Normal Service Will Be Resumed…

Yes, I’ve been quiet here for quite a while. Apologies for the absence and all that.

Various reasons.

One has been the un-joys that is the so-called ‘holiday season’ – a month-long hell of family, ghastly fake-music and faked-up pseudo-jollity everywhere, the worst excesses of money-worship disguised as a gift-economy, and worse.

That’s mostly over now at last, yet behind it, for me, is the relentless gloom of another northern winter, combined now with ever-darkening skies on every global indicator.

And on top of that, a crushing sense of failure that I cannot seem to shift – not least that, no matter how hard I work, the frauds, the fakes, the fudgers and the f*ck-ups in our industry and beyond, they’re all still there, all still peddling the same old over-simplistic mistakes, all still ‘successfully’ making things worse for everyone with every passing day, and seems there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

That way madness lies…

And there’s further madness on the horizon, on a vastly larger scale. The ponderous multi-decade disaster of neoliberalism – otherwise known as ‘let’s-play-Chernobyl-with-the-global-economy’ – is fast approaching its inevitable endgame in the next few weeks and months. Again as at the start, we have a glib, deranged, self-serving media-clown in ‘control’ on one side of the Atlantic, and a vain, smug, self-satisfied, over-certain schoolmarm on the other. Once again it’s clear that they and those around them are completely clueless about real-world consequences, and are somehow even less competent than the fools that started us out in this path the first place.

(For those who can’t remember what happened at Chernobyl, it started out as an unwise, unauthorised experiment, by a bunch of barely-competent technicians, who intentionally put their badly-designed, flaw-riddled reactor into an unsafe condition, then deliberately disabled or jammed every safety-device, and then wilfully ignored every warning-sign that it was not only unstable but about to blow.

Their research-question was, having put their reactor into that condition, whether it was then possible to get it back into a stable condition again.

The answer, as we now all know, was ‘No’.

Thirty years later, the human and environmental impacts of that one act of stupendous folly are still being felt across half a continent.

The analogy is painfully apposite here… – especially with self-styled ‘conservatives’ who’ve long since forgotten the literal meaning of ‘conserve’…)

It’s not looking good right now. At all. For anyone. Or anything.

And I’ll be honest: it’s very hard for me to keep going right now. At all. For anyone. Or anything.

Yet I’ll do what I can to continue to provide something resembling normal service under increasingly abnormal conditions.

It helps sometimes to remember that whilst the social definition of ‘normal’ is ‘keep on doing the same things over and over, even when they no longer work’, the geometry definition of ‘normal’ is more like ‘sideways-on to everything else’.

‘Normal Service Will Be Resumed When Sanity Permits‘? – something like that. Whatever that ‘normal’ might be – or ‘sanity’, for that matter.

I’m still here.

Still working.

Still doing what I can.

I just hope it helps somewhat, that’s all.