jackomaha

[jackomaha]

To be a semi-retired high or middle school teacher in the suburban midwest. Knowing that there will never be any surprises coming home from work. To be able to turn on the TV and balk at what an aberration mainstream pro wrestling has become before turning it off and settling for the newspaper next to a home cooked meal every night. Mentally that’s where I’d like to be. The willpower to just scroll through boobs, 3rd world beheadings, plane crashes, body cam footage, hockey highlights, bears catching fish, high school classmates getting married, and candy crush advertisements and think what a crazy world we live in.

Every day this teacher leaves at noon not thinking about how the third chair girl can’t play the oboe even passably nor a biting impulse to redownload X for the umpteenth time that I swear isn’t fomo there’s just a lot going on in the middle east right now and the feds gotta be plotting something with these protests. Armed with a can of diet coke and the three bic pens in his shirt pocket, he deleted facebook years ago and hasn’t thought about it since. Sometimes he’ll notice how his white students talk with the same kind of vernacular as his black students without all the n words and not quite know what to make of it. A few weeks ago he received exceptional service at an auto-body repair shop from one of his former students and he still talked that way, nearly 10 years removed from middle school. Curious observations like that are brought up from time to time as a kind of cold open to class, always spoken in the same unvexed, benign unfilteredness and it’s always met with the same disillusioned expressions not sure how to respond to no clear point. Mr. ______ sounds apathetic but not insincere, almost a foreign language to these kids. From cokes that have names printed on them that never match the name of the person who’s drinking it or how before smartphones were a thing, students used to really doodle in class.

All in all his classes are more well-behaved than the average public middle school sampling, even if middle school orchestra is at its best, still creaky and unserious to the tuesday afternoon passerby at crossroads mall.

[jackomaha]

At the conclusion of my first semester I now know that if I want to make friends & get the "college experience" my older brother lawn chair preached about, I must sacrifice my self-respect as an individual. That is why fraternities and sororities drink so much. To forget.

Individualism - conformity = acceptance

[jackomaha]

If the tower of babylon was God's punishment to man for trying to reach the heavens, postmodern architecture must be the punishment for ruining the internet. That's my running theory. I don't even know the actual name for the soulless structures that just seem to appear overnight in nameable U.S. cities - or gradually then all at once. Kind of like a monolith. Is postmodern just a term pseudo-intellectuals started saying to not scare normies with the word dystopian? But still sound smart. No but not cool like a monolith that we dance around like monkeys waiting for a UFO to take us abroad to a higher level of consciousness and returns us reborn, ready to take the next evolutionary step. I wish it could be like that instead of corporate post-sorority girls on their way to pilates class before they do insurance marketing at the ministry of truth. I watch them from the sewer and think if a monolith shows up no one would pause their fucking airpods.

[jackomaha]

What is a normie?

Is the worst nostalgia the nostalgia you have for a time you weren't even alive to remember? I don't think I'm alone in my generation for feeling envious of people who got to experience the last decade of individualism right before me, in the nineties.

I go back and forth on it. Reading Chuck Klosterman on the nineties, how we we could enjoy technology without being enslaved to it, american consumerism seemed so harmlessly fun like early youtube before ads, it's hard not to see the time as adam & eve in the garden of eden before eve met the serpent, through a contemporary lens. Then I get cynical about it, how I'd still find things and people to hate like Bill Hicks did. Or how deceiving age can be, that the younger years are remembered better than the older, present years. I think we just romanticize the past to repress the knowing that we'll always have something good we took for granted only in retrospect.

