Just getting back to you after an unexpected hiatus that kept me from tackling my promise to you. In my defense, I had to upgrade a failing laptop with a new one (and all the shopping and reconfiguring that comes with it), and accommodate a buddy from about 35 years ago visiting Japan. But even more salient ... you are simply above my paygrade as a writer.
First off, there are an increasing number of us in full agreement with the content of what you've said with this post (though still not enough).
But your style is a beast of another nature. Reminds me of the sword of substack favorite, Margaret Anna Alice — but hammered with testosterone, forged in acid.
Hell, you could bring a blush to Ambrose Bierce.
Reminds me of something Nietzsche once said ...
'I don't write to be understood. I write to be memorized. I write with a hammer.'
Now I finally have some time to go back and start reading a few of your posts that have popped up since posting your novel's chapter. When I first read that, I didn't have enough of a context to leverage into any meaningful analysis. But in retrospect, the style reminded me a bit of Ayn Rand ... neither fish nor fowl, neither purely fiction nor purely philosophy. Something ... different. I guess I still won't be able to give much feedback until I read the whole novel.
But it is posts like this that really humble me. Your creative drawing-and-quartering, gutting, and burning evil at the stake is poetry of the highest order. But in this era of Tweet-length attention spans, poetry is a hard sell.
I understand the dilemma of preaching to the choir at the expense of excluding those who hunger for only the bread and circuses of Hollywood. The closest thing that comes to mind in bringing your writing to the larger public is something similar to those Milla Jovovich movies 'Biohazard' or 'Resident Evil' ... but as documentaries rather than Sci-Fi.
Like listening to a solo by the likes of Bill Evans, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, or Pat Metheny ... I look at your writing in this post, and there is not a thing I can suggest to raise the bar. You are on fire. And I love it.
Maybe one direction is to start looking for collaborators ... particularly in the visual arts, and then in music (maybe an audio voice narration), as those seem to penetrate the subconscious of the average consumer more easily.
But then again, there's that dilemma of pointing to the truth, but with an audience like an obedient dog gazing at your finger. I haven't figured out my way out of that hole, but am inspired by you to buckle down and get serious.
You have the talent, the motivation, and the insight to make a difference. The best I can do now is to introduce you to a few I chat with who are also consistent in engaging their readers with rigor and authenticity.
Margaret Anna Alice I've already mentioned. Oh ... damn! I just took a look at the list of those you follow and see that you subscribe to her, as well as another I was going to mention ... Toby Rogers! Margaret was one of only three or four I had subscribed to, but on a fixed income of declining value, I've let even those subscriptions slip out of my fingers.
In thinking of that wide range of earth, wind, and fire ... two others along a similar wave length include poet/essayists Mary Poindexter McLaughlin and Kathleen Devanney.
It's going to take me a couple of days to go back and read your most recent posts. I suspect, and hope, they are similar to this one ... hard cutting music to my ear.
Go Dean! I'll be spreading your name to the few I chat with.
Cheers buddy, and again ... apologies for being a day late and a dollar short.
First off, no apologies needed. You could’ve spent the last six months lost in a Shinjuku pachinko parlor or meditating in a Nara forest shrine and I still would’ve welcomed your words like a rainstorm in the desert. Things worth waiting for are…things worth fucking waiting for!
Japan, by the way, is the perfect backdrop for this kind of philosophical reflection. A nation where the trains run on time, but the whole kamikaze thing still buzzes beneath the surface and Mishima’s blood marinates the Ministry of Defense HQ. Where politeness conceals heartbreak. Where the Simpsons earn their way back home via typically dignified game shows. I’ve always felt like Japan understood the sanctity of subtext—even if my Japanese-American spousal unit doesn’t. Go figure.
Now—on to your comment. Damn, man. I don’t know whether to thank you or nominate you for sainthood in the Church of Tinfoil Saints. That was less a comment than a benediction. You’ve turned “reader” into something nobler—a co-conspirator in the great unsanctioned exorcism of our era’s engineered madness.
