What masks mean.

Masks have meaning, they are not — as the press insist daily — merely a medical or practical measure. Like illness, masks are not only a scientific phenomenon, they are a metaphor. Everything is a metaphor actually, and you ignore this at your peril. Today everyone competes for who has the most ‘facts’ or is the most ‘scientific’ or who has the most truth; this is invariably toxic because we are creatures of lies, stories and fiction, and we are merely setting our lies against each other. It’s important  to understand what we are talking about here. I certainly believe masks can help to keep illness under control. But to the devoted mask-wearer, the mask is something else. It is a kind of blessing upon them, it is the hand of God touching their forehead and telling them they are good. We are told again and again that masks are not about protecting ourselves, they are about protecting others. In this way masks bestow upon the wearer a kind of mystical seal of approval; a mask-wearer is one who cares about others and is inarguably unselfish, one who puts their own feelings last, as they themselves don’t care about their personal appearance, or inconvenience (Where’s my mask? Oh it’s caught in my glasses…) in the face of altruism. It’s all about altruism really, and ultimately about living in a world where we finally come to realize (good luck with this!) that our own happiness is less important to us than the happiness of other people. Masks say; there will come a day -- no — it is finally here  — when I give up my life for you, when I not only do unto others, but will abandon my own comfort and pleasure to make you happy. As you might well imagine, for the anti-masker, the mask means something else; it’s about freedom, or the lack of it. To an anti-masker, the mask-wearer is a hypocrite, a person who may wear a mask but probably beats his wife or kills helpless animals for food; the mask bestows nothing and it is at the very least a lock a chain, a pair of handcuffs — no worse than that — a stranglehold on one’s life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You are of course permitted to ignore what I am saying here (and you will) as it’s much more fun to go around patting ourselves on the backs for each of our competing ‘truths’ — as my truth is right and yours is wrong. Unfortunately, ignoring the narrative meaning -- the mythical meaning -- of masks will make us all hate each other more, because unlike in the old days (pre human consciousness) when we all believed in the same God, and in effect, were connected to the same digital channel (i.e. mystical intuitive truth) we are now all on different channels and our Gods and truths are vastly different depending on whether you use Google or DuckDuckGo. This explains why we presently celebrate the deaths of the anti-vaxxers who die of COVID-19. Wow. This is a beaut. I simply can’t believe this is happening, or that people are actually defending it. Yes, the maskers say, it’s okay to be happy when anti-vaxxers die of COVID, and it’s okay to celebrate their deaths online and make fun of them. Why? Well obviously because they are evil and deserve to die, many times over, for spreading the virus. This reminds me of my dear friend Rob Johnston who was an AIDS ‘denier’ I.e. he dared to suggest that AIDS was not precisely not what Antony Fauci said it was, that perhaps there could be alternative interpretations of the illness, related to homoeopathy and drug use — in other words various factors other than Fauci’s much vaunted virus that transmits HIV. At any rate, when Rob died, many in the gay media celebrated his death. I would say there is no justification for celebrating the death of another person, no matter how evil they are; they deserve what we all deserve -- respect, because they, too, are human. We are all human (just a reminder). I was having a drink the other day with a woman who was my friend, and when I mentioned I have another friend who is an anti-vaxxer —her eyes glazed over with hate. I could tell she was suppressing the urge to ask me to leave. How did we get like this? From forgetting how much we all adore our own personal fictions. Because, after all, it is not reason that separates humans from animals, it is our ability to lie.

