Geography: What about it

Everything is quite much a geography problem. And all will be fixed just by being in the right place at the right time. The right place at the right time is not luck, it is seeing trends and moving towards those whose nature seem more appropriate for one's configuration. I found love in a place that responded, somewhere in the future.

Abstractions aside, geography: what about it?

Cities are vortexes. Dead concrete trapping souls. Souls moving at the pace the concrete and the roads and the laws decide/have decided. It is light coming from millions of years, how can anyone miss? Some people have high dysphoria, would kill to change their bodies. Cities are environments are half of what we are. Environment can be swapped away in exchange for money. One can rearrange one's current configuration. To be reborn is possible.

Money where? Every person has stuff, hard coded, that can be monetized. One does not need to learn. One already has skills. How much these are valued exclusively depends on the environment. The environment is the master puppeteer.

Ah!: How to test environments, then? Say I can swap them at will. How do I know which is the best one, which is even the best way to enter, to test enter a city, a place, an environment, a potential home? Cuz one can't just try two or three clubs and call it an answer. And it matters, what you are looking for. White huge Nordic guys will find cunt in whenever Northern Europe hostel they wish to go. I don't want cunt. I want total surrender.

I want displaced people who will see me as one of their kind. I was that in Rome, the founder of the FH. They didn't had to double-check me. We are in the same social strata. In Manila, I will be a music producer. A rising producer. I will not collab with anyone cuz that takes time and it may yield good music but I have enough good music, I don't need more of that, I need an architecture that yields, a Maria, someone to do the social interaction, to do what she does best, enter clubs, be noise, be noise, claim the place for me, for us. I understand that for that to happen I first need to be a clear node, not just a regular but a clear node. For that I need people who will vouch for me, mini nodes who'll make me the big node. I may need to help people, and I am good at that, I can read their aesthetics if they are socially uptight and alternative enough, and make them better. A kind of grind towards Maria—you dumb fucker, how much effort you make me put! I need aggressive motion, and aggression. Dylan Harrises and me as the gun.

Yield

I have been in the city long enough to be opinionated.

Buildings on themselves are useless. People on themselves are useless. The most important things are abstract.

Recurrence perhaps is useless as well. Life is a numbers game, a math equation by all means. The more exposure, the more likelihood. More exposure to dangerous places, more likelihood to get killed. More exposure to youth centers, more likelihood to get laid. You get the idea. But this is not enough.

Recurrence should be enforced structurally, but only on people who are likely to yield something back. Recurrence at the void is recurrence at the void. The suggestion to become a regular is a favorite one of AI, it is however flawed. Recurrence is to be enforced on the right audience, and people sort themselves on the very first minutes.

It is my opinion that traveling on itself is useless. Novelty is good but it wears off. What does not wear off is a constant, structural exposure to new people. Think FH, the social meetups I arranged back in Rome. It worked, just slowly. I was right and I am always right, it seems to be the case. New cities get things rolling cuz mapping gets rolled and it forces contact. But I am afraid to say it is by a very large margin a lie, an illusion. First time in a club is fairly useless, I am afraid to admit. Meeting as equals—ah! What a foul suggestion. I am not an equal. These people they've lived all their lives locally, grown roots all the way down, I am not an equal, I am a visitor, a promoter, a marketer, an extractor. I need people as rootless as I am, and I need to manage their growing.

One should never ask for anything unless the ask is rhetorical. The stage should be arranged so that only the desired path can follow. Triumph by logic. Life is a math problem. I have tried this and it works. Familiarity is a sunk cost. You just need people chill enough to invest early. Early investors are the best, they will buy chunks of the idea, and after that initial bite it is hard to get out. I hate people who can afford to think.

One needs complete mapping. Not shallow, not surface. Complete mapping of every cluster in a city. If you can't do that then everything is useless, meaningless, and wrong. It is universally wrong, like killing all maritime species, it is that sad. Time is finite and my patience is even more. Every city has potential, it should be squeezed until it returns everything. Everything in sight. A flattening of the territory.

By cluster I mean the desired segment of the population. By mapping I mean get to know them. To get to know people you need to be with them in a place, for thirty minutes at least, they there by choice. People want things and so you are to promise everything. Every conceivable excuse to meet them every day at every hour. Everything offered, so that everyone comes. Then, grab a few nodes and start producing. Delivering is to be furiously pushed forward the way people scream when drowning. But this is to be dealt with when the need arrives.

