Freak of the week

Danny, in his human form, can take one hell of a punch.

Online he's a well known stuntman, doing absolutely batshit insane stunts that would 100% kill anyone else. He makes a point of flaunting the lack of a meta gene in his genetic tests he took for his audience, and is generally known to be juuuuuust slightly unhinged.

So he's in Metropolis, getting ready to do a stupidly dangerous stunt, when a mind-controlled Superman lands in front of him.

In front of a live stream.

So he can't go Ghost like he wants.

Instead, he turns to the camera and grins, all teeth and feral.

"Who wants to watch me eat a punch from Superman and live?"

#personal

It’s been a pretty busy couple of weeks in terms of work.  It is a little surreal to identify as working for yourself.  I ran into one of the people who hangs out on this block.  I’ve known them for years in passing.  There’s a gang of people who hang out in the alley underneath the subway tracks.  They asked what I had been doing.  I replied I work for myself now.  My office is officially my kitchen.  It look out at those very tracks. They film Chicago Fire and PD on my block often.  I don’t watch either of those shows but it can have a Hollywood backlot kind of feel.  Most of the street level communication I have resembles grittier parts of New York.  There’s no one dominant kind of person on the block.  People tend to keep to themselves but know vaguely what the other’s deal is.  There’s a sort of hidden network of communication maybe.  A block culture.  That can get a little hard to read the further you get away from your safe zone.  I’ve travelled all over the world at this point by myself.  I started travelling to Asia back in 2011 with the intention of networking.  Later in 2014, I revisited making music particularly with a Chicago form of street dance called footwork.  Footwork at the time was on the tip of everyone’s tongue.  But the root of it was buried under layers of white dominated dance music.  In 2015, I decided to say fuck it and try to organize a music tour for myself.  I tried with people in my own city but their personal agendas always eclipsed my basic plans.  There was a bass driven night in Chicago at the time called Coldtech.  It had a sister night in Melbourne.  I tried to organize a tour that passed through on my way from New Zealand.  I went to New Zealand to visit a friend.  I ended up going out on a few dates then ghosted the final night.  Somewhere in there I got detained in customs and accused of being a gang member.  I eventually ended up in Japan where I met Jake Innes.  Jake was an anime nerd and video game freak.  He knew the Coldtech people but was more like me.   Out on his own trying to use his passion to promote something he loved.  Culture.  Just like punk back in the day, you could count on that culture in a pinch to survive.  We travelled all over Japan for a few days.  Jake was my translator.  I was guided to amazing food.  Amazing spots to shop.  We talked about what moved us.  I had come up with this dumb ass phrase at the time.  Yolonet.  A sort of blockchain word of mouth.  Jake had a lot of trust with people.  He was friends with Lil B after all.  It didn’t really matter who he was friends with to me.  I am a very genuine and transparent person.  You have to be when you’ve wasted so much time on liabilities.  You never expect those to turn out to be past friends.  After reading all this depressing news about the entropy in the job search, I felt down.  You don’t expect your professional contacts to just disappear without a trace.  I barely have the connections on professional social networking to prove it.  Those people never reach out.  Never ask how my employment is going.  Don’t even realize I work for myself.  And yet the block knows.  Jake knows too.  In fact, the last two releases I put out just for fun were purchased by him.  The only way I am connecting to people I can depend on is through culture.  Something I can trust beyond politics, sooth saying, and employment fraud.  

