Good morning everyone hello hi how are you are you doing okay? Holding up? Still snowed in? We are… not exactly snowed in thanks to our snow shoveling marathon, but there is still no school nonetheless. It’s a big county. Well. By Lower 48 standards. Lol well no. By East Coast standards, then. Not all the roads are clear. So we remain schoolless. Jane sent her breakfast back because I deigned to include a dark chocolate Quaker bar. Little princess.

Oh hey. Buy some girl scout cookies. Consider buying them from this very cute doll-house-sized Girl Scout Cookies stand. I had an Adventureful last night — okay I had three. My god, they are so good.

I am depressed. Read too much of the Epstein files again last night. Child sex trafficking aside (god, what a thing to say), there is this pervasive sense of conspiratorial cosplay. The sort that’s so prevalent and universal in, well, actually, most of America, but especially the rich, those in media, those in government, in tech.

Ryan from Garbage Day had a fantastic rundown of one aspect of this yeaterday, Epstein’s interactions with 4Chan Founder M00t, aka Chris Poole. Now, I met M00t a bunch in this period, we had several mutual friends. And this period, New York in the early teens, was the sunset period of my own ambition, my own misbegotten desire to make a difference, to put a dent in the universe, to change the world. It’s actually a smidge terrifying to think how few degrees separated me from all this horror, there but the grace of god go I, etc. etc. But that’s not the point here. The point is that M00t, as far as I could tell, was a decent guy. Not my politics — I was always far more skeptical of religiously unmoderated “free-speech” internet cesspools. I’m older, I grew up in a different darkness from Chris. I grew up with the internet of Usenet, not 2Chan: an internet that had a semblance of moderation, even if it was from 47 overweight bearded dudes in University basements.

Man I am digressing. Anyway, the facts seem to be that Epstein and M00t met, and the next day M00t started up /pol/, his third attempt at a news and politics board on 4Chan. This was after two horrifically unsuccessful attempts involving Nazis and Ron Paul supporters.

So they meet, and the very next day Chris decided to try again and launches the /pol/ board on 4Chan. This is everything that anyone has found in the files about Chris. And it could be, probably is actually, a coincidence from Chris’s point of view, that he starts the board back up the next day. But from Epstein’s POV, of course, it fits right in to his larger global cosplay fantasy. Whether he actually did convince Chris to do this or not, it happened, he thinks he did, his mastermind complex is rewarded.

Says Garbage Day Ryan:

Were Epstein and Bannon really building a crypto-funded far-right coalition of pro-Russian dictators across Europe? Or were they just LARPing as kingmakers with each other over email? And does the distinction even matter if other powerful figures seemed to believe in their project?
It is nearly impossible to not get pulled deeper down the rabbit hole while reading through Epstein’s emails.

Because, whether or not he did directly influence elections across the globe, he was trying to. And he had the means and the access to believe he could. But even if we stick to what we know from previous investigations and what can see in his newly-released emails, the reality, stated plainly, is, frankly, insane.

This is exactly what I mean when I start ranting about “noble pedestrian domesticity.” All these fuckers looking for “the biggest stage,” doing thing on the scale of billions, having ambition to “put a dent in the universe” or “make a difference.”

It’s all just fucking horrible cosplaying with fire. You cannot control it. It doesn’t matter if you are cosplaying or not, other people believe it, other people act as if it is real. If you lift of the blindfold, in a lot of ways all of these people are cosplaying, and all of them are just fucking with our lives. Everyone from Zuck and every tech fucker who superciliously said “you can’t understand internet problems at this scale” and who said they wanted to work at Facebook because of “the scale.” The Mossad, Trump, every billionaire, every wannabe kingmaker journalist like Michael Wolff. Every one of them trying to make a difference. In aggregate, even including the ones who want to make a good difference, in aggregate they are fucking the world.

Their ambition fucks the world. Their desire to matter is killing us all.

Can a person have purely good ambition? How do we make a vaccine? How do we stamp out malaria or measles if not for ambition? You do it with other people.

The right has black-pilled America to think that bureaucracy and committees are poison, that’s a bad thing to do an environmental review before you blast through a mountain.

But mark my words: ambition kills.

You think you can control it, you think you have some master plan, I cannot say this enough: It Never. Fucking. Works. Even when you think it worked, it did not work. The side effects are unpredictable and likely toxic. The bigger the stage, the bigger the potential for unintended consequences. And there are always unintended consequences.

This is not to say I don’t have any ambition. I’m in recovery. I will be in recovery for the rest of my life, I suspect. I’ve been faking-it-till-I-make-it negating my ambition for, oh, 10-plus years now. We all have ambition in us. Like we have lust, like we have cowardice. Tempering them brings no joy, I think. I think this is where I differ from the monks: they’re full of shit. Negating your ambition and lust is not particularly fun or rewarding. Tempering it to keep the healthy parts without the toxic ones is one of the great balancing acts of being a human.