In retrospect that has to be the individualism. And the most pointed approach to compare 90s individualism to today is to start by defining what a normie is. In 2024, a normie is someone who scrolls through executions in third world countries when work is slow. Someone who knows podcasters better than their own family members. Someone who is afraid to take the airpods out. It is someone who has seen more sex than the amount of sex their grandparents ever had. People or animals. By the age of 16. Again I don't want to romanticize a time I wasn't around for or be too cynical of the present but goddammit I know people had an imagination beyond fucking spongebob memes and office references. It's not just that a 90s normie is less depressed than today's normies, better question what is an individual today? If you are an individual today, you do not have a niche hobby like coin collecting or you play the didgeridoo. If you are an individual today you must have an in depth knowledge of government sponsored satanic pedophile cults, transhumanism, the singularity, CIA psy-ops & coups, the federal reserve, proxy wars, mRNA vaccines, mind control, special prosecutors, ballistics, and if just the awareness alone doesn't make you jaded enough, the ostracization by friends, family, would-be-friends, and would-be-family will leave you standing on a sidewalk on a cinematic fall day, kids launching off swings into raked piles of leaves, mothers pushing strollers wondering if maybe it's YOU.

Yes the normies in the 90s were a little too naïve but they were unique at heart. We weren't supposed to stay that way forever, but this hip kind of narcisstic nihilism should not be the successor to that naïve but aspiring individualism in the nineties. The human's evolution of consciousness starts out as gullible, recklessly curious as a child, then undergoes a melancholic metamorphosis throughout adolescene before a level-headed, purpose-driven adult can emerge. I think the last pre-internet era, the 60s through the 90s was the childhood of the current collective conscious. Enjoying and benefiting from acid, rock n roll, consumerism with some class and imagination - a very apelike enlightenment before the childlike wonder wears off, naturally, but saturated through conformity pressures stifiling pure creativity, conditioning to the 9-5 starts in kindergarten. Then the information-age up until covid was the edgy adolescene. Having the what-you-were-taught innocence questioned in a forum then unrecognizably changed emerging from a rabbit hole. 9/11, pearl harbor, JFK, like finding out santa claus isn't real, drawing swastikas over the teacher's marks on your space race report.

People should have graduated by the end of covid. This is still the information age, but it's now post-covid and pre-singularity. Time to grow up and stop being so naïve or sardonic.

[jackomaha]

Release Ross Ulbricht

Ever since I finished reading Nick Bilton's book on Ross Ulbricht's amazon for illegal drugs (the silk road) I've had a gnawing discontent with the conclusion of the case. The book is called "American Kingpin" and the story follows a similar prose to the ambitious entrepreneurial adventures of Bezos, Zuckerberg, & Jobs - thorough journalism and competent writing is all the display the story needs, as a true story that reads like fiction tends to seamlessly entrance a reader.

The best sell I can give it is it's like the most realistic version of breaking bad with Ross Ulbricht being the lovechild of Walter White and Mark Zuckerberg. Or Ed Snowden and Ted Kaczynski. Or Steve Jobs with an ideology. I mean, never mind, it's not like Ross is reading this cooking in his prison cell - it's just a shame that unbridled genius gets the maximum punishment when it doesn't comply with the above the law forces of evil that run this country. I can't stress how much of a boot in the face Zuckerberg has become to Ulbricht. Say what you will of the dangers of having lethal substances purchasable like alexas on amazon - I'm not putting down anyone's moral qualms about the Silk Road; there's no point when Ross has been receiving punishment while Zuckerberg exploits his users privacy for unlimited financial gain and kowtows to the intelligence agencies at further expense to his users and the country at large. That's what I'm fucking trying to get at. It's not even anger directed at Zuckerberg, hemming and hawing over moral dilemmas of Zuck and Ulbricht with smoking pipe bifocal-turtleneck intellectualism is such a futile approach overlooking the real tragedy: they're two sides of the same coin, punishing or corrupting the brilliance of individuals from the above the law forces of evil that run this country and destroy this world. We discovered the genius of the unabomber then let them declare him insane and put him in a cage for the last 25 years of his life? In a perfectly absurd world Kaczynski would've been given the chancellor position at his alma mater. Could you imagine how lush of a world we'd be living in if Harvard grads had been coming into the workforce with a healthy dose of the unabomber's train of thought? Technology designed to blossom our human qualities rather than erode or corrupt them? An internet that waters our individual thinking rather than enslave us to entertainment and drown out our individual identity? Good or evil, genius should not be wasted because ALL genius can be used to benefit the species. It's just a matter of limiting each one's power & control. Shooting stars don't die in space, they disintegrate into our atmosphere and sprinkle upon a handful of people at birth. It's up to the rest of us to prevent their potential going to waste.

