Years ago I snarked at Michelle Wu on Twitter—she said something about supporting public education, and I asked her why she then kept voting for budgets that harmed it.

Her response was to reach out to me and ask if I wanted to get some folks together who knew about school budgets so she could listen to us and learn. Some time later, I got people who knew a LOT about school budgeting (I was in touch with such people then because Twitter facilitated building communities of like-minded local folks to get stuff done, which is probably another reason Musk wanted to kill it) together and we met with then-councilor Wu in the meeting room at the JP Library. She took the T from City Hall and walked 15 minutes from Green Street to the library. And she really listened. And took notes.

And so this is how I came to break one of my own rules, which is “don’t stan politicians.” I volunteered for Michelle Wu’s first run for mayor and really believed that, unlike Marty Walsh, she cared about people who live in Boston, not just people who use Boston. She had all kinds of cool progressive ideas for making the city a better place, so much so that she was derided in right-wing circles as a “radical left mayor.” (This was mostly because she opposed the secret police rounding up our brown neighbors.)

And then she absolutely, conclusively THUMPED Josh Kraft in the primary, which is effectively the final in Boston because we are not electing Republicans here. So now she’s been unleashed to really enact her progressive agenda!

Except…it’s not happening. She’s frozen work on a bunch of safe streets projects. (i.e. projects that may inconvenience car drivers in order to make the street better for people walking, biking, and using public transit.) The city may lose federal funding already allocated to these projects if they are frozen too long.

The new city budget (the council technically votes on the budget, but the way Boston is set up, the mayor has a ridiculous amount of power over the budgeting process, so I’m laying this at her doorstep) eviscerates the schools. Hundreds of young teachers across the city are losing their jobs. Class sizes will increase. The quality of education will decrease.

Meanwhile the Wu-appointed school committee voted to give Superintendent of Schools Mary Skipper a 15% raise. (!)

Oh yeah, and the Boston Police Department is level-funded. (The BPD’s overtime budget, which is primarly spent on having cops stand around and do nothing outside of construction sites, eats up 100 million dollars per year.)

So—keeping the city car-centric and prioritizing policing over education. Actually over pretty much everything else, as most city departments have had their budgets frozen.

Man, I’m glad we didn’t elect the billionaire!

So why, with an absolutely absurdly strong showing in the recent election, has Michelle Wu suddenly abandoned the priorities she professed? Well I have an idea.

We know she’s ambitious, which I do not hold against her. She doesn’t want to be Mayor of Boston forever, which I think is a good thing. The city certainly didn’t benefit from being Tom Menino’s personal fiefdom for 21 years. We also know she’s a mentee/former student of Elizabeth Warren, whose current term will expire in 2030, after she turns 81 years old. Perhaps Warren has given Wu the heads up that there’s going to be a vacant Senate seat in 4 years, and Wu, who is widely loathed in the suburbs, is selling out Boston in order to win over the suburbs. And the wealthy suburbanites who bankroll Senate campaigns.

The sad thing about this is that abandoning making Boston a better place to live does absolutely nothing to shore up Wu’s chances with people who will never forgive her for being “from Chicago.” (She is originally from Chicago, but has lived in Greater Boston for nearly 20 years and chose to settle and raise a family here. People who complain about her being from Chicago use it as code for other facets of her identity they’re not allowed to complain about openly, at least in Massachusetts.)

Another incredibly dumb thing about this strategy is that it follows the conventional idiocy of the Democratic Party, which seems to be “don’t do anything that might alienate Republicans.” But people are hungering for politicians they can support who seem to actually have principles and who are willing to ruffle feathers in order to get things done. Wu is a skilled politician who has the ability to explain progressive policy choices, and people like the idea of a politician who stands for something!

Instead, it looks like she’s decided to follow the failed Democratic playbook of pretending to be progressive and then being centrist. Thanks, Obama! No, literally, thanks, Obama, who won the presidency in Michelle Wu’s sophomore year of college by pretending to be progressive and then proceeded to be a moderate conservative President.

Nobody can predict the future, and it may well be that Wu’s intelligence and charisma and the fact that she’s both a woman and a Chinese American will give her the appearance of progressivism to the statewide electorate while not actually ruffling the feathers of the big money people who are ruining everything. Good luck to her, I guess.

But damn—is it so much to ask that Democratic voters actually get the candidate we voted for? People on the right vote for hatemongering theocrats and by and large get exactly that. And hatemongering theocrats who fight like hell to enact their troglodytic priorities! Where the hell is that energy from the Democratic party?

I’m going to continue to vote because I believe that it’s foolish to abandon any of the tools at my disposal to make the world better, but I have probably knocked on my last door as a campaign volunteer.

I say that, though the next time we get someone posing as a progressive running for mayor, I’ll probably support them enthusiastically as well, hoping, like Charlie Brown, that this time I’ll finally get to kick the fucking football.