ALSO I just gotta say. I insanely, pathetically, fucked-upedly looked through a Google Drive of every photo and video from the Epstein files. Lotta horrific sensored non-CSAM and a lot of blank cards that say shit like “NOT SCANNED: ALBUM OF 33 CSAM IMAGES” that completely fucks with you, but I am not here to talk about that just now, not to diminish the horror.

I am here to talk about how fucking disorganized and ugly all of Epstein’s properties were. The dude clearly delegated every noble pedestrian domestic pursuit to staff and they sucked at it. His ethernet patch cables sucked, his racks were a mess, his sub-basements and closets just catastrophes of disorganization. Everywhere that wasn’t the front-of-house, pedophilia circus show was as dreary as a decrepit church basement. Every property is a theater: glam in the front, shambles in the back.

If that dude stopped cosplaying a globalist and cleaned up his server rack and jetski garage he would have been a lot happier, a lotta people wouldn’t have gotten hurt, and the world would be a better place.

Wealth, man. Look, I don’t think a billion bucks instantly makes you a pedophile, I think, to paraphrase Caro, wealth reveals. BUT I also think wealth, without serious safeguards, open keys to doors that are dangerous as shit. It removes life’s guardrails, and there are people out there like Epstein who are ready and willing to dangle illegal, immoral, evil temptations in front of you over and over until you crack. And why shouldn’t you crack? You’re part of the global elite now, why shouldn’t you reward yourself with what is your due? This is the way the world is, isn’t it? I see it now, now that I have the access.

You think you want a couple houses, a pool, a private jet. This is where it leads, man. This is where it leads. You can avoid it, but you have to actively want to avoid it and actively know to avoid it and understand you are weak. Epstein has seen a hundred billionaires crack. You have not seen a hundred stay strong. His advantage is asymmetrical.

Speaking of which, PSA: Burning Man ticket registration closes tomorrow act now.

Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!

We’re listening this morning to a band called The Tubs, they are very jangly pop, they sound like the Black Watch, or Guided by Voices in their most straightforard pop, Bee Thousand era or something. The album is self-titled, I don’t remember who recommended it to me, it is my second listen. I like it.

We finished up the latest season of Star Trek Strange New Worlds last night. It was not as solid as previous seasons, they are getting a little too soap-opera-ish, DarkTrek has inflitrated, just a bit just a bit. But mainly the season-spanning big bad kinda sucked, and I don’t think Trek should even have season-spanning big bads, last season of DS9 aside. But anyway, it’s not terrible. There was one episode, “"The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” that might have been the finest episode of Nü Trek ever. But anyway the last episode features M83 music in it.

This morning, listening to the Tubs, well, can you imagine Jangly Pop ever showing up in the future in sci fi? “Computer play ‘Come Dancing’ by the Kinks.” lol. Jangly pop, power pop, mainly old bearded dudes listen to it, which is pretty weird, if you think about it.

Maybe Taylor should make a power pop album oh my god.

Years ago I went to LA for a wedding and the day before my friend Harry took me to the El Rey theater (where Anaïs Nin did some performances back in the day so I was very excited). We went to see one of the Jon Brion residencies, and it was great, made me a fan for life. BUT ALSO, he opened with a cover of “Waterloo Sunset,” and, I mean, I knew the song before, but Jon Brion made a fan out of me, knocked it out of the park and it has been one of my favorite songs ever since.

I have written about this before. Some day I might even listen to the rest of the album it’s on.

I keep having dreams of large boarding houses, college roommate houses, the sort of seven-bedroom flophouses I lived in all through the 90’s. It is conceivable I’ve been having these dreams my whole life. They often include a toilet sitting in the middle of a bedroom, which is a thing that existed in one of the houses I lived in in 1999 or so, so I guess that part of the dream (probably) didn’t start until then. I would say I have dreams of these places, three, four nights a week. I am usually moving in or out. I almost never see any other roommates. The houses are inevitably ramshackle, maybe a kicked keg in the corner of the living room. The architecture is variable, the sense of the house being abused and worked over from a combination of laziness and pleasure-seeking is not.

Last night it was combined with another aspect of dreams I have all the time, the euphoric feeling of jumping and not landing, of almost flying, as you jump, say, down the stairs but never land. I love that feeling. In my dreams when I am almost-flying, I’m… I often think I can actually do it in real life? Like jumping in an elevator?

But it never works in real life, does it?

Jane was great yesterday. Mostly. B+. She wasn’t allowed to watch Real Civil Engineer YouTube so we found some cozy lady game streamer and watched her play the Barbie Secret Agent and Barbie Explorer games from the 90’s and she was great, though she swore too much. But Jane snuggled and she made me forget all the mean things she had said earlier in the evening and she was great for Emma and brushed her teeth and everything.

Parenting. What a trip. That girl needs to go back to school.

Justa mix for you today. Old and new. I fucked up. I was gonna save that photo of Justa Store in Fairbanks for the next Justa mix, to remind you all where that dumb joke comes from, but I used that photo in yesterday’s edition. This mix probably doesn’t flow at all, I really just sprinkled the old songs throughout trying to mix em in with the new. But they are all good songs, I promise. I PROMISE.

Keep the faith, friends. Stand with Minnesota.

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