Fuck if Ross Ulbricht ever gets released he should be donned the head of the fed. Walter White got the fate he deserved so why can't Ross? Right now Ulbricht should be replacing the fed with blockchain tech and rallying a comeback for a cash-in-hand society. I've never been a real drug user or homeless and I don't mean to romanticize, but I just have this nasty gut feeling that a cashless society takes away the good huck finn adventure in both.

The end of breaking bad is the final emphasis on a work of great fiction. Great fiction doesn't just describe reality, it describes how reality is supposed to be without creating anything like playing god. Where unfettered evil stole the magical order of a chaotic universe, great fiction writers remind us of its original place.

[jackomaha]

An exercise in everyday equality

At 8am, every seat on the metro bus is full. You are sitting alone, on the throne the music in your headphones has granted you. The throne presents a birdseye view of all the bus's inhabitants, sharing time & space in their hunched 3-D forms. As if they're not breathing beside you, thinking thoughts and feeling as empty as you are.

Suddenly the bus screeches like nails on chalkboard interrupting the daydream.

In enters a trans person and a pregnant woman.

Every seat remains occupied.

What do you do?

"am i black?"

No you're you.

"You look around and see if anyone else has recognized the precarious predicament that has metabolized."

"You give up your seat and get on your hands and knees to make a bench so the trans person and the pregnant woman can choose between your back and your old bus seat."

"You tell the bus driver to keep the bus stopped a little longer so everyone can get out to disperse and form a line based on ranked victimhood status so everyone can file back on the bus to take up seats in that order."

Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

You give up your seat to the pregnant woman and stand in solidarity with the trans person. Then you allow a white guy wearing a face mask to punch you in the face. The whole bus stands up to clap in respectful overtones for your assailant as you lie motionless.

[jackomaha]

Franklin Scandal retrospective

35+~ years ago I believe Warren Buffett approached Lawrence E. King with an offer: you take the fall for embezzling money out of the franklin credit union and using it for child sex trafficking/political blackmail and I will spend the rest of my life in Omaha. King asked for one condition: Only sentencing for money embezzling, no hard time for child sex trafficking/political blackmail and probably killing a handful of innocent people. Buffett accepted, getting his own monopoly game and pushing the dominoes that would lead to Epstein & Diddy. I'm just kidding. Like most people who have gone down the darkest rabbit holes the information age has to offer I've resorted to viewing the most blood curling departures of human nature like the franklin scandal through rotating lenses of comedic absurdity and placid realism. Sure sometimes it's hard not to drive past an abandoned building in Omaha and get inspired imagining the words "FUCK LARRY KING END HUMAN TRAFFICKING" spray-painted all over it for the whole interstate to see, but that's just not how things get done.

Most of the few people who live in Omaha and know about the horrors of the franklin scandal understand that any contempt, outrage, frustration with the complete absence of judicial justice that concluded the scandal will leave you feeling like you're living in the Truman Show or God forbid Taxi Driver. Realism - which can be a gateway to cynicism - is the way to accept the tragedy. Decades have passed, books have been written, Epstein got off'd and Diddy's days are numbered. Yes King is still free and may be up to his old ways and there's not a lot to do about that except having some faith in good people and ultimate justice. Not to say that the Nick Bryants, Terrence Crawfords, and Alisha Owens(s) can end evil, but there is probably some hope that leads somewhere good for the species when strangers improve other strangers' faith in humanity.

And that's enough grandiose romanticism for my sanity. I've been thinking about Franklin again after discovering Lawrence King's alleged return to Omaha back in July (below). I don't think it's him. If it is him, I don't care that he was spotted, that man can put on a disguise. A scorpion t-shirt, jean shorts, holding a dog leash - I can't tell if he's trying to put on a disguise from his normal ritzy business attire or his sexuality. Whatever the true story on that pic is, I always thought Larry King would come back to Omaha like Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt. But instead of having a post-retirement late-life crisis, he'd come back to a town that forgot about him. Feeling sad/weird about no mob with burning pitchforks only then would he have a late-life crisis, revisiting every satanic ritual spot in the woods, the remains of the franklin credit union, the roads of Boys Town, the highest floor in the Woodmen, hummel park, a central high choir performance - no one knows who he is or who he was. Maybe Warren Buffett comes around to offer him a drink at the Blackstone Hotel and King gets a little closure. I don't know, someone wrote the Larry King character in Breaking Bad as Gus Fring, someone should write this script too.