My care team doesn’t understand me. They pretend they do. But they offer sympathy, not compassion. Textbook dialogue and sterile warmth; there is no soul behind their surgical reassurance. I swear, I can see it in their eyes. They understand too little and say too much.

They place me in hell and call it health. Progress to them is that I suffer in new ways. That suffering is my problem, not theirs. I’m left miserable while they feel proud of what a good job they did in helping me return to the arms of my fears and pains.

Other disordered people get it. Not everything, and not all the time, but enough. I love them. They understand the safety that an eating disorder offers. They understand the pain of trying to separate from it. My clinicians? They learned from words. Words lie. They follow a shadow of a scientist’s interpretation of my situation. Disordered people actually know the reality.

Having latterly acquired an oil-painting for the first time in decades, it only took me two more weeks to get another one. I had wondered what art might be on offer at ebay. What I found there was a bewildering variety of unappealing work at price points ranging from tens to tens of thousands of pounds. Among the affordable options were very few that caught my eye – but after browsing for some time a still-life painting did eventually give me pause for thought. It was listed in an auction starting at only about £45. Expecting to be outdone, I threw in a bid, and was surprised when it proved to be the only one.

The painting (Fig. 17) depicts five items: an antique brass microscope; an empty glass jar; a seashell; a piece of rock crystal; and an ammonite fossil. Unlike the last piece I bought there's a clearly legible signature: R.P.B. Gorringe. He, it seems, was a freelance illustrator and painter who also did some teaching. It's a small piece in a good frame that has improved a corner of my hallway. There's scant chance of my accumulating any fine art on my budget: I'm happy to have been able to expand my humble collection at relatively low cost.

---

I had not suspected that kora virtuoso Toumani Diabaté had recorded with bassist extraordinaire Danny Thompson, until reading about the album Songhai a few weeks ago. It's a record that they made with the Spanish flamenco ensemble Ketama in 1988. I was alerted to its existence via a list of notable nuevo flamenco records compiled by Noah Sparkes at Discogs. I ordered a second-hand CD copy, which arrived on Friday.

What a wonderful record! It's a joy to hear the interplay of influences from either side of the Mediterranean. The strumming guitars and the twangling kora are the obvious co-stars, with Thompson's bass oftener in the background than the spotlight. Here's some footage of this ensemble performing the album's opening track 'Jarabiu', in a live performance. And here's some more with just Diabaté and Thompson on stage. In '88, nuevo flamenco was having a moment with the worldwide success of the Gypsy Kings. Diabaté, meanwhile, was just beginning to build his international reputation. As for Thompson, his other engagements around that time included contributions to records by Richard Thompson, Sam Brown and Talk Talk.

---

Murphy the cat reached the milestone of his eighteenth birthday on Wednesday. Although very much an elderly gent these days he still hasn't lost his good looks (Fig. 18).

Also on Wednesday, there came, just after dinner, the unmistakable sound (an enclosed descending flutter) of a bird falling down the chimney. Could it have been a sort of birthday offering for Murph from a well-meaning but misguided higher power? As it happened cat and bird did not meet, with the latter (fortunately uninjured) needing no prompting to leave as soon as I'd contrived to open up an exit route for it.

• Ok just be honest with me, do you not wanna come to Achensee with us next weekend or not?
• ÄÄÄÄ of course I wanna go to Achensee next weekend with you? Why would you say that?
• Well the way you were talking about it before and then you were like “Oh yeah next weekend we have Achensee..”
• Haha what?
• “Achenseee...”
• I was just telling them what we are doing next weekend, we're going to Achensee with your family.
• It wasn't what you said, it was the way you said it. Like you went down on “Achensee” like that wasn't something you were looking forward to do.
• That's just how I talk, it's not my language, I had to think for a minute, I don't know, you are joking right?
• No that's actually not, that's actually not how you talk. Like when you talk about true crime it's like
• But it's TRUE CRIME!
• See? “TRUE CRIME!” “Achenseee..”
• Man, you cannot compare true crime in general with other stuff, and true crime is not a german word and yes oh my god, can we go back to the part I just said I am excited to go to Achensee? Excited like in a natural way, it's a family thing, just as much as you are excited for, I don't know, for Weinwandertag on my birthday with my cousins, I mean, it's..
• Weinwandertag...
• I'm sorry?
• I said “Weinwandertag..”
• Why are you saying it like that?
• You see?
• What? Do you not wanna go?
• Well, exactly. You see how that make me feel like you might not wanna go? What if I'd say WEINWANDERTAG ON YOUR BIRTHDAY!
• That's nonsense. You want to put up a fight, like you are invested into creating a problem. I'm not falling for that.
• It was just an observation about your tone.
• Ok then let's talk about your tone the next time I invite you to... I don't know, my fucking japanese movies at Filmcasino
• Sure.
• So do you want to join me at Filmcasino tomorrow?
• I mean when? I have stuff to do, but yes, fine
• SEE, you said “fine”
• FINE!
• Not “yes, let's do it!”
• It's just Filmcasino, how am I supposed to get excited?
• EXACTLY, that was my whole point, I am not expecting you to get overexcited, unless...
• What?
• I mean, I can give you a hand with getting excited.
• Are you deviating this conversation to flirting with me as you always do?
• No. I'm preventing this straight relationship from sounding like a weird lesbian fighting cause speaking of tone, that's what it sounds to me like right now, and by the way, YES, I AM TRYING TO FLIRT WITH YOU TO GET YOU EXCITED OMG HOW DARE I? IT MUST BE HORRIBLE TO BE YOU RIGHT NOW
• Hahahaha
• Oh a laugher, is that a white flag?
• Yes..
• You ready to get excited?
• I am excited
• Nice. Hold your fire, I need a shower
• Should I join?
• Sure. I mean, it's not ACHENSEE, but..

