Manifesto

     While attending university, I enrolled in an Arthurian Mythology literature course. At the end of the semester, one student asked the professor which version of the King Arthur stories gave the most realistic impression of what life was like in the Middle Ages. Without hesitating he replied Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He went on to explain that the Middle Ages were a time when knights and kings and aristocrats were tromping around in the mud making fools of themselves while believing they were far more noble than they actually were.

     Such is the human race. It is likely that is how people were from the beginning. In our own way, that is what we are now in the 21^st century: a bunch of clowns who think of themselves as king and queens, far beyond reproach, the pinnacle of civilization, the summit of accumulated knowledge, the end point of evolution. In a hundred years, if the human race even survives that long, our ancestors will be looking at us like we were nothing but a bunch of ignorant hicks. The best of us will be forgotten. Most people will be remembered as nothing more than footnotes to footnotes to footnotes, the subject of billions of bytes of data, a cloud of digital dust that no one will care to inspect. What little attention we get in life these days comes from computerized algorithms that are incapable of thought. Our brains are dominated by AI information systems that run on autopilot. Most people think of the internet as a giant brain that exists to do all the hard work of thinking for us. We live in an era when the activities of the human race are destined to be forgotten due to lack of interest. It is an era of social self-negation, each individual becoming an autistic life support system for a cell phone.

     Ernest Hemingway said that all people, regardless of who or what they are, die like animals.

     And so I blog about history and the books I read. I do not make any claims to complete accuracy. I did not witness the historical events I describe. All I can do is write paraphrases of paraphrases written by people who possibly never knew what they were talking about to begin with. If you really want to flesh out the pure truth about it all, get up off your lazy ass and research this stuff for yourself.

     If you don’t read deeply, you don’t think deeply. Therefore I offer my thoughts on the literature that keeps my mind alive in a world full of intellectual dullards who are sleepwalking through history.

You can do what you want with these writings. I do not care about getting credit for any of it. This is purely a labor of love. I will never be able to sell this stuff; no one would want to buy it. In our day and age, any writing longer than a Twitter post makes most human brains shut down. Intellect is absorbed by video games, internet porn, and Facebook newsfeeds filled with photos of cats, babies, tofu burgers, and political rants written by a strange cousin you only met once when you were nine years old. If you, reader, by some chance find a way to make money off my writing then go for it. Just do me a favor and send a couple bucks my way so I can buy some more beer.
     But beware! Plagiarism is a game for vermin, parasites, and other losers who are not bright enough to do their own work. The demons of fate may be cursing and stalking you. When they sink their fangs into your neck and drain all your blood, what will you do then? That is a problem you will have to solve on your own.

     The pictures and music are just there because I do not have time to write everyday. Think of them as  sensory immersions into a world of nightmarish pleasures. The articles are there because there is, and always has been, some crazy shit going on in the world. Some of it is actually interesting. Do yourself, and the rest of the world, a favor: Read and Think; there aren't enough people out there doing either one.