To ask: A manifesto against default least resistance

Least resistance is still great resistance. It is just lesser by comparison.

What makes something "become" the easiest path? Elimination. During the cold war, it was easier for the Americans to get man to the moon.

Comparison happens prior to elimination. To compare, two or more items are needed. The nature of an item is intrinsically linguistic, meaning: it is well-defined. Definition is the core of items. One cannot compare vibes, approximations, corazonadas. Brain expects mathematical input.

Asking flattens things. This may be deemed wrong by some people. The thing is things unasked have potential, but potential is blindness. Potential is meaninglessness. It lives in the realm of the unreal.

One has the existential task to flatten things, for the benefit of one's own life. You can't build a house with vibes, approximations, corazonadas. Better build one with small stones than with air. Potential is air.

Asking, stating, demanding—call it what you want. It flattens things. Unalives them. It gives them mathematical properties that can then be compared. Unclaimed things can't be processed by the pathfinder.

The pathfinder is a two-dimensional creature. It expects things flat. And as we know all too well, dreams are made of infinite dimensions.

Brainstorming

Today I come here to brainstorm, with as much restraint performances as I am able to—not a lot of—, the design of a comeback INC.

So far stuff has worked—fine. But this stuff, it is waves quite scattered around me and I play the traffic police as I gesture to each wave which way to go. This is valid for it has worked some, but it is also a trap, and it is unsustainable. The real solution is to move along the trends. This, it is abstract as hell, and I want momentum.

Meetups will keep happening. However, I feel that a strong shaping needs to occur. One does not shape things, but one can just decide how things will be—before they begin. Always before they begin. We have—I have to work with some maxim, otherwise it is endless spirals.

What I need is to be needed. There are already, even if a couple, music labels here. People want to be liked, and promise is extended. But stardom will never happen, and one has to work with what is at disposition. These music labels, I don't know them well. The idea goes that they deal with finding venues in where their artists will play, if to start a following or to get some earnings. The latter I extremely doubt—even a punk rocker isn't that imbecile. But they offer the artist a infrastructure, a path, “sign and let us tell you what to do”, they kill ambiguity, they become Oracle in almost every way, “oh, music label, what now?”, and then every thing they are told they rationalize with “our music label said it”, it is their narrative compass. Well these music labels all they need to know is a handful of people: someone who owns a minute place, someone who knows how to share a link, and if they are fairly advanced someone who prints vinyl and cassette, which really shows you how useless they are, who buys those things, why, what kind of fan, but at least it indicates some level of recognition, but more likely it is just another phantom selling point, “lo, we'll make you a vinyl”, and people don't protest “why in the world” they just say “cool, that's so cool”. Music labels are people who know people and that's the end of it. To befriend, how hard is it? Ah, one needs to be around, all around probably, not hard, not hard at all. It really just takes constancy, to show up on every important day, play on the micro festivals in your genre, until people become familiar, “yea that band, of course”, until you become furniture. It ain't hard, but people like to make things hard, “we need x then y then” and the whole alphabet twenty seven hundred times follows, an endless iteration fueled by stupidity that never ever ends.

I will make my zine. It may take more than a month. Classes are about to start, and if I take one day or one afternoon a week for it, I could even do it in little more than a month. Then share it. Maybe ask for a few collabs. All these ideas I've already had them. What I need is movement but I don't want to steer the waves, I instead need people bleeding, actually bleeding. Bleeding loneliness like crazy, or misunderstanding, god I fucking hate a handful of persons I have known and that are so in love with perpetual stasis. I really hope time falls on them like heavy rain and wears them off and so they realize that I am the path, I am the path in some valid degree. More precise: I am the one who sees the path. Who points at it and who understands a fair degree of it. People when they don't see the “A product by Meta” they yell in agony, “what is this, what scam, who is following me, where are your credentials, where are your credentials, this hasn't worked for the long five seconds we've been talking hence you're a con”, they are deceived beyond recognition, it is useless to deal with them. They want to be punched so they can claim validity to their stupidity, but they are not worth a punch. I come again to what kind of loneliness I need. Maybe some really shady individuals would make a good team. International students, they experience loneliness and unfittedness but not much that it makes them want to orbit my plans strong enough, because they have money and they can buy a McDonald's if they are sad, or play video games if they are sad, or just masturbate if they are sad. It really is sad. I can do these things too but I don't do them, certainly not on a spree like they do. But finding individuals in _ is the wrong approach. Did you know Jeffrey found his wealthy sponsor when he was a teacher—a teacher!—in a not so random but rather elite high school? Still elite, still worth something, but he didn't apply for President of the State or for Director of that school, he applied for the most basic position that was still respectable: a math teacher. I need to apply for a basic position. I don't need to run for President of the State. I don't need to apply for Director of a school. Those are bets. The thing is without a winning bet I am at stage one and that is just wrong. You need a baseline and you scale from there. I need to be the math teacher in a music social scene, or related field of my interest. Which is the most basic yet respectable position, in the hierarchy of things I want?