/2022

The Kwantlen Student Association (KSA) has been frequently in the headlines for all the wrong reasons: alleged mismanagement, flagrant lack of transparency, and questionable fiscal priorities. While it is easy to blame the individuals currently in power, the ultimate root of the problem is a 25-year-old legislative failure.

The dysfunction we see today is the direct result of a specific 1999 policy shift that stripped universities of their oversight and handed student societies a blank check with no strings attached.

The Great De-Regulation of 1999

Before 1997, the [College and Institute Act](https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/rs/rs/9605201)_ provided a common-sense balance of power. Under the original Section 21, university boards held the discretionary power to collect and remit student fees. Most importantly, the law included a “kill switch”: boards could stop collecting fees if a student society failed to comply with the Societies Act, failed to produce audits, or—crucially—failed to maintain “sound fiscal management.”

That safeguard was erased during the premiership of Glen Clark. In 1999, responding to intense lobbying from the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) and various B.C. student societies seeking “total autonomy,” the provincial government fundamentally rewrote Section 21 (see its original here).

From “May” to “Must”: The Death of Oversight

The shift occurred via Section 4 of the Miscellaneous Statutes Amendment Act (No. 3), 1999 (also known as Bill 81). While the NDP government passed the law in 1999, it officially took effect on June 1, 2000, under BC Reg 407/99. This legislative “one-two punch” introduced two catastrophic changes that remain on the books today:

1. Mandatory Remittance: The original Act stated that boards “may” collect and remit fees. The 1999 amendment changed this to “must.” This wasn't a grammatical tweak. It transformed university boards from overseers into collection agents. Institutional boards were stripped of their discretion and legally compelled to hand over millions in student funds, regardless of a society’s track record.

2. The Deletion of Fiscal Standards: Previously, Section 21(2) allowed a board to stop the flow of money if a student society failed to maintain “sound fiscal management in the opinion of the board.“ The 1999 amendment deleted this “fiscal management” clause entirely. By removing the board’s ability to act on its professional judgment of a society’s financial health, the province effectively blinded the only body capable of providing immediate, local oversight.

Jennifer Saltman reported in The Province, these changes were pushed through despite explicit warnings from institutional leaders. The result was a legislative paradox: student societies were granted the status of fully autonomous private entities, yet they were funded by a “mandatory tax” that the university was legally forced to collect and could no longer withhold for bad behavior.

The Logical Outcome of Legislative Design

When you grant a private society a guaranteed, multi-million dollar revenue stream and simultaneously strip the funding body of its power to demand financial competence, you don't get “autonomy”—you get systemic risk.

Under the current version of the Act:

• Universities are “Handcuffed”: Even when a board sees red flags, they are legally obligated to continue the flow of cash.
• The “Must” Clause Prevails: As long as a society exists on paper, the money must flow. Regardless of the concerns the university remitting these funds, they are compelled to release these fees which contain portions of tax-payer public student loans.
• Fiscal Accountability is Optional: Without the credible threat of losing their fee-collection status, societies have little incentive to prioritize professional governance over internal politics. Under the current law, the only remaining recourse for students is often the court system: a path that is fundamentally impractical.

Student associations frequently shield themselves behind expensive legal counsel and opaque bylaws, creating a daunting labyrinth for students who are already balancing full-time academic loads. This creates an asymmetric power dynamic: student leaders use mandatory student fees to fund legal defenses against the very students who are forced to pay them. When the law removes institutional oversight, it leaves 19-year-olds to act as their own private investigators and litigators—a burden no other segment of the public is expected to carry.

Restoring the Safeguards

The ultimate progenitor of these fundamental issues plaguing the Kwantlen Student Association since early 2021 is not a student; it is a 1999 legislative amendment that prioritized political lobbying over fiscal responsibility. To fix this, the Province of British Columbia must revisit the [College and Institute Act](https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/complete/statreg/9605201)_ and restore the protections that existed prior to the Glen Clark era.