[jackomaha]

Hope in dread

The one thing about aging and maturing that no one talks about is the seemingly uninspiring will we must have to overcome basic every day aggravations. Like no matter if you're 5 years old, 20, 60, or literally 100, you'll still have to confront the dread of having to, I don't know, do something you don't want to do. Putting on socks, waking up early, waiting in line - for me this sort of entry-level existentialism comes to me on the toilet, after I finish my business and feel myself becoming painfully aware of the unconscious dread I've always had about wiping my ass. Even with toilet paper as a barrier the actual knowing of the act itself is something that won't evade me, that disconcerting warmness and the required thoroughness (notwithstanding the complete absence of alert to a breach). Having to analyze the results of each wipe to ensure completion. Repulsed by the sight and smell of the wipe yet the shiny sterility of the tile and general fine-combed ambience of the public restrooms (the ones I participate in at least) serve as a doming awareness to the fact that I am in public and can in no way appropriately gag at the sight and smell of my own shit.

Yet nothing humbles me more.

Through the years, the seniority we claim by climbing the ladders of adulthood often penetrates the sensibilities we took for granted in our youths. Read that sentence again. Read it. Visualize a memory of adolescent vulnerability you experienced. A confused sexual awakening, some active crisis of security being stripped exposing a most private insecurity. Find those scars. Let them rape you again. With all their cutting viscerality, breaking the fourth wall that seperates concsious day-to-day banalities and the repressed horrors of the unconscious circling like sharks around your cage. Understand that the cage has no bars, the only barrier are the sharks that orbit you and yes they will bite if challenged but you can escape stronger. Granted you never could have stopped yourself from taking those moments for granted at the time. You never could have foreseen that you'd grow to be mature and be unalluded to all the downsides that maturity has; rigidity (think of the smell of your father's white-collar closet), the constant routine that bigger responsibilities demand, and shortening for the sake of staying on topic - the quiet self-choking self-assuring comfort of knowing thyself. The kind that prevents you from putting yourself in uncomfortable situations because you're just glad to be __ years old and know what you do and don't like. So it is those every day moments we dread that keeps us naked. That bind us to our different, random, confusing existences. Quite possibly our best hope.

[jackomaha]

I'm paraphrasing - "every generation faces different dilemmas that force them to grow up" - a david foster wallace quote I recently read on a goodreads review of "the end of the tour" book that was made into a movie. Point is, he was making the point that his generation (gen x) needed to put down the simple, easily accessible pleasures to grow up because the pleasures are just going to get cheaper and more convenient with time yadayadayda. It never happened, at least for the majority of gen Xers who became the parents to gen Z, I just don't feel like they gave us any purposeful lessons on the brainrot perils of quick and constant mindless consumption. It was just a sort here's-the-world-at-your-fingertips sink or swim. They can't be blamed, I don't blame my mom for getting into an argument over the phone with the cox lady about family guy while I was upstairs discovering beastiality on the same device I used to tell her where she could pick me up after school, by the time gen X had realized the lessons the technology had already evolved exponentially. Inadvertently their inadvertent sink or swim approach to smartphones created a new American coming of age: unprecedented levels of adolescent depression and anxiety. The most extreme example is the kid who sent their crush a picture of their genitals which subsequently got leaked to just about everyone in school. If you remember this happening to someone (assuming everyone this happened to has killed themselves) the memory is kind of like a puberty of the mind. From then on you knew where the line was. You still got your own visceral scars, seeing that you weren't invited, people bullying by being cryptic in their captions, you learned that the internet is real life. And that maturity prepared you for the internet being the way of life as an adult. Growing up and realizing that the real world is more of an escape than the internet. So yeah.