A music producer perhaps. “Everybody is a music producer”. Everybody is a music producer. But maybe, just maybe that's the point, a start, the basic line, “I do what everyone does, just like that old lard Jeffrey Edward once did.” Baseline is baseline.

Continued

Which gives that the act that goes through the path of least resistance is an act performed out of pressure. We have to carefully define things. The path of least resistance, as an idea, is not really the path of least resistance. It is the wishful path of least resistance, usually one that is not available. In Lolita, there is a moment where Humbert Humbert finds the perfect opportunity to murder his wife, yet he circles the idea time and again, and accepts the conclusion: he doesn't have the guts to do it, couldn't live with the guilt. That's the wishful path of least resistance, “I could do this thing, it would be beneficial for me”. You spot it when you have to think about it. Logic is the arch-enemy of least resistance, by definition. No act is rational. Even those who, and especially those who survive scrutiny, “My calculations tell me this is the only way left”, that's coping, you don't call a person rational for choosing to kill themselves by crashing their car instead of by throwing themselves off the bridge. Pressure makes rationality obsolete. Absence of pressure signals lack of actual need, cosplay, a farce. Absence of pressure equals absence of action. That's death.

Let's treat the term pressure with care. Pressure is waves of society. People are on the verge all the time—financially, sentimentally, aspirationally. Whatever they've been stripped of, they seek to reclaim it, to grab the easiest prospect and claim it their own. A family friend recently lost their child out of negligence, then adopted one months later. The thought of adoption may have been a stupidity before the accident: too much paperwork, which child to adopt?, let's just have one of our own, who wants to raise something free of one's genes? The logical brain fights the thought, it can afford to, there is no need to adopt. But once the child dies, a new pressure emerges, one dense and haunting, and unforgiving, sadistic almost. “I want my child back”. The child is dead and they want it back. This will go on until they too die, or until the child is replaced. Adoption and its burdens become trivial now, and whatever pain bureaucracy may cause, it is not thought of, at all. If you'd just joined the case, you'd think it's hypocritical, “What happened to 'I rather have one of my own'?”. And the answer is: “Shut up. Stop talking. Don't open your mouth. I repudiate logical thought. I won't stare at anything, won't contemplate anything with thought or care or reason, until my pain is over”. And pain is never over. It just happens the orphan capitalizes on the heightened crisis.

A situation free of pressure is a taste of death. Let them then come to life, the built-in pressures, the primal ones, invoke them with spell, bring them to the surface, “this you can't look back, you can't afford to”, let the pressure be felt in skin and in bone, let it become existential angst, you don't push the rock to the cliff, you let it grow denser, oneself is one's top enemy, the disastrous ending coded in one's DNA, you cast the spell, let them come back from the safe trance, let them bleed and let the rock be its own end. “You don't have to jump”, and behold the rock throwing itself anyway, against reason, against its own conviction, because what are convictions if not paths of least effort, rationalized. (Convictions: bah! Never trust a rational man's claims. He's just too comfortable with himself. He: a result of least resistance. As he'll begin, “You wouldn't believe the years of work...”. The S-21 survivor will never understand the awful luck of his guard. It is easier for him not to.)

Proximity, revisited

Or positioning or familiarity.

Proximity comes to mind today. A couple weeks ago I switched my desk's configuration: I deleted everything from the shelf, and put a book on the right of the table. I didn't end up finishing that book, although I read quite a bit of it. There are four books there, now: Notes from underground, Tu rostro mañana, The selfish gene, and Lolita. And I have read a few chapters of each, daily. Of course, I don't read a chapter each, daily. Some days I may read two different books, depending on what I'm feeling like reading. The gist is I'm reading. I had stopped reading for a considerable lapse, and now I am reading daily. It wasn't choice, it wasn't motivation, it wasn't deadlines. It was just proximity. Path of least resistance. Physics, against one's will.