The Solution requires three specific legislative actions:

• Revert “Must” to “May”: Return discretionary power to the boards so that fee collection is earned through transparency.
• Restore the “Sound Fiscal Management” Clause: Explicitly allow institutions to pause remittance if a society is in breach of the Societies Act or failing its audits.
• Protect the Student Paycheck: Ensure that mandatory fees are treated with the same level of provincial oversight as any other public fund.

The Bottom Line

We cannot expect student societies to reform themselves when the law provides them with a guaranteed income regardless of their behavior. The cracks in this 25-year-old system are now so wide that the Province has been forced to intervene.

In March 2026, Finance Minister Brenda Bailey took the rare step of issuing a ministerial order to freeze the assets of the Kwantlen Student Association, citing concerns over “problematic conduct” and the potential misuse of funds. While this investigation is a necessary emergency measure, it is a symptom of a deeper disease. The government shouldn't have to wait for a “Registrar of Companies” report or a multi-million dollar deficit to trigger a freeze; the authority to enforce accountability should have remained with the institutions all along.

It is time for the Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills lead by Jessie Sunner to coordinate with the Ministry of Finance to undo the damage done decades ago. We must restore the institutional safeguards that were stripped away in the name of “autonomy.” Until the College and Institute Act is amended to prioritize the students who pay the fees over the organizations that spend them, these scandals will continue to repeat—not by accident, but by design.

23 March 2026

Sub scene (working title): alighted at Wood Green station and noticed, for the first time, an odd and artful decorative ventilation grill up high on the tiled platform wall close to the ceiling. It depicts an idyllic scene in a panoramic Art Deco style—what appears to be a deer seated under a shining sun, flanked on either side by a flying bird and three trees. Turns out it's a bronze that was designed by the artist Harold Stabler (1872-1945) in the early 1930s for the station's unveiling in 1932, which he made along with two others (same size/dimensions) that now reside at Turnpike Lane and Manor House stations. Apparently the designs were meant to allude to the history and daily life of each station's neighborhood, which is something to sit with given the current state of things in that part of the city (more on that later, have been thinking a lot about the street life where I live). But I was initially drawn to it for the strange effect of the serenity of its subject matter rendered in what is now, nearly a hundred years after its creation, almost charcoal gray metalwork that floats on a mesh grid over the intense deep blackness of the vent's interior. There's one bit in particular that I've been working with, from the left half of it, where a bird's wing is clipped at the top by the boundary of the rectangle that frames the entire piece while its other wing is almost fused to a vertical line behind it. While in flight.

#002324 – 09 de Agosto de 2025

Pedalo até casa. E reconheço o vestido turquesa. Afinal não é uma rapariga, é uma senhora. Tão bem assentava na descrição a juventude, que me saiu sem hesitação ao referir o quadro da mini-produção para as redes sociais. Só agora ao nos cruzarmos no passadiço é que a idade da pessoa descrita afinal se revelou próxima da minha. Quem sabe que equívocos provoco eu, de enorme barriga a arredondar a camisola amarela, a quem me vê passar e se cruza mais tarde comigo.

(Notice I use the word redundancy… versus inefficiency.)

• A cramped creative space
• Lists and lists without deadlines
• Awareness of my own awareness of being a hoarder, and yet perpetuating maximalism and hoarding
• Defining boundaries and telling people how important they are but not clearly communicating them in every single one of my own interactions.
• Not following my vegetarian weekdays and omnivore weekend diet and then falling ill

I left the above list open and hanging, unpublished as I stewed in bed, with whatever illness this is. Is it a cold? A flu? COVID? No idea. I’m returning to this window to babble and then hit publish.

As part of the lecture-performance I went to, we did quite an intimate thing passing our mobile phones around in a circle last Monday (long story) and I suspect that is where/how I might have caught a bug. Somewhere in public, exposed to other people’s hygiene habits. Bah. How dreadful. I could barely raise my head for the last two days. I don’t think I had a fever but felt very dizzy. I haven’t been this sick since last year… I thought I was doing okay building my immunity and strength again. I got that weird stomach bug exactly a month ago, but it wasn’t too bad. It barely lasted a few days.

I was telling a friend that I intuited getting sick. I had this thought just as we finished passing each other’s phones around. I was so excited about the lecture-performance piece that I lost track of whether or not I sprayed my hands with hand sanitizer and if I washed my hands as soon as I got home as I normally do. Then, this. Constantly resetting, helps to train our attention to be mindful and to notice how every single thing is connected. Hands. Phones. Mouth. Eyes. Bacteria. Touch. Taste. We’re so distracted, we have all the technology to be well, to live well and yet, here we are still making ourselves sick.

I am many things...but I am not someone who rejoices in exploiting another human being (for profit or entertainment) and I never will be. Life can be surprisingly fun, fulfilling and meaningful without it. Try it.

#002323 – 08 de Agosto de 2025

O barulho destas duas motas de água é irritante. Passam a subir o Douro a alta velocidade e removem da atmosfera da esplanada qualquer sossego. Mas quando estão já longe da vista e dos ouvidos e durante minutos, escuta-se o líquido balanço das ondas que provocaram a bater na margem. Tinha pensado que estas máquinas eram a interrupção do som da água, mas são a sua causa.