We love Digitalcapitalism,

 there’s no two ways about it. It is the way of the future; it’s all about convenience and pornography. Basically we all love pornography and we all love convenience and everything is to be sacrificed on the alter of that. Digitalcapitalism -- i.e. Amazon, Google, Apple, Meta, Instagram and Tiktok etc. -- all know this.  If you once imagined that the digital world was a place to learn, expand your horizons, or open your mind to new ideas well forget it. Now that capitalism has a hold of the digital world, your computer has become immoral — or perhaps amoral is a better word. The worldwide web is now fundamentally corrupt. Don’t get me wrong I’ve got nothing against capitalism, except that we like to think of it as inherently ‘good.’ Capitalism is not good, or noble -- it is simply greedy and pragmatic. As long as we remember this we will do just fine. When we imagine capitalism is good for us or has noble intentions we are sauntering down a dark road. Digital ads these days suggest that living salespersons in stores are trying to corrupt you; you are safer online. (This is similar to the myth that education is  better online; a toxic idea -- we know that now after trapping the kids in online education during COVID.) It started with the CARVANA ads. CARVANA ads make fun of car salesmen suggesting they are sleazy, pressuring liars. This is supposedly unlike online shopping for cars—where you will be treated honestly and not pressured. (Right!) Now you will find this notion everywhere; apparently going out to a store to buy something is automatically a nightmare, immediately a phalanx bevy of greasy manipulative sales people will descend on you and perhaps physically attack you in order to force you to buy. But online, of course -- you can make independent decisions without pressure. (So true, eh?) Digitalcapitalism is working towards the day when you don’t even have to point your phone at a cash register; there will be chips in our brains and if we think about a product or service long enough we will have bought it. It will all be magical, fantastical, and oh so convenient and filthy as hell. Because don’t forget pornography—  the motivating force behind Digitalcapitalism. You think I exaggerate. Well  my boyfriend gave me TIkTok as a gift last Christmas -- just to keep me aware (I’m very old you see, and these things are liable to pass me by). I watched it for 45 minutes— that was more than enough. I soon realized that I could have watched it all day. And then I realized that the more I watched it — the more shirtless cute boys kept appearing, over and over. I talked to a young straight guy about TikTok and he said: ‘I hate it, but I’m on it all the time’— this is akin to the way a heroin addict might talk about his needle. TikTok is Brave New World’s ‘Soma,’ we feel alive and fascinated even though we are actually being hypnotized by the flashing lights and appealing skin reveal, until we will eventually become immune to real human emotion and real life in general. Anyway the young straight guy I talked to said that he had noticed that a lot of cute girls were showing up on his TikToks, I said ‘well that’s pornography.’ Digitalcapitalism can read your mind, and unless you’re half-dead — and even some half-dead people still seem capable of getting vaguely horny — you want to see flesh, because we all respond —whether we are in denial or not — to physical beauty. It doesn’t matter how many times we’ve been told that beauty is only skin deep and that we are all truly deeply interested in the inner person not the outer, we are biologically programmed to respond to tits, ass and dick. Period. That’s what computers are about really; a hugely efficient delivery system for an entirely private voyeurism; when we open that computer we filled with tingling expectation  because we know that there is the possibility we might just accidentally see some human nakedness somewhere; we may pretend we are looking at celebrity photos or family photos or reading gossip — it is all really soft core pornography because ultimately it’s just there for us to wank off to really, in one way or another. I must admit that I have tended to get furious lately about  the young and their addiction to Digitalcapitalsm, but I recently chatted with a very philosophical friend of mind who calmed me down. He is a brilliant stand up comic. Brilliant standup comics are all fundamentally motivated by a deep inner melancholy — it drives them to cheer the world up. When I started ranting about the young rejecting reality and living in an onlne fantasyland, he just frowned at me in his somewhat goodnatured way. “It’s funny!’ he said. ‘Just laugh at it, I do!. Don’t bother getting mad.’ I asked him how he achieved this admirable state of equipollence (that’s a skeptical term for calm) and he said ‘well didn’t you do a lot of crazy things when you were young?’ Unfortunately I didn’t. That Is why I am now presently so screwed up— still discovering love and sex always for the first time. (I was a very good boy — and that can only lead to villainy later in life.) Nevertheless his point was well taken. My attitude now is this: if the young want to live their lives online, well more power to them. Let’s just see how that works out. I will amuse myself watching; let the bodies pile up where they may. I recommend we all recline on our elderly divans and enjoy watching this divine decadence, as the world ends gradually not with a bang, but a whimper. Let the young have what they want, as long as I'm alive, I will be amused by their suicidal online obsession.  If you catch me cursing the little darlings again, please stop me. I won’t mind.