I feel like I should share this. I probably already have here in some way at some point, but I'm too lazy to try and search 2327 posts (641 unpublished, including 7 out of the last 10, just sayin'). 

Tomorrow's Harvest may be the most perfect album ever made, it gives you what you need every single listen. Everything Boards of Canada has done up until this point is worth your time (and money). I don't get to see or hear a lot of profound art these days without stumbling upon it. Most days when I'm awake and not working, I'm watching/reading/writing something, usually all at the same time, so I don't stumble across a lot these days.  I tend to go back to certain things, mediums, instances that live in my mind, when it needs to recalibrate. There are only a few albums that are almost other worldly for me. For my dad it was most things Pink Floyd, especially listening to Animals and repeatedly watching Live at Pompeii, but he also very much loved A Momentary Lapse of Reason when it came out, as did I since dad made tapes of the album, along with an Alan Parsons Project album for me and my sister.  I was 9...different time.  I can't help but wonder, knowing now that my dad did acid, smoked and grew weed before and throughout my childhood, how fried/high he probably sometimes was when listening to and watching that shit.  He passed a little bit of his love of Pink Floyd on to me and my sister simply because there were many years when some form of Pink Floyd was always on, sometimes woven in with Alan Parsons Project, Yes, Prince, Genesis or Peter Gabriel, but always in the rotation on Dad's nice stereo or on the tv, which was also hooked up to the stereo. The through line is, much like Momentary Lapse, both Cacophony and Tomorrow's Harvest were both created long after both Rudimentary Peni and Boards of Canada had won the respect of their peers and were already at a kind of legendary status amongst those who don't give a shit about mainstream music or "art critics".  In my opinion, both are BY FAR their best albums, and I genuinely love every single song those entities created before these albums.

I have a few bands that I can never tire of, but can only compare Rudimentary Peni to Boards of Canada in terms of how they affect my brain and mood. Both seemed to have already lived in this universe before anyone had ever even heard them. At transformative times they helped make sense in the absurdity that debating objective reality and the acceptance of it, or the futile rejection of it, is ever-present. All at once, all of the time. To deny that objectivity creates a shared reality is to reject humanity, and ultimately, yourself.  Acknowledging that is what allows us to make better choices as humans, and not put desensitizing faith in what modern man creates to make himself feel alive and relevant. [I am still searching for a better way to say this, I cannot capture it precisely] Having more productive and honest reckonings with ourselves and others lessens the need to seek out comfort through judgement of humans instead of their available choices. It's that easy, just made to seem out of reach for no good reason. Anyway, this kind of art is always in the background, even when it's not. If you have severe anxiety and decent taste in music, close your eyes sometime, put on comfortable, good headphones (not fucking ear buds, man) and listen to every Rudimentary Peni album from start to finish independently. Then do the same with Boards of Canada.  Probably not back to back. Two very different rides that somehow always end up in the same place. 

It is fucking cold.  The snow isn't stopping, I love this shit, but can't help but recall losing power and hearing transformers popping, falling trees and branches all around and not being able to do anything but sit tight until the sun comes up. At least I have a 20 year old and not a 4 year old now. I am glad we live in a city, we usually don't have to wait long for restoration because we're off the main roads.  We're also close to a hospital, which provides a little comfort.  It's a more of rural hospital, so not that much comfort.  

It does make me pause to wonder why the fuck am I looking at property in the middle of nowhere, away from cities and freeways in, maybe not so coincidentally, four states that are currently being occupied, to varying degrees, by literal white supremacist federal forces - the billionaire fascists' jackboots.  Immigrants, Palestinians, Venezuelans, the global south, (...) are being punished because wealthy pedophiles got too lazy and comfortable. They're paying for the people not lying down and going along with fascism, or really it's because those who present themselves as the left or decent human beings for nefarious purposes, very publicly won't do anything to stop it in its tracks. It's very much still, 'guys, trust us, it's going to swing back the other way because that's what happens in history. You're all very privileged and predictable. Just wait until the NEXT election.' That's what happens when you send privileged kids to privileged schools, they don't learn anything but billionaire/Epstein class talking points and graduate top of their class for it. Afterward, they're hired to work in law and consulting firms, then as judges or into lobbying groups, and/or become politicians for a brief time before going right back to the same lobbying and consulting firms. Eventually, they have even more privileged kids of their own, who were destined to repeat the same steps before they were born, and so it continues until someone, or a great many someones say this is enough.