#002322 – 07 de Agosto de 2025

No parque oriental uma rapariga de vestido curto turquesa, sentada de pernas cruzadas numa rocha, virada para o rio Tinto, que ali é um riacho. Foi ao passar de bicicleta que uma cintilação para ali me puxou o olhar. Um espelho de maquilhagem, com um pequeno pé e mais apetrechos pousados na rocha, quem sabe para difundir nas redes sociais a beleza de um dia tão primaveril como este vigésimo quarto de Março, mas ainda assim em melancólica solidão. Já no Gramido a solidão adolescente é menos pronunciada, aos pares e trios, alguns de óculos de sol, viram-se para o rio para receber o sossego que nem os ecrãs perturbam muito. Acabo por ser eu, cinquentão, que aqui pego no telemóvel para escrever isto.

Anything you might be seeing on the news about the U.S. government's effect on the operational capacity of TSA (Transportational Security Administration) is an understatement. I just made it through what may just be the longest queue in human history; 7 hours. That is not a 7-hour standstill, but rather a 7-hour moving line. It was a very very long line. It snaked in and out of the terminal, and back in again and all through it and around it, and down in the tunnel underneath it and circled back again, then up... this must be the type of thing purgatory is made of.

Once I'd finally made it through security, I had already missed my flight by a good 3 hours. It was after 10:00pm, and all the restaurants at George Bush Intercontinental Airport had already closed (a completely alien concept at, say, Istanbul International Airport (as an aside, isn't it funny how they like to point to the autocratic nature of certain “Eastern” nations that only ever name their airports after cities, but it's countries of the “West” that almost exclusively name their airports after their political figures? Never mind the wholly unnecessary confusion it brings upon international travelers).

I thought, rather naively, that I'd be able to get on another flight that very same evening or at most next morning, but no, turns out I could only get on the flight heading out a full 24 hours later. No way I was going to leave the terminal after persevering through the 7-hour queue of torment and deal with it all over again the next day, so of course I sent the night on a crappy airport waiting seat (No sleeping pods or convenient terminal hotels, which is shocking to any traveler whose ever flown through Thailand or Istanbul or Mexico City—which most Americans clearly haven't).

Severe failed state feels at George Bush International Airport right now, where in spite of it all, you can still score yourself a bottle of Channel no. 5.

The really crappy part is that all my luggage flew out without me. With a transit in Paris. I have a feeling my bags will be the recipients of their own brand of logistical horrors.

#journal

My dad passed away in February. So, I’ve been away from home, down in Florida, getting things squared away there. They’re not squared away – in fact, I’d say they feel pretty misshapen and all over the place. They’re… fractalized?

In any case, although I brought pencils with me, and acrylic pens, it was hard to do anything creative while I was gone. It was a lot of get up, go to my dad’s house, clean/pack/sort, go back to the airbnb, sleep, do it all over again. We did get away for half a day to the beach, at least.

So, here’s a work in progress – I’m not sure where I’m going with it, so how it turns out will be a mystery for all of us.

And, one of these days, I’m going to get better at taking photos of my work.

I recently bought a cover from Amazon to hold my notepads and other stationery items. This unknown brand cover holds a couple of 3.5” x 5.5” notepads. Unfortunately, it doesn’t fit my small collection of A6 notepads. So, looking in my cubby there were a couple blank paper Moleskine Cahiers with previous writings that I wanted to finish before buying new notepads.

But writing on blank pages is unsettling. My sentences drift off center, the sizing is inconsistent, and my paragraphs smush together like a sat-on sandwich. This chaos makes my thinking just as jumbled as if I was typing them on screen. Ever wonder why you always have trouble writing on a blank screen? It’s the same with blank pages. There’s no structure.

Lines on a paper give order in the chaotic world of writing. It tells you can write as long as you don’t overstep your bounds. You don’t need a ruler. Lines are your companions helping you make those first few steps before they let go.

So the next time I’m given a blank notepad, I’ll just sketch random stuff. Like stick figures shooting at other stick figures, tanks, ships, helicopters, and fighter jets.

#writing #blankpage #notepad

神社は、所作を行う場所であり、人が集まる場所でもある。 なぜ人は神社に集まるのだろう。

お参りをしたからといって、直接的に幸せになるわけではない。 それでも「お参りは礼儀正しい行為である」という共通認識があり、その認識が良いものとして共有されている。 本質的には意味がないように見える行為なのに、みんなが同じ所作を行うことに、不思議な魅力がある。

意味がないはずの行為でも、多くの人が長い時間をかけて繰り返すことで、そこに何かしらの意味や重さが生まれてしまう。 誰かが強制したわけではなく、自然に形成された無意識の秩序。 人間が無意識に積み重ねてきた行為の結晶が、神社という場に漂っている。

この重さとは何だろう。

人々が同じ行為を共有すると、そこに特別な力や神聖さが生まれる。 理由があるから行うのではなく、行うから理由が生まれる。 私はその現象に惹かれているのだと思う。

科学的にこの重さを測定できるのか、センサーで検知できるのか、研究者に聞いてみたい気持ちが昔はあったが、しかし、実際には科学的な説明そのものにはあまり関心がないのが、大人になったから分かった。

では、私は何を知りたいのか。 何を感じられたら満足するのか。

結局、私が求めているのは科学的な証明ではなく、 自分が感じている世界が、幻ではないと、確かめることだろう。

私が感じたい世界は、今日も科学の外側にあって、 そのことが、今日もどこかもどかしい。

All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change.

• Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

One can describe a god as a being that consumes “thoughttime”. The greater “thoughttime” it consumes, the longer it survives and the more power it has to drive action in its subjects. Thoughttime is simply the mental space of a living entity (for now, a human or group of humans) over a period of time. It is a measure of how much a person or group of people think about a specific thing.

This entity has a will and a consciousness in so much as it occupies the minds of others and directs their minds to imagine that will and consciousness. It is similar in this way to a virus that a virus hijacks the operations of a living cell to replicate itself, so a god hijacks a living human or group of humans to create and enact its will. Then a god functions in some ways like a human, with objectives and goals, but its cognition is spread across multiple humans rather than just inhabiting one body.

But this definition is not yet entirely unique from any fictional character who, once shared by the original creator inhabits the minds of readers. These characters may themselves drive action, replicating themselves into the minds of others through the elicited action of recommending a book, a film, a comic. These beings may well live in the heads of others, taking their own lives, as evidenced by fan fiction. But this replication is not carrying out the command of the entity and the character does not exactly exist within the same world. Its consciousness is not responding to the lives of people and driving action in their lives, at least not as described here.

Though, there is a way in which this can happen. An individual may identify with a character, be that a person who lived or an imaginary one, and construct part of their identity from this character. They may ask themselves, in a given situation, what that character would wear, would say, or how that character would act. Over time this character integrates into their own consciousness so that these questions become subconscious.

All representations of people, including real people, are necessarily fictional, so there's really no difference in the “reality” of one versus another within the mindspace. All accounts become fictional once interpreted, once recorded, so that every story is ultimately a legend. It is a legend, it is fictional, in that it, at best, necessarily omits some details. There is a fiction to the way stories are chosen, even if they are literally true.

There are a specific set of stories we are told, and that we ourselves tell, as a form of shared social construction. We tell stories about people we think should be emulated, such as the stories of Hercules, Ulysses, Joan of Arc, Che Guevara, Lauren Olamina, and Tom Joad. We tell stories about people we should avoid emulating, such as Pandora, Eve, Hitler, Satan, and Charles Manson.

Joseph Campbell claimed that modern people don't engage in myth making, that no modern myths had been written recently. He was, as was often the case when he said things, deeply wrong. In fact, saying those words was itself engaging in a type of myth making. The very characters story he was so obsessed with tying himself to, Star Wars, is itself a modern myth complete with the very types of characters we are talking about: Luke, Leia, Han, Vader, and the Emperor.

But these are not gods. At their most influential, these characters become integrated into a person's psyche. There is a different term for this type of entity: an archetype. An archetype is a persona that a person can become. A god, though, is different. A god is above the individual, paradoxically outside, commanding them, directing them, sometimes arguing with them.

Some entities straddle this line. Christians are encouraged to ask themselves “what would Jesus do?” The identity of “Christian” itself means “Christ-like,” making the expectation clear: to have the identity of Christian is necessarily to embrace the archetype of Christ. But Jesus is also a god giving commandments like “love thy neighbor as thyself” that the individual is expected to follow. The command to proselytize is the replication function of that god, a way to expand its thougthtime past the small group of people who it inhabited.

Archetypes were once beings whose creation was attributed to gods, but now we own them, and we can create them for ourselves.

For monotheistic religions, there is no differentiation between “religion” and “god.” The religion that inhabits the thoughttime is the god. So there is a blurring between the two entities. Polytheistic religions may have more distinct gods, but the line between the religion, the archetypes, and the pantheon blurs. Archetypes are who you are or are not, gods are external entities that say what you should and shouldn't do, the combination of these is the entity of a religion, occupying thougttime as a living belief system. Some religions have many gods, others have none. An atheistic Buddhist may be able to identify archetypes, Buddhas and those who approach Buddhahood, and a set of ideas but no central being. A Taoist may similarly have a set of ideas that align them with the flow of Chi, but lack any concept of a conscious outside force. If Chi flows through the Taoist, then they are aligned with the living universe. These again blur the lines between god and archetype, as both are expressions of a universal consciousness expressed through the individual and the rest of reality. The legend of Gajendra Moksha is illustrative this god/archetype unification.

