What Was Once All Threaded Together is No Longer So

Roma (Federico Fellini, 1972)

The Big Lebowski (Joel and Ethan Cohen, 1998)

When I first got sober they told me I’d have to start working on my defects of character and that was easy because they were glaring. This work is aided by persistently reminding yourself, like the voice of a little bird perched on your own shoulder, that you are powerless over people, places, and things not engineered to satisfy your needs, however modest. Most who believe steadfastly in domination and control have no power or control. They have a control problem like the recidivist drunkard has a drink problem, though it is also true of course that what the drunkard really wants is to control how he feels…before ultimately becoming controlled  by the bottle. Control uproots and finds no intelligible network or system. We cannot speak or spell and it’s why we’re going to hell. We failed to grab the baton and make a material futurity sufficient to frame our destiny as material reality. Not only are we powerless over people, places, and things, very often we are completely powerless also over our first reaction to something surprising or unexpected, but, with that being said, as the seconds continue to count down and everybody’s sort of standing there uncomfortably, you really do have to get your vessel stable pronto and yourself situationally reoriented such that the error or errors can be honoured with the proper (spiritual) interest. Other alcoholics do this work and I get along pretty good with most of them. We are testy and irritable as a rule, as you notice in big, loud colour if you ever attend an Alcoholics Anonymous convention. I know that a guy who runs his mouth can sink the whole fleet and I’m working on that but not perhaps all that successfully. I am scared only at this point of being buried alive or entombed by the lechery, populist authoritarianism, and willful ignorance all around me. I shouldn’t take it personally, though, because who the fuck am I in the greater scheme of things? Well, some of the winos call me Dirty Jake and I like that very much. That's actual righteous status. In the war of needs and wants there shall remain very little compassion and even less sense. Those who get defensive immediately are almost certainly never going to reorient, though I guess there are surprises. I run my life like a delinquent military operation and always have. It’s situational, scattershot, improvisatory, and fuelled in large part by the collection of actionable intelligence. I make sloppy mistakes and astonishing discoveries and that’s how it goes. As China Miéville observes in October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, the big powerful men in wars and revolutions very often find themselves in a cramped room with an excessive number of colleagues for weeks at a time with absolutely nothing happening. Even though that's a blatant index of an industrialized warfare mentality from which nobody will ever gain, I can see clearly that I need to work on battening down the hatchets...and probably swing a tad Bolshevik as well. Why not? Forever perched up in the cliffs and ready to throw down with the harbinger cry of the early morning owl.

The Dead (John Huston, 1987)