This is all very 2001-2002.  They just realized they can make up any "touchstone" launching point whenever they want because enough Americans are sufficiently stupid, distracted or uninterested.  Buying entire media conglomerates and spending millions (billions?) for bots and trolls are no longer just good business practice, it's more of a necessity to maintain power now that the wealthy Pedo-Nazis have been forced into a premature coming out party.  Meanwhile, the democrats always seem to find themselves pacified or voluntarily choked by money, power, potential blackmail, and their love of outdated platitudes that don't fit in this century, if they ever did.  You know why none of this shit ever works anymore in spite of all of the money and power in the world, why fascism is always the inevitable outcome for "both parties"?  Because they know no one really wants what they're actually selling.  I don't mean what they say they're selling, that's all pro-consumer, pro-capitalist slave propaganda bullshit, but do you know why it's so important to make sure no one ever really wants to know about the actual outcomes of their direct/indirect actions/inaction and participation in capitalism?  We, just like the overwhelming majority of species on this planet, aren't inherently violent and sadistic.  Some believe the best defense is offense earnestly, it's just most people, whether they think they agree with that sentiment or not, don't want to inflict (non-consensual) pain or death onto another human. Most of us want to help people when they need it, especially if they are in pain.  We aren't supposed to know or think about the fact that the international economic/political system that rules over us all requires rewarding and amplifying psychopathy.  Efficient psychopathy is peak capitalism, it is, and has always been the end game.  As long as the West is educated to believe Democracy=Capitalism, or more accurately, Capitalism>Democracy, those who have coerced and bought all the power using stolen blood money will willfully, enthusiastically defend elevating the most dangerous wealthy criminals as the most important humans, because they've been programmed to believe it's kill or be killed.  The working class, students, the elderly, disabled folks are told their only power is to "just vote, stupid" or you're useless.  And don't you dare organize or you'll be labeled as an enemy of the state.

The people who do not value collective life at all are always the ones who can't stop trying to convince you they care about the concept of life more than anyone else, while cheering for the brutal deaths of thousands, if not millions of children, women, men, and everyone in between.  They just need tepid reassurance that the conditions are right. That is, if they haven't been told it's simply the will of their god(s), making atrocities not only ok, but necessary. The exclusive deciphering of its intention conveniently, can only be human appointed or come from very intentional interpretations of ancient texts drenched in other fallible human perspectives and biases. I believe a great many of the people who buy or accept this shit -- if they weren't so purposely detached from the rest of us -- don't actually want the responsibility of causing people death and or great pain.  As a species we abhor torture because we recognize the dangerousness and unpredictability of a mind that can carelessly inflict that kind of unbearable pain on another living being, not solely because we fear the physical or psychological pain ourselves.  When someone shoots up a grocery store, and they're the right color, the media wonders should someone have done more to inquire about and treat their mental health problems.  When entire industries thrive and make money off of exploiting people at their weakest, they hold daily brainstorm meetings to invent new ways to keep the population turning against one another using partisan marketing, or creates a new way to profit off of indiscriminately inflicting hardship and pain on large groups of people, we buy stocks in them.  The detachment from everything is everything.   

This is where COVID came in, it further numbed people to caring about being responsible for someone else's well-being, health or even death in a very visceral and real way, it was no longer in the abstract.  You knew if you went to the store sick without any kind of protection or consideration for who also might be at the store, since all of the uneducated charlatans who were feeding you bullshit to groom you into their cult were wrong, and all of the scientific evidence was right, you could potentially be guilty of negligent manslaughter.  Then you were made to think because you don't feel like being inconvenienced, you have to fight for the right to needlessly end lives, which continues today with ICE -- who incidentally are legally encouraged to wear those things that you were willing to kill others over in protest so they don't suffer consequences when they murder American citizens -- along with laws that say it's ok to kill protestors if they make you late to work.  If we hadn't already been dehumanizing and carving out certain sects of people as human rights exceptions for the greater good to begin with, it wouldn't have come so easily.  I'm looking at you blue-no-matter-whoers.

