Time for a break from writing, maybe a permanent one
Institutional human decadence became more revolting than entertaining a long time ago. And unlike some, I don't actually have to pay attention to any of it
It’s been four days since I last posted anything here. It will be at least another seven before I write anything new.
Nothing unusual, or unusually terrible, has happened this week to compel this decision. My daytime schedule has changed lately in a way that has drawn my perspective away from everything that stings my eyes and brain, reminding me I always maintain the option of ignoring grisly themes and developments altogether. And I have a project I should have wrapped up a long time ago that I need to finish before the end of the month, so from a practical standpoint, this would ne a good time to recuse myself from barking about the various aspects of society that have been irreversibly degraded by the institutionalization of insane ideas from unwell and malign actors.
I’ve gone close to a week before without publishing anything under similar circumstances without the need to remark on these “dry spells.” What’s different now is that I’ve just naturally reached a point of experiencing a very low rewards-to-drawbacks ratio. That day was going to come even if this place attracted 100,000 subscribers (actually, a massive readership would have led to me more rapidly arriving at the same psychic crossroads).
Rather than home in on the ineluctably bellicose, graphically blinkered, and persistently dishonest aspects of the human animal, and fret over the persistent scramble among its “leaders” to eliminate the kind of livable free societies most people prefer to inhabit, I’m spending my free time playing music and reading books about long-dead people. Right now I’m working my way through Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. I don’t watch cable news at all, so if I disconnect myself from a small handful of streaming platforms and other websites, I can be an oblivious as an infant to all the ostensibly avoidable death and decay that seems to be the primary working objective of the people who have the boom-boom toys and enact laws the rest of us are supposed to follow to grease the wheels for this march toward nonhuman “living.”
If the schadenfreude of observing the sheer hubris at work in this ferocious self-inflicted downfall—the grim, fundamental hilarity in watching people accept lunatic frameworks around gender, speech norms, public health, foreign and financial policy, and everything else—could prevailed indefinitely in my mind over the sadness and sheer morbidity in play in this dilapidation, I could keep going without lapsing daily into despair and contempt. But that's not the case.
And I’m not going to change a single thing with any of my ranting. not that this was ever the intent. The entire running industry is powered on lies, to the point where not a single person I have contacted in the past three years to express an obvious mistake or ethical transgression has responded. Not one of these grifters, liars, or hypocrites has even bothered with a lame response, let a lone a substantive defense. It’s just block, delete, ignore, and hunker down in the security of knowing that people willing to openly and repeatedly question broken ideas are in the distinct minority, at least when it comes to the pseudo-runners, males winning championships, and lying, racist Afrogluttons whose presence dominate running-related chatter on social media. I have known a few of these people for a long time, and I wish I had never met or worked with any of them.
The fact that we runners are smallish people doesn’t require this to be packaged with small brains and minimal amounts of courage and integrity, but the unavoidable truth is that distance running has been infested with losers and whiners who want everything around them dragged into the slow, obese, lazy, sub-mediocre muck in which they exist athletically, intellectually, and emotionally. The average person identifying as a runner—legitimately or otherwise—is basically a lazy, blathering idiot and a pussy who doesn’t accept that a four-hour marathon is not an athletic achievement, even if it requires everything in someone’s individual arsenal to achieve. When humans exist who can cover the distance twice in half the time you can, then you suck at running and shouldn’t expect total strangers to find anything inspiring in your inefficient, knock-kneed, wobbling progress. Even age-group categories are a joke, with “major” titles all being claimed by obvious dopers.
Running, whether the fatties and shufflers accept this or not, is still considered a sport. A dirty one that attracts too many well-off, preening imbeciles, but a sport all the same. Weekend golfers aren’t crying about a lack of recognition for shooting 130 for nine holes, and I know few bowlers who whine about a lack of recognition for maxing out at the same score for ten frames. All of the body-neurotics running predictably draws are no longer content to finish races. They all need to be celebrated for being somehow special despite having chosen an activity that reliably stratified people into “faster” and “slower.” And these days, they can even defiantly organize clubs specifically around excluding people who are competent at running, as if being shaped like an eggplant and not training for races is an alternative form of fitness. It’s not that these people are out there, it’s their demand for attention and rule changes that serve as reminders that most adult humans in Western countries are forever children in some ways.
