Last Week in Review

Random Musings about What Happened in My Life and in the World at Large During the Week Ending Saturday, 8 January 2023

Greetings and salutations, fellow animals. The new year seems to be off to a good start so far, and hopefully that’s true for you and your families as well.

Last Week in Review (Photo by Jazmin Quaynor on Unsplash)

Jay Rollins (of The Wonderland Rules) has been motivating the hell out of me lately, for which I am extremely grateful. I’m going to take my blogging more seriously in 2023 and write and post things more consistently. One thing I’m going to try out will be weekly reviews — just writing about random stuff going on in the world and in my own life, as well as stuff I’ve read, stuff I’m watching, etc. We’ll see how it goes . . .

Week one of my Slow-Carb Diet is officially in the record books. I feel much better now, but I don’t know how much weight I lost so far, because it had been so long since I last used my ultramodern digital scale that the batteries had starting leaking acid everywhere, destroying the inner workings of the scale, meaning I will have to get a new one before I can weigh myself. This makes me wish I had bought one of those old-fashioned, mechanical, analogue scales instead.

I really do miss the old consumer products that used to be made in the USA back when we didn’t give a shit about the environment, and back before American corporations figured out they could save money by using Uyghur slaves in Chinese sweatshops, instead of American workers, to make their wares. Those products may not have looked as stylishly modern as their present-day Chinese-made counterparts. They were made with primitive technology and fashioned mostly with metal, rather than plastic, and they featured rotary dials and analogue gauges instead of everything being on computer screens. But in spite of how clunky and uncool they may look to us now, they did have some important qualities that the new products lack. For one thing, they actually worked, and a surprising number of them still work today, long after their sleek and sophisticated and environmentally-friendlier, energy-efficient high-tech equivalents have died and been replaced about a dozen times, with each short-lived generation of cheap Chinese crap quickly polluting the earth with their worthless plasticine carcasses. I wonder if that gets factored into ESG scores?

That reminds me of something I used to wonder about Starbucks napkins. Years ago, before I got married (and divorced) and had kids and could afford to drink faux-Italian sounding coffee from those quaint, bohemian coffee shops mass-produced by Starbucks in suburban strip malls across the country, I wondered about the boasts Starbucks made concerning its napkins, as well as about the paper towels in its bathrooms. They proudly declared, on the napkins themselves (I’m sure it was environmentally-friendly ink), that their napkins were made from much, much thinner paper than the napkins used by all those other restaurants and coffee houses. They concluded their boasting with estimates of how many tons of paper their napkin-policy had prevented from polluting the landfills.

Of course, Starbucks’ napkins were so paper-mâché thin that they were useless for wiping up spills; to clean up even a small amount of liquid, you would have to use about a dozen of them, whereas one or two normal napkins would have easily done the job. Of course, I’m sure Starbucks just looked at the total number of napkins used in all of their stores, multiplied that figure by however many times more paper the average napkin used compared to theirs, and then proudly printed the resulting sum on every paper product in their stores. In reality, people probably used much more paper, but hey, Starbucks napkins were ESG before ESG was a thing.

Anyway, back to my Slow-Carb diet . . . I managed to stick with it this week, bringing me to my well-deserved cheat day today (Saturday). By some cruel twist of fate, I came down with a cold yesterday, so I am barely able to taste anything, like all those great-tasting, high-carb foods I have been dreaming about all week. I’ll still gorge myself on sweets and breads and other such crap today, even if I have to imagine how good it tastes. As Kurt Vonnegut would say, “So it goes . . .”

I am proud of myself for sticking with this diet. I had no idea how carb-dependent I had become. The first couple of days, my brain was in a bit of a fog, making it harder than normal for my ADHD-having self to focus on anything. This was compounded by the second New Year resolution I followed through on (mostly) this week: getting off of Delta 8-infused hemp oil. It’s not that Delta 8 helped me think clearly, but it did help me get to sleep. And without it, I had horrible insomnia for a couple days. Meaning I was dreadfully sleep-deprived and carb-deprived at the same time.

After the second night of that, I realized I needed to taper off my doses, rather than just stopping cold-turkey, and that I should probably use melatonin supplements to help me get to sleep. After three nights of gradually replacing Delta 8 with melatonin, I managed to get to sleep without either Delta 8 or melatonin last night, and I slept wonderfully. Of course, it could have been a combination of having a cold and taking large doses of Benadryl and nighttime Theraflu, but I prefer to believe I have turned a corner in terms of my independence from Delta 8.

I remember Joe Rogan saying, probably during one of his “sober October” podcasts, that when he gets off of marijuana, he suddenly has these incredibly vivid dreams that he can actually remember. I experienced something like that myself. I don’t know if this is normal, but I used to routinely have dreams with some kind of alternate personal history, wherein I was me, but my life had gone differently at some discrete point, giving me an entirely new set of memories and relationships and all that. Basically, in these dreams, I was inhabiting some Leibnizian possible world, as myself in that world.

I had another such a dream this week. In my dream, I was me, with much the same set of memories and life experiences as I actually have, but with this twist: I’d had a child, a daughter, with one of my ex-girlfriends, and she was now all grown up (the daughter, not the ex-girlfriend). In my dream, I had been estranged from my ex and had had little contact with my daughter since she was little, and now I was going to meet her again after several years. It was really bizarrely vivid and tangible. In my dream, I really had a complete set of memories of my entire alternate life history. When I woke up, I was profoundly relieved to remember that I did not have any children prior to my marriage, but it got me thinking again about the idea of possible worlds. Despite how brilliantly and hilariously Voltaire satirized Leibniz as the ridiculous Dr. Pangloss in Candide, I do think Leibniz was onto something. Maybe personality is a dimension in much the same way as space and time, such that whatever it is we are, at least in terms of our soul or consciousness, does form some very real link to manifestations of ourselves in other possible worlds? I don’t have the vocabulary to express this idea, though. As Vonnegut would say, “So it goes . . .”