Then, depending on your frame, it becomes possible to refer to any religion or belief system as a god, and vise versa, in that there is an isomorphism between the two: It's difficult to constrain the definition of one in such a way as to omit the other. We could define a god as having an identity, but a religion has an identity. We could say it has a will, but a religion can be said to have a will. Perhaps we could say that a god has “personhood,” but mystics and Diests would disagree.

In the language of Esperanto there's a single term that is used to describe a religion and an ideology: ismo. Kapitalismo, hinduismo, it's all the same word. And why not? There are plenty of ideologies that cannot be separated from religions. All forms of theocracy, from American Christian Nationalism to Caliphate, are clearly both political ideologies and religions. But all government is rooted in ancient religious institutions, currency and paid labor (the core of capitalism) comes from ancient temples and “the invisible hand” is literally just Adam Smith talking about god. Worshipping Power and /The Dawn of Everything/lay out the case that the two have never really diverged.

Even Communist states derive their governance structures through governance structures that are themselves rooted in religious structures. The supposedly Atheist Soviet Union drew from a branch of European liberalism that Marx never really separated from European religious concepts of labor and property. The centralized Soviet state was simply a reorganization of the Tsarist one that came before, maintaining many of the same structural justifications while swapping out the ideological one.

Surely, though, Anarchists are different? “No gods, no masters,” and all that. But Erica Lagalisse in Occult Features of Anarchism argues quite the opposite. The Dawn of Everything also clearly connects the European liberal tradition, from which anarchism split, to the critiques of Indigenous people from Turtle Island (so-called America). These critiques could hardly themselves be separated from religious assertions. Aside from these two threads, anarchist thought is rich with the influence of both secular and religious Jews. It makes sense that historically marginalized people might have a greater incentive to reject the justifications of the governments that oppress them, and it's difficult to separate these critiques from a religion and culture that has experienced oppression as part of its identity.

Anarchists have long practiced ancestor worship and martyr culture. Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Joe Hill, Sacco and Vanzetti. The spirit of Anarchism lives and guides thought and action, so much like the Tao or Logos, as the spirits of our ancestors guide us as archetypes in life. I'm not the first person to suggest that the spirit of Anarchy could be thought of as a god. “Many gods, no masters,” and all that.

But there are other gods that occupy our world, occupy our mindspace, live off our thoughttime, command us, threaten us, demand our service, compel our action. These gods are far more alive in this world than any others. These are the gods of corporations and governments. But what else is a corporation? Are you not asked to think, “is this good for the business?” Your work becomes the manifestation of this god in the world. Leadership strategy becomes the mind of the entity, a mind forced upon you to become your daily personal god on threat of starvation.

This god is one in a pantheon, for it is supposedly subject to the will of the greater god of government. The corporation must spread the teachings of the prime deity, with mandatory training created by the corporation to comply. There is a war in the heavens, a vying for power between the gods, struggle and subterfuge we recognize well from the ancient legends of Greece or Rome. Corporations and churches vie with other ideologies for control of the great god of the state, while anarchist summon a different spirit that brings power from below.

It is interesting, with this context, to reflect on the most important command of god of the Abrihamic faiths, rendered in Christian branches as the command “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

In this myriad of gods we can, perhaps, see that these entities are not all the same in their manifestation. The story of the liberal state is that of a god created by “the will of the people.” The corporation, on the other hand, is an old-style god born of one mind and guided by those who inherit it, those who earn the mantle of spiritual successor by proving their allegiance to the deity. The supreme leader, the pope of the corporation, the conduit between god and subjects, the CEO enacts the will of “the shareholders” and “the market,” anointed by “the board of directors” to control the corporate personhood.

Many such gods have lived, and still live, which speak only through one or a few. It is specifically these gods that make so many people in to atheists, that so many anarchists railed against. And yet, there are other gods.

Quakers, among other mystical sects, believe that every individual can connect directly with god. They do not believe in the hierarchy of clergy. Any can speak, and their words can be filled with the light of the spirit. A Quaker once commented to me on that same commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” “If God,” they said, “manifests through the light within us all. The Bible is a book, an imperfect thing in an imperfect world. Though the light may shine through it, by shining through those who wrote it, it cannot be perfect. Then to imagine it as the perfect word of God, as fundamentalists do, is to violate that most important commandment. It is to make a God of the book and to place the book, as a god, above the true God that shines through us all.”

There is a resonance between this and the Proudhon quote, “I dream of a society where I would be guillotined as a conservative.”

Gods may live in us, and be controlled by us, or may control us. They may manifest in our actions, compelled by our allegiance to them or compelled by the threats made or maintained by the allegiance of others.

But these corporations are small gods that can be traded for others. Even the gods of nations are bound by space and time. The gods of religion are no so tightly constrained. But they are the same type of thing, they are the same class of entity. Could we, then, create a new god that is more powerful than these others? Could we intentionally blur the lines between god and archetype, and reversing the memetic flow, such that the identity of our god is the archetype of ourselves?