There’s people outside of that Yolonet who have gone dark.  Entire segments of ex-friends who memorialize people who have long died while pretending I just vanished from the face of the earth.  It’s been surreal to watch.  Much more disorienting to live.  And yet, I am still here and surviving.  The people in my dash are much realer and emotionally satisfying to me than the people who forgot about me.  And the mystery of why is a little harder to detangle.  I was reading a book about Chinese director Jia Zhangke.  He was talking about how as a kid the only way to escape the place you grew up was to join the army or go overseas to school.  It’s the same if not worse here.  America talks a great game about freedom but it’s at the expense of the coffers of the military industrial complex of world war two.  Thank the baby boomers for that.  It benefits mostly the rich and generationally wealthy first.  Wealth connects and is rewarded by those connections in America with more wealth.  People who have Military family ties seem to always fall victim to the state’s own hidden expectations of connection, opportunity and ability.  Hunted by recruiters since there’s little actual income to go around.  The rich are hording it without paying taxes.  So the military often bullies people into the reserves when there’s no valid occupational work or space on corporate payrolls.  Fight their wars as a gateway into a career in cybersecurity I’m already overqualified for. My current state of wealth is due to a benefit known as a pension.  This is to say I actually worked for it.  And this is also to say I’m not exactly retired by choice.  But I worked with a lot of people I knew for over twenty years.  I literally got people jobs at that place.  My ex girlfriend for one.  That ended horribly.  The other people I helped out to try to connect ghosted me out of guilt presumably.  And so the only people I seem to be able to rely on are in the culture I have built or connected to myself.  This blog has been one of those lifelines in ways I am not at liberty to divulge at times.  There’s people I have better friendships through a click of a button than I’ve had ever in my life.  I used to try to explain these things to people.  And generally my exile from anyone in real life giving a fuck is a harsh lesson in the reality.  People don’t actually listen.  They don’t actually communicate in anything other than comparison and contrast and monetary valuation.  I was reading how a person just literally asked to buy the rights to one of Elon Musk’s tweets for 7777$.  How a sentence from a billionaire is worth more than my pain in this entire process or the lives of the worker’s in his factories even.  We just got six hundred dollars.  That should be enough for us.  But I wasn’t valuable enough to insure past October even though I was paying the premiums.  It would seem the real world’s network isn’t very reliable or at least focused on something so out of sync it seems comically evil.  What can I rely on?  It seems a lot.  I never have felt alone in the last year or so.  Ever since Valentine’s day really.  Sometimes you can show you care by not even saying a word.  Words are worthless when you can buy them for seven grand I guess.  It’s the action of caring and attention that counts.  If you built a foundation on people who didn’t care, your path ahead will be volatile at best.  If you limit someone based on your fear of them outshining you, the results will be constantly mediocre.  And many times, later in life you find you’ve outgrown these limitations people envision you in.  And through that worthless feeling you seek out something true.  You take the once in a lifetime risk to set up your own network.  To leave the baggage and the past behind and see it for what it really is.  Your self worth is no longer shackled by people’s envy, jealousy and active sabotage.  You are a defective crash test dummy that served it’s purpose for capitalism.  Or you can leave the car wreck behind and opt out of the American social experiment entirely.  It’s a free country after all.

The baby boomers did have an answer to all of this.  Shut up and take their money because they know what’s best.  My dad would always say later on in life I’d understand Republicans.  Maybe I’d even want to become one.  Like many Republicans from the suburbs, he’d never be caught dead in the rougher areas of the city much less outside of the country.  I’ve never seen any politicians talking to people on the streets in passing.  I’ve never seen anyone answering, speaking for, or actively working on this privilege that acts like a monkey on my back.  I’m an only child.  When my parents die, my bloodline is some bullshit.  I’ll most certainly have to deal with some estate affairs on either side.  But when I die, who knows where my legacy will go.  Will I get married?  Will I have children?  Will I be able to fulfill my role in the helping America achieve it’s desired GDP?  I can’t even count on my government during a Pandemic let alone to hold people accountable for crimes.  Will I die alone, invisible, broke but talked about on the Internet.  Will people watch my life until the very end to see the tragedy unmatched to their own?  Are people just drunk on making me some sort of talking point?  The gossip will never end.  The sad truth of the last five to ten years for me is simple.  There is an opposite to block chain.  A network of people who only cover for themselves and their lies.  The great lie as they spoke of in Germany did something horribly foul.  A lie when it gets out of control.  A lie when it eclipses the truth.  When every word out of your mouth is gaslighted to protect an entire ecosystem that feeds itself and protects the criminal.  When your very presence needs to be edited and erased to continue the engine running.  A great lie can tear a hole in the very fabric of reality and the truth of a narrative.  And it can suck somebody so far out into space that they have to terraform a whole new network of support.  These days the writing is on the wall.  We trust everything and doubt further.  I have only had the luxury of looking to myself for answers.  I have other inspiration.  The best inspiration if you ask me.  But I keep that to myself for fear of breaches in trust.  But it’s no lie what I believe in.  A freedom that allows love to bloom.  A freedom that values people for what they do in deeds not speculation.  A freedom that is accountable in broad daylight and answers for what it represents.  Opportunities that exist outside of war economies and mark to market accounting.  Making art that connects people without controlling the dialog.  Being part of a culture and democratically so without disrespecting the read receipts.  I’ve been real for longer than most people have been breathing.  Not long enough to claw my way out of the designs these dinosaurs outspend me on.  But the one thing I know going forward is that you cannot get anymore hardcore of a foundation other than being true to yourself.  And I’m proud to surround myself with people who are true to me.  Wherever the fuck you may be.  You all live deeply inside my heart.  And that’s something there’s no price on to betray.  So let’s stop speculating and let’s live in the moment.  I built this Yolonet for us.  And instead of hello world.  Let the first words be simple.  I love you.  World peace forever.  Drink some water.  It’s your human right.  <3 Tim