When all of this is being propped up by former and current pros, it’s no longer a sport. It’s a bunch of people scampering or lumbering around on foot making chaotic, self-interested, often self-contradictory noises. And because maintaining a strong social-media presence—something in my mind only a broken, brain-dead, or quietly unwilling person would do anyway—means adhering to every popular narrative, these people still believe or pretend to believe the advice from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, support the destruction in Ukraine, and otherwise present themselves as profoundly retarded cheerleaders for ignorance, rot, and filth.
Substack offers the option of refunding money to paying subscribers with one click. If you are a subscriber and sometime in the next week get a payout from Stripe, Inc., that will be the sign that I’m done here and have moved on to the phase of ignoring the entire display rather than immerse myself in something I barely recognize. I won’t delete the site outright, although this is tempting, as this is my only remaining dynamic online footprint. And that will probably be the last a lot of you ever hear from me no matter how long I choose to linger. I was better off before the Internet and cell phones and don’t really need either of these things to sustain myself for as long as I dubiously choose to exist.
If I do return to writing, anything I write about running will be oriented toward improving personal performance. I’m never going to run any races again, largely because I don’t like anyone watching me run and never have, but also because I try to avoid gatherings of the kinds of humans who attend these events. I would be better off in smoke-filled dive bars, at least if I wanted to leave feeling healthier and more spiritually edified than when I arrived. But I haven’t ruled out doing solo or assisted time-trials, and I remain interested in the concept of improving fitness and running fast. I have a lot of old one-published material I could review and spruce up in a possibly helpful way.
Whatever happens, this is not a flounce, or the deliberative result of not getting what I want out of my “work” here. I was always going to reach a point where optionally tuning in to others’ derangements and ugliness was, on balance, not good for me. I can keep firing flaming arrows at illiterate shrews and scammers and biology-deniers, but it’s better to simply accept that this is how most people are. They are not very bright at all, and worse, they are basically cut-outs, breeders who duly breed NPC kids and become locked into cooperating with dismal schemes and thus go with whatever flow they perceive is acceptable and sublimate any aspects of this that trouble them, and just lie, lie, and lie some more.
On the other hand, I have met an array of cool and interesting people in recent years, and it would be accurate to say that some of my closest friends and allies are people I didn’t know were alive before 2020. Had this not been the case, I would have withdrawn into silence long ago.
At a minimum, well, Happy Halloween. For those of who enjoy rooting for war and gluing yourselves to screens so you can be programmed into hate someone even more, I hope that journey continues to be fulfilling. Piss on the entire Middle East and its holy wars and the multiple contrived deities this savagery is organized around, and the insistence of the U.S. and its senile, externally owned, Zionist-rich government in playing a leading and instigating role in all of it, although Israel has clearly revealed itself to be led by an even more disposable class of psychopath. Maybe if every mosque in synagogue in the United States were leveled and the constructions of new ones outlawed, all of these maniacs would leave the only country I get to live in and carry on extermination-oriented processes meant for primitives in the faraway desert where all of this belongs.
And in case this really is it, thanks for the support. As secure as I am in the concepts I choose to write about, without regular reinforcement, I would have given up many moons ago. Maybe I should have; I obviously don’t like people very much, although it’s more accurate to say I dislike the inevitabilities of human nature (a distinction with little real difference). But I don’t regret a word of it, even if it’s just turned me into a different kind of asshole from the retards, the injection-fanatics, and the hypocrites. I wasn’t “put here” for any reason, but I will not choose a role that sees me submitting to the will of dung-encrusted, foul-breathed, poison-ejaculating monkeys even if I go dark about the specific things I’m resisting.
History suggests I won’t be able to stay quiet, but at this very moment, I hope I’m wrong. Few people have the option of merely pretending most of you and your opinions don’t even exist. I do, and even if I have no expectation of being alive in five years and no sadness around this already well-vetted notion, I don’t have to spend my remaining time soaked in everyone else’s fecklessness, stupidities, and forced miseries.