Wanted to try and corral a big herd of thoughts, observations and cultural references I’ve been tracking since writing my last full-length article about prostitution - which is suddenly very timely in light of this Spitzer thing…

But I don’t have all the bits worked into place though. Still very much in the puzzle stage, but I have managed to tease out a few very significant outlines.

It’s weird when you begin writing something very long and involved: you can never quite see where it’s going, you only have hunches on the shape it will take. But you know it’s important and you find out why and how it’s important along the way. Thematically, the focus of this series for me has become something like: the lifestyle of nomads, outcastes and outlaws. And somehow through that, I’ve uncovered what feels to me to be a very authentic, very universal almost - I don’t know - root human culture. It’s allowed me to identify what seem like naturally recurring cultural developments born on top of the actual experience of being a human.

The framing, for me, has been more personally helpful and successful at re-envisioning what it means to be an authentic human (one of two questions sci-fi author Philip K. Dick supposedly chased himself through life with), much moreso than any of the perhaps more “trendy” counter-cultural obsessions, like primitivism. I’ve read and written in and around those circles enough to know what those people are saying and why. And honestly I’ve found it intertwined with a great degree of fantasy of unreality: and by that I don’t mean bad imaginings, but things that don’t seem to match life experiences I have perceived as a human.

Working very closely 5 days a week with a pack of animals, a little tribe of dogs, a little herd has been helping sharpen my focus around this as well. The primitivist conceit that humans living in tribes are, by nature, totally peaceful outside of “civilization.” It’s just fucking wrong and stupid. Animals just don’t work that way. Animals fight for no reason. Animals pick on each other and try to fuck each other in the face just out of nowhere and eat their own poop. They do, I see it all the time.

I guess the thing about a “carnival”, especially as a holiday celebrated in other countries - Mardi Gras, etc - is that it unmasks the idiotic machinations of the rules we normally allow ourselves to be governed by: the arbitrary sets of behavioral restrictions we call “culture” or “civilization” are suddenly and temporarily lifted - and this act is celebrated through flights of fancy and decadence. And then things kinda go back to normal. I think the thing is, in a culture like that - where you have these sort of blow-off periods where everyone as a group up-ends the rules for a while is that there’s just more solidarity. You get to know people you party really hard with a lot better (and a lot worse) than people you keep always at a distance through cultural roles and what-have-you.

That’s kind of one tangent. One angle I want to develop. Not well fleshed out, but you gotta start somewhere. The other angle has been following the line of succession on these things back through time, because they’re easier to spot when they are in alien cultural contexts, in which you’re not immediately immersed. So, the Great Depression. A similar time in memorable history (those now living) when “hard times” were suddenly compounded into an almost Biblical Scale cultural disaster: things got so bad that people were forcibly pushed out of their daily routines, and had to improvise, make do, or die. In disaster situations, once the immediate shock has worn off, one begins thinking very clearly. It doesn’t take long for reality to settle in and to see the impact of one’s decisions in a whole new spectrum of priorities blah blah.

The whole thing is about wanderers, about nomads and weirdos. People who won’t, can’t or shouldn’t settle down. Maybe they would be dangerous if they stayed in one place too long. Other people would drive them out or get into trouble with them. People went to the frontier, I think, in many cases because they weren’t cut out for ordinary life. Some people are but some people aren’t.

Flipside to the traveler aesthetic though is a theme I want to draw in closely: old-school hospitality. Like where you would take anybody into your house back in the old days for any reason and you would bathe and clothe and feed them and let them sleep with your wife type Biblical shit. Where did that go? Can you imagine living in a culture like that? I mean, I don’t need to sleep with anybody’s wife, but I think a society in which people were treating full-on STRANGERS with such intensely passionate full-contact HUMANITY™ is something which ought to be idolized, something that should be held up as an example. You just don’t hear about stuff like that anymore. People are too scared of terrorists rapists and other nonsense. People have been taught to PROTECT YOUR PRODUCTS™ much too closely and strongly.

But there’s nothing to hold onto. Nomad or not, we are all travellers through this life. We’ll all die and be forgotten. But that’s not hopeless to me. That’s not existential despair. It means that we have fantastic opportunity right now to just live a good life, live right and be right with others, because that’s all we have. It’s like saying: “Oh, the game is as easy and infinitely fun and enriching as this? Is that all? Then, let’s play!” I mean, cause I personally was making it WAY harder than that. Now I’m just sitting around fucking smelling flowers and eating fruit and playing with puppies all day long and then writing cool songs. It’s like the fucking of Garden of Eden over here. I mean, I don’t have internet at my house right now, but other than that… You should try it out.

To have hospitality though, you need a house. At least, I think, linguistically. Or maybe you just need a host. A host and a guest. A host has a house and offers hospitality to guests. Like a hostel, or a hotel or a hospital, or a hospice. A place where people care about and for each other and respect each other and improve and enrich one another’s experience of life. A community. A group of friends. A culture: a group of individual organisms growing together according to certain common patterns, shared traits and behavioral characteristics. Collectives, collaboratives, shared identity and experience.

For us in the US, I think this concept could be drawn into light through the figure of the nurse/waitress. Florence Nightingale is probably the archetypal example. Some ancient goddess of Mercy, any incarnation of the Shekinah/Shakti. God’s Grace dispensed through the hands and works of ordinary humans.

Also those sent out ahead: emissaries, spies, agents, missionaries, explorers, rogues, irregulars. People you send out to go check on things, to influence and push things ahead of everybody else. People you don’t mind losing. People who don’t mind doing things you’re scared of or think are filthy and who still live honest respectable lives regardless. People at the bottom caste of every culture: people who handle feces and dead flesh. People you can pay to rape, pillage and murder for you. People who are doing the paying and the pushing, cultural manipulators, robber barons, warrior capitalists, New Age freakshows. How nobility feeds on the poor.

Long-distance truck drivers, teamsters, people who don’t mind driving for three days straight. Spice navigators. People who don’t operate according to ordinary frequencies. People who the cultural imprint programming totally failed on. People you wonder about but who you don’t want to be around too often because they freak you out. People who can hear in frequencies you and I can’t hear. People who see things you don’t see: the dead, the past and future. All these things exist. Everything is real. Make the most of it. More soon.