[I was touched enough by this email to use most of it for a dialogue, in which I shall take the back seat and merely insert some comments. I want to preserve this is a species of field note for the current status section of the ongoing book Enemy of All Mankind.]
A little about me: I was born in New York City, in lower Manhattan, where I lived for most of my childhood. I did spend a couple years as a toddler in Baltimore where my family lived on Patterson Park, but I barely remember it…
[Family information redacted. Dad and Mom moved around the nation for work as a result of dad not kissing ass on the PC job front. Our man seems to be a GenX latch-key kid, the single most abandoned generation of men we have had during my smear as a human stain.]
Then I went to Columbia University for undergrad….
…where I started shooting heroin. Which began about fifteen years of ping-ponging around America, working various menial jobs, occasionally getting into trouble with the law. I lived in a halfway house in Minnesota in 1998, back to NYC in 99 to work in insurance, 00 I was in Eugene Oregon because of a woman, 02 I moved to Austin Texas because it sounded cool, 04 back to NYC to try college again (I lasted one semester before I got strung out and thrown in jail for grand larceny and possession), 06 out to Orange County California (where I got arrested 14 times; the cops there don’t fuck around with degenerates like me), 12 up to Olympia Washington for a girl, 13 to Portland Oregon with the girl, and finally 14 to Gainesville Florida with a cat after the girl hated my guts.
[Across my life, across races and cities, the residency of men from my father’s generation down to those currently in their teens and 20s, seems entirely dependent upon women. Almost all lone men have been unable to buy a house or rent in a good area, in that those who succeed, attract a woman, who use the government to swindle the man into homelessness or marginal rentals.]
My family are good urban liberal progressives, so they never thought much of me moving around for no reason, never marrying or starting a family, etc though they disliked the drugs, tattoos and heavy metal, and they wished I had a career of some sort. I never really saw the point in much of anything.
In one of your books, you said “This process at the core of the toxic notion of democracy, causes rampant, criminality, as individual agency and masculine, merit, associations, and true interpersonal loyalty can only take place outside the state structure.”
In a warped and often stupid way, a life of drugs, violence, street living, and the like seemed to offer some way out of the totally meaningless and empty mode of life I was told I should lead. I did finally go to a technical school and have a decent job now, though this was a purely pragmatic “if you can’t beat em join em” decision. I’m sure the people I work with would be shocked if I told them about my life. I did stop shooting dope over ten years ago after…
[It has been my observation that criminals have an ability to see through social delusions imposed by Modernity that escapes law abiding folk, most of whom simply blame the drug or the character of the person for his criminality. There must be a devil (Morpheus) or a sinner [the crook] at fault, seems to be our long term social default. When the system is implicated by a law abiding person it is cited as merely flawed due to a mistake or well-meaning folly. The possibility that the system itself was begun for, or has evolved into an evil macro-organism is beyond normalized modern conception.]
[Redacted personal information.]
...a lengthy stay in the psych ward. I gave up all drugs and drinking, which fucking sucks and is boring, but my life had become such a disaster, and I was so scared that I would continue to not die and just languish in county jail/some shitty rehab/a rented room working some awful job, I saw no other choice.
The problem, besides the brutalizing nature of drug addiction that is anything but freeing, is that you inevitably wind up being taken in and totally crushed by the system - by cops and social workers and psychiatrists and COs and POs and the rest.
[This, I see as the purpose for the Drug War waged by some facets of the same government that brings in drugs, supports the activities of drug gangs by declining to use the RICO statute against them. For, from a system perspective, the medical and legal binding of a man who has not been successfully “housebound” by a woman, who is a born slave to civic rule, is a total social good.]
I’m not married, have no kids, basically a loner who keeps to myself, though I do have friends. A lot are dead, a lot are broken. I’ve always loved women, though I have never been able to work shit out with one, and I’ve grown admittedly bitter and curmudgeonly.
[These are all desired system effects. Such a system NEVER wants a native population with ties to the land it operates on, and will do what it can to limit native population and import client population. This is imperialism 101. The Inca and Assyrians did it.]
I can’t remember how it all started, what caused me to go down the mental road to people like you, Myth of the Twentieth Century, and that whole strange sphere of people and podcasts and ideas. I was a typical liberal, something like a Bernie Bro. But it stopped making sense.
[As a writer, I was dragged down this rabbit warren by young men simply seeking advice on combat and urban survival. I never had any ambition to write social commentary, urban blight journalism, travel journalism, crime reporting, or American history, and especially not this history of conspiracy your email has become an anecdote for.]
I still feel adrift in a sea of bullshit, and it drives me insane how the typical Caucasoid just imbibes the toxic bullshit around them (as long as they have enough cars, Netflix, DoorDash, etc.). My mother was sexually assaulted in the street by a black man, my father was robbed at gunpoint by one, I have been robbed and mugged and beaten by them. But when my grandma said “those niցցers sure dance funny,” all hell broke loose because we would rather be raped, beaten and robbed than be offensive. There is something sinisterly toxic about all that.
[That paragraph above is a perfect distillation of Civilization, its means, its progress and its goal, which is MORAL FEAR OF NOT BEING PASSIVE.]
At one time my family in Baltimore (all Pollacks of course) lived in the city in ethnic neighborhoods with large families and local churches, bars, clubs. I’m sure they were fucked up in their own ways, but in the old black and white photos they look healthy beyond a standard that is even possible now.
[When at my mother’s I see these pictures. When at Megan and Georgia’s place in East Baltimore, I see the pictures of their large polish families—blown to the four winds. Both of our entire families, except for Georgia who cannot afford to move, having lost her husband, are gone from “the place of our nativity.”]
Now everyone is scattered all over the country, no one has kids, half of my cousins are gay, everyone secretly hates each other, but they all keep doing, thinking, believing the same thing. Same thing with most people I grew up with, besides the ones that are dead from drugs or suicide. I remind myself I once was them, and by all appearances still am. Who the fuck am I.
You may be unique in that most men I’ve heard dislike the current version we have of civilization, but would prefer another (either a past one or an idealized possible version). However you view the passivity, hypocrisy, weakness, and dysfunction as essentially part and parcel of settled societies. This is an unsettling thought, though I think you are correct.
[Unsettling is the perfect word for it, and also for our current settlement model, which is to force us to move every decade of our lives, and is therefore a perfect model of social hypocrisy. Whatever we may say about the evil that rules us, it has achieved perfection in open, even brazen, deception.]
Anyway, I apparently needed another man to speak/write to. Not sure if you found any of this interesting. I’m justifying the verbal vomit by saying to myself that you are a writer and would therefore enjoy such a rant.
[This was not enjoyable at all, but an excavation of some shared pain, that is useful in my current, unpleasant inquiry.]
On that note, take care, good Sir James of Balmer.
[Thank you!]