I don't know why that is in the middle of this post, but for now, I'm keeping it.

Rudimentary Peni - Cacophony - fastest 42 minutes and 39 seconds of your life.  At least it always is for me. I always feel like it's over so quickly, and yet it's their longest album. I think. I don't know, I'm too lazy to go in the other room and look at my albums/EPs on iTunes. Other than my child, this album is greatest thing I got from my ex.  I'm lucky that I don't associate it with him in any way while listening to it, would have been devastating to ruin it. First time I listened, it was comparable to taking acid for the first time in the way it woke up my brain. At least up until the peak, which transitioned into a bad trip pretty quickly because we smoked a joint that was unknowingly laced with PCP.  I'm still glad I experienced it - just maybe wish it was not at 14. Anyway, I had drawn a short, crude storyboard for turning this into an animated short film using Nick Blinko's art as a foundation within a year of hearing it.  I would still like to do it. I've been listening to this, and all Rudimentary Peni, ever since. 

[This is not background music, initially. It requires your attention. But it can be eventually.]  

Very different routes to get to there, but the same sentiments can be said for this album. They share almost nothing and yet so much. 

 Boards of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest

Also.  I am writing.  A LOT.  More than I have in years.  When I want to be inspired by and write about the current fascist wave in the West, I sit down to get it on the page. I get a good start, but I hit a wall when it intersects with some unknown personal trauma in my brain or some other bullshit I get stuck on.  Not a journalist, obviously.  I've been having all of these vivid fucking memories I had not really accessed for more than 30 years because at the time, I was encouraged to shove shit aside in order to be able move on, even though I had kind of already moved on at that point.  I was supposed to leave all of it and them behind, even if the person encouraging the burying had no intention of doing so himself. Stuffing trauma has a successful track record in history, I'm sure that was the correct way to handle it. I was 16 and had no desire or tools to try to unpack all of the shit that had happened over the previous several years.  So I just drank, a lot, and smoked weed.  For about 6 years.

Anyway, when I start to write I end up writing 15 fucking pages of shit that kind of comes rushing into my brain, but in colorful fragments and pieces, that are sometimes loud, sometimes silent.  I write them out, gaps start to fill, new perspectives are illuminated, sometimes helpful, sometimes wormholes I have no way to traverse with current information.  It's kind of bizarre how easily and clearly certain instances come back, some I really wish were gone, but especially how others that I really WANT to remember without any doubt are still very fuzzy. Photos kind of help, some of my old writing might, but I am not ready for all that comes with that yet.  I still don't even know what I have or what was tossed 15 years ago in an act of self preservation, or maybe just cruelty.  Or both. Still haven't been able to make myself go through that stuff.  Soon, though.

I have thought about trying to contact a couple of people who are the only ones who can answer some of the questions I have, but I don't know if it's a good idea for multiple reasons. I'm not looking for confrontation, in fact, the opposite, just some hindsight to fill in details and perspectives, but I don't know that anyone would even care or have a reason to want to help. Or can remember.  Might bring up some destructive shit for me. Or them.  Might not, though.  Could allow me to answer some questions, zip up and bury some old persistent shadows once and for all. Might make things worse. Anyway, it's mostly shit I can't post here.  I can't really put anywhere.  It is what it is, I gotta go with it and take it when it comes.  All I know is I'm working on many projects, I'm more productive now than I have been in a decade or more. I'm not going to question it out of fear that I lose it.

If I had "disposable" money I would 100% put this in my cart and seriously think about buying it for several days until it's too late, already sold or until I convince myself there is no way I should spend this much money on something that's not a necessity. 

1/25/26 4:32 PM