a series of 3 sequel novels. I don't think any material or ideas from them were reworked for Blade Runner 2049.
Last month I managed to get through a disappointing novelization of the Diablo games. I didn't think the novel was particularly good but it did give me the idea to try to find novelizations of other films that I like to see if any of them could remotely compare to the original. The ones I'm the most interested in right now are the novelizations of Alien and Mortal Kombat. I might try to pick them up for super cheap when I get paid. A long time ago I managed to get through Tarantino's own novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood but unfortunately it did little to make me think more highly of one of my least favorite films of his. My roommate and I have been trying to watch more films and anime together on our CRT television. My favorite reread lately has been Althusser's Philosophy for Non-Philosophers, it still stands the test of time as one of my all time favorite philosophical works. But, I don't have my physical copy anymore. I gave it to someone. I've been trying to reread and finish what I have left of Revolutionary Demonology but I've been spending so much time at work that I don't know when I'll ever have the time to get around to it.
Lately I've been slowly getting through another horror short story collection after I finished reading Stephen King's Night Shift. This one's Thomas Ligotti's collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe which were originally two separate works. It's given me a goal to shoot for. Now, I know who I want to try to emulate to the best of my ability, even if I fall horribly short. At the same time, I've been wanting to scour the archive for more creepypasta to read. I'd like to get a thorough education in the masterpieces of internet horror. After getting through some of the fictional works of the Order of Nine Angles, the Tempel ov Blood, and the Satanic Front, I've come to the conclusion that all of them can be accurately described as failed ARGs and horror projects, stillborn at the womb. To some extent, I see the CCRU as a similarly failed project. Though it's not a failure in terms of the quality of their aesthetic productions, it is a failure in the sense that they had a much more grand vision for how much further they envisioned the CCRU's hypervirus to spread. Its popularity and cultural influence pales in comparison to the SCP Foundation, and in turn Anton Long's fictional productions comically echo the cosmic heights of H.P. Lovecraft's. Out of a refusal to repeat myself in full, I still maintain: Satanism has never had a fictional author worthy of its name. Despite my own efforts, it likely never will.
There's one particularly thorny problem that I've been thinking about lately. Ruminating might be more accurate. Ever since my break
with the Maoist Communist Union, I've been rethinking my relationship to communism. I've said it before and for this, I will repeat my self: I maintain my commitment to communism, and to some extent I maintain my fidelity to Maoism as its highest science. Yes, I've lapsed into Deleuzian explorations and hyperstitional absurdities, but my convictions remain. I've come to think that I'd be rightfully ridiculed or outcasted if my personal efforts towards the realization of communism were tallied up, as if Santa were checking his list. Thus, I've begun to explore the idea that maybe my commitment to communism isn't a properly revolutionary or scientific one. I've come to accept that my communist fidelity and sympathies are strictly speaking, religious. But, I refuse to flee or disparage the sacred and divine that I've encountered, as would the most sterile and boring atheism. I've tried to learn to be honest with myself. Like any honest religious person, I can be hypocritical, self-absorbed, dogmatic, close-minded and evince my own personal neuroticism on a regular basis. Like Al-Hallaj or Spinoza, I'm likely to be branded a heretic for my efforts and excommunicated from the communist faith. I pray for a revolution that I might one day survive. I pray for the abolition of classes and the creation of a world where people are free to come to find their own God or Gods through whichever path suits them best, or to pursue anything else that they'd please. I pray our world will heal after it burns.