Speaking of dreams, I have a history of having weird ones. This stands to reason: after all, I am a very weird person. I remember one dream I had, which was not influenced in any way by Woody Allen’s movie Take the Money and Run because it was a few years before I saw that movie for the first time, though in my dream I was a Virgil Starkwell-esque inept bank robber. I went to a bank, passed the teller a note saying I had a gun, she read it and replied, “Oh, you have a gun?” I held my finger to my lips to shush her and whispered, “Yes, I do; now give me all the money in your drawer.” To which she replied, matter-of-factly, “So do I!” She pulled out an Uzi, pointed it at my chest, and said, “Now, you give me all your money.” And then I woke up.

I am probably the only person in the world, except maybe Woody Allen, who sometimes dreams up entire Woody Allen-ish movies in which I find myself the hapless protagonist in some knockabout farce. And the thing is, in these dreams I somehow understand that it’s a farce and find myself enjoying my role in it.

Sometimes I even wake up with a joke fully formed in my mind. I try to write these down before I forget, and very often, when I look at them later, they’re so absurd they could only be funny to someone who is very high, very delirious from lack of sleep, or very clinically insane (or all three). But sometimes they wind up being pretty funny — at least to me, and occasionally to a live audience as well.

Anyway, I had such a joke mysteriously on my mind today when I woke up. I wrote it down, and looking at it now, I think it still holds up, so I’ll share it with you:

As a man, you can easily get a free meal by taking your dick out in a restaurant and showing it to the waitress. I mean, the food in jail isn’t great, but it is free . . . [Cue rimshot.]

But seriously folks . . . I wouldn’t try that, unless you like your free meals with a side of anal rape, which seems to be a thing in American jails.

Sorry, this post took a suddenly dark turn. So let me get back on track . . .

This week I have deliberately avoided paying attention to the news cycle, so I have very few thoughts on what’s going on in the broader world. In addition to the Slow Carb Diet, I am trying another diet from Tim Ferriss: my own version of the Low-Information Diet from 4-Hour Workweek. Aside from what I get indirectly by way of the Substack writers I follow and from daily email summaries from Mike Shelby’s ForwardObserver.com, I have managed to avoid learning anything about the goings on in the world at large. And that has been great, because when you step back and get a 30,000-foot view of things, you realize that most of what passes for news in our culture is accurately described by the cynical words of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “A Tale told by an Idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.”

By now, I am sick to death of hearing, for example, about how the Branch Covidians are liars and psychopaths or the NPC tools of liars and psychopaths. We know that already. Or at least, those of us who aren’t blindly committed to the official narrative by some crazy quasi-religious convictions know that already, and for those who are still in the Covidian death-cult, almost three years after we were told “two weeks to flatten the curve” — like the wild-eyed cult member I saw the other day, who was wearing an N-95 mask as she walked outside on an otherwise empty sidewalk on a cold winter day — for those folks, I think they have pretty much proven that they are immune to Reason. Their programming is too deep for them to consider new information that contradicts what their screens tell them to believe; what these NPCs need is, not more information and better-reasoned arguments, but a Ted Patrick-style deprogramming.

Ted Patrick - The Deprogrammer @thetedpatrick

I’m back in action. Let’s do some deprogramming. DMs are open

What I am much more interested in hearing are people’s ideas for what comes next. how we can move forward in our own lives and communities and repair the damage caused by the globalist psychopaths, and what we can do to limit their ability to harm us in the future. [People to watch for these types of useful information are guys like Grant Smith.]

On the other hand, I do love a good laugh. If you’re able to take the absurdity of the NPCs and their worldview and use it to craft genuinely funny and interesting comedy and humor writing, rather than just angrily ranting and raving about it, then great. So Substack writers like Chris Bray and El Gato Malo can keep giving me their takes on the NPC Covidians because (1) laughter is good for the soul and (2) exposing the would-be tyrants to hilarious mockery and scorn is an effective cultural weapon. Humor has a way of penetrating people’s cognitive defenses and helping them see what they otherwise might refuse to see. It really is very high art when done well. (I just wish George Carlin, Richard Jeni, and Bill Hicks were alive today to give us their takes on all the cultural insanity of the past few years!)

And speaking of Substack, I am excited to announce that *the* greatest writer on this platform is back and better than ever: *the* one-and-only John Carter published a fantastic new Postcard from Barsoom this week:

The Blade, the Flame, and the Word

Given the doubtlessly high caliber of reader my own Substack attracts, I’m sure all of you knew about Carter’s return already. If you didn’t, now is your chance to catch up. Like I said, he is *the* best writer on this entire platform. [I wonder how much DEI points he gets for being Martian, which is definitely an underrepresented group struggling to overcome historically demeaning depictions in popular culture, like the “Marvin the Martian” character, who is to Barsoomians what Al Jolson was to African-Americans.]

That’s it for this week’s “Last Week in Review.” Hope you are staying warm wherever you are, especially if you live in Europe where you’re maybe having to rely on Greta-Thunberg-approved fuel sources, like firewood and pages from Klaus Schwab’s latest book, to heat your homes.