You eventually fuck whoever you have around. Who's the closest?, the cheapest? Closest in I don't know how many dimensions. Some subconscious calculation is always present. For example: the one who you haven't had a huge fight with; the one that's in your friend group; the one that's always present in your messages hence in your mind—mental positioning. Could be many dimensions, or you could ensmall them in some neat 2D. Either way, it's always the path of least resistance. When there's sexual tension, you look for the path of least resistance—romance. When there is none, you look for the path of least resistance—“friendship”. War's path of least resistance is a bombing campaign. Peace's path of least resistance is a warm greeting. Until war becomes costly and then peace becomes the lesser investment. Until peace becomes unbearable and war becomes the quickest thrill. Contexts change, but the response— the birth of these contexts, actually—is the path of least resistance. The easiest thing. Sometimes the easiest thing appears to be the hardest. This is a lie. The guy doing the hardest job is—believe me!—following his path of least resistance. Or ask the war prisoner, hoping to see his son one day. The guy killing himself is following his path of least resistance too, maybe he has no one at home anymore. And once the decision has been made, how will he kill himself? Will it be a laborious death? Of course not! Unless the laborious death is the only way—you guessed it: the way of least resistance.

Proximity—not will—is the creator of action. Put a kid in a room with books only: he will read them all. Put a kid in a room with books only, and physical violence all around him: he will become a drug user, possibly impregnate his first girlfriend. And so on. It is so simple it is dull.

Well you can see how proximity is not straightforward. The consequences are but not proximity itself. Books alone don't guarantee you a well-read individual. Instead, the person's needs set the dynamics. And a person's needs are generated by... something something. Let's not lose ourselves from our main thought. A person in need sees the world this way: it is easier for him to long for X than to be content with life. Why? Because people like being unhappy. People need to manufacture unhappiness in order to cope with existence. “If you want to be happy, be!”, says Tolstoy. “I rather not be!”, says man. So he longs for X. Naturally, X is the easiest thing to long for. A man who has lost his wife would find it hard to long for a dog—it takes work. He instead longs for an iteration of his wife. The investment has already been made, and man is a lazy pig, a self-deprecating joke. So man projects his wasted investment into a new prospect.

X is sunk cost. People are preying on people, looking for the one who fits the role that once was but isn't anymore. That's exploitation but whatever, I am the bad guy, Google. Me alone.

That's how psychopaths get their shit done. “They find out what you are missing and become that”. They do it because then you—the lazy motherfucker—need to do no effort. Effort is wrong, effort is ugly, it is science, bah!, bah!, effort is the reason she left me away, it was too much an effort for her to stay, too much an effort, going to parties is easier, meeting new guys is easier, once far from my hands, once in those trenched and morphing lands of Ciudad de Mexico, she will give me no second thought, forever, “long-distance relationships”—what a joke!, “last thought of: seven years ago”, the audacity to suggest that true love defeats these “obstacles”, there is no such thing as an obstacle and there sure is no such thing as a challenge, if “true love” wins over long distance and long time, then it was no triumph, none at all, folks, none at all: it was the path of least effort.

People more pragmatic—or less performative—than psychopaths don't become what they are not, not too hard at least (everyone becomes what they are not, but for a limited period, none can sustain the mask). They instead expose themselves. Whereas the psychopath tailors himself for one person, the pragmatic embeds himself in a see of people. But oh, what if the pragmatic finds a one person that's so great, but doesn't necessarily requite? He or she may then—so as to not become a psychopath—make his unsatisfying self (we assume he or she has been deemed “too much an effort”) the path of least resistance, by rewiring the other person's environment (and here we refer to the many environments: physical, psychological, something something, and so on). This, to me, is more of a triumph, more an admirable feat, than passive lack of effort. Although let's not deceive ourselves: a man or woman that does this, does it because it's the easiest path available for him or her.

But let's go back to my damn books, please. They are not far from my last thought. In fact, they are not far at all! By having them on top of my desk—right side—they—which used to be a burden—became the easier choice. “Ah, what do I do now that my tasks are finished, and the feeling of boredom seethes in the room? Oh look, a book”.