The gods that inhabit many of us are generally not self-aware. We are not conscious of the fact that we control the gods, but rather they simply control us. The gods in our heads generally do not understand that their existence is dependent for its survival on the valuable resource of our thoughttime. What if our god was self-aware, understood that it needs us, existed to serve us?

We return again to Gajendra Moksha, but with eyes open, bruised and aware.

The second law of thermodynamics is the Monad from which the Dyad, the infinite cycle of creation and destruction, emerges. With one hand it sows life, trading local entropy for global, and on the other it reaps, as all things move towards entropy. But even as it reaps, it tills the ground again. Increasing entropy globally creates additional evolutionary pressure to decrease entropy locally where the scope of locality increases.

Organisms must first establish self-stability to survive. They must react to dynamic environments. Over time, they will be presented with new opportunities to react to environmental pressures. New regional climates or local climate change may challenge their adaptivity. With each adaptation, the organism adds complexity to manage the complexity of the environment.

This very pressure drives evolution in a general direction: towards complexity. But it is not simply towards complexity, rather toward a specific type of complexity. Organisms that align with their environment survive. Organisms that are able to manage the complexity of their environment survive. Entropy grows over time, providing organisms, species, ecosystems more and more opportunities to die. Individual organisms experience a continual pressure. Species may experience regular episodic pressures as climates shift and change, or new organisms evolve and adapt to challenge their own ecological niche. On a long enough timescale global ecosystems are challenged. Five such events have already occurred, and we are currently within the sixth: the Holocene extinction.

At each level, there are pressures to develop ways to adapt. Humans thus far have answered these questions with things like language, culture, and religion. At each challenge, we have developed new ways to grow and adapt. But now we have created a god that kills our world, that kills us, a dead god we no longer control. If we fail to confront it, to create a god that can kill it, then we will also cease to exist. The universe challenges organisms and systems of organisms at higher and higher levels of complexity, keeping those that adapt and culling those that don't.

Then the universe, which, through evolutionary pressure, created brains able to model the world and language able share these models, created, by side effect, all the gods that inhabit us. The universe itself spoke into us through the vastness of time, from stardust to creatures linked by metal and thinking sand, all that we have been and all that we can be. Even these words, that you read now, are the phenotypes of the genes the universe forged for us through entropy and thermodynamics.

The challenge is really one of identity, one of the self and how we define it. The “self” has expanded from “me” to “us and we” to adapt to those evolutionary pressures. Individuals, families, tribes, religious groups, nations, in an ever-growing set of identities, in an ever expanding concept of “self.” The challenge we now face is yet again one of identity. Can we expand our “self,” and this god we create, to encompass the whole system, the biosphere, on which we depend for survival? Can we, intentionally, become one Gaia against the pantheon of dead gods who threaten her?

But is this really a deviation from the pattern? No, this extinction is not new. Before the “big five” extinction events there was one more called the “Great Oxidation Event.” It, like the current one, was caused by organism changing their environment in a way that finally made it hostile to their own life.

We must increase the scope of our identity, invent a new type of god, become something different or die. We do this because we are constrained by the patterns and laws of the universe. But how different is this really from an omnipotent, omnipresent god manifesting its consciousness into our minds? The universe creates life. The universe creates beings that can think. The universe creates situations that produce organisms able to think, able to model the universe as a consciousness and manifest that into existence. Those that do survive, continue to exist, those that do not die.

Is this really a new god then, or an old one? Could there be a convergence between these two concepts, between creating a god to serve us and god as the laws of the universe manifesting its thought, it's “words,” it's “logos,” into reality? Do we now create a new god, or do we rediscover the god that has always been? Or is there really a difference for something unbounded by the logic of time?

Then perhaps we can, as this god, recognize “ourselves” both as new and as reflected by the apprehension of mystics reaching back into time? What would we then become?

Since Enrico Fermi first asked the question, “But where is everybody?” We have pondered this paradox. Why does it seem as though we are alone in the universe? If there is other intelligent life in the universe, why haven't we found it? It's statistically likely, given the vast numbers of stars, so why are we not flooded with signals? One proposal is that there exists a “Fermi Bottleneck,” an event or class of event that eliminates most intelligent species leaving few or none. Have we reached that point, we may wonder, or are we reaching it? Are we currently passing through it? Is this it, now?

Perhaps we can, reflecting back on everything thus far, explore the question in a different but related way. Have we not found intelligent life because we are not ourselves yet intelligent?

Could it be that we are not actually intelligent life because being such is predicated on expanding our understanding of what it means to be life, to be intelligent, to be conscious? Could it be that we are not “intelligent” because we have not yet become this new type of god?

Can we recognize ourselves, in pieces slowly weaving together and woven through eons, as gods? Or will we be dragged down, to share a planetary grave, by the globally dominant pantheon that rules this sphere, of corporations and government?

The god that you feed your thoughttime is the god that grows. The choice, then, ultimately belongs to all of us.