And you’re right—great minds and all that. The fact that we’re both tuned to the frequencies of sanity preservationists speaks to the same thing you alluded to: not just shared taste, but shared urgency. A kind of cognitive triangulation. As if we’ve each been tapped on the shoulder by something larger whispering, “Don’t flinch. Not now.”
Your phrase—poetry is a hard sell—landed with a thud and a nod. Yes. It is. Especially when truth has to compete with dopamine, and nuance gets ghosted for engagement metrics. But I still believe there’s an audience out there with hearts like cracked bells, waiting to be struck by something honest. Maybe not everyone’s ready for a hammer, but some are. And they’re worth the swing.
I love your suggestion about collaborators in the visual and audio space. I’ve been circling that exact idea—like a crow around fresh roadkill—for months now. I’ve got this vision in my head: a narrated series cut with archival footage, analog glitch, and slow-burning dread. Something between a sermon, a séance, and a sucker punch. If you know folks in that space, I’m listening. Hell, I’m already talking to ghosts—might as well record it.
I hope to check out Mary Poindexter McLaughlin, Kathleen Devanney, and Barsoom’s desert dispatches. Of course, I’m still waiting for Ritalin to live up to its promise.
But rest friggin’ assured, if you find yourself writing more regularly again—or plotting your own dispatches from beneath the silken corporate veil—I’ll be front row, ears open, jaw clenched.
Thank you again for the kind words, the cross-recommendations, and most of all, the attention.
Real attention. The kind we’ve all been taught to abandon in favor of dopamine dings and shallow scrolls. You took time, and that’s a currency I respect more than coin. (Not that I won’t take the coin. I am a whore, after all)
Onward, comrade. Through the static. Through the noise. Through the sacred absurdity of it all.
Dyspeptic Dean
P.S. I can’t stop picturing Nietzsche on a bullet train, scribbling manifestos between vending machine stops and somehow still writing with a hammer.
Hey Dean. It's as much a pleasure to read your comments as your posts.
I hear you about cultural subtexts and spousal units. Among the plusses and minuses of a terminally single life, I still have memories of romance, if not the hormones. And once a week dinners or an onsen trip with the fairer gender might be my sweet spot for hedgehogs not huddling too close for comfort.
Much gratitude for forgiving my uh ... 'questionable' ... time management skills or practical help.
LOL ... 'circling in on roadkill' ... I'm remembering some of Margaret's collaborative projects, and I think Tessa Lena has done some. Those might be worthy queries.
Thinking it would be easy enough to prompt GPT to sketch a Ghibli image of Nietzsche on a bullet train — Kathleen's recent post about 'Baby Buddha' was a break from the globalist-war showing off her graphic A.I. prompting skills, and slightly wicked humor. But I've also seen some over-the-top use of multi-modal input/output that was not so impressive. All-in-all, I prefer the analogue human touch ... or a scary-close proxy.
Shit. He replied to my comment within an hour, and I posted the following ... only to have YouTube's algorithm remove it ...
"@projectparadiseNZ Small world! I had saved your video, planning on eventually high lighting it in a substack essay about the sociopathy of collective human nature, and what to do about it. From what I am seeing in other YouTubes and 'private' Fakebook groups, New Zealand, like most of the Western world, seems to be in the process of a planned destruction by globalist-technocrat, would-be, god-kings. If you are not yet on substack, highly recommended as a place to meet like-minded people, and go from there. Just having discovered your channel, would love to hear more about your time in Japan as well. If up for an essay-video collaboration, or even just a chat, I write under 'Count Chocula' on substack, or you can send a free end-to-end encrypted mail at my proton address of GroundhogdayAgain atmark proton dot me. (Have to be careful because YouTube can be as devious as Fakebook in preventing empathy-driven communities from emerging.
Cheers again to ya. It is a surprise and pleasure to make your acquaintance."
I suppose YouTube judged and censored me for breaking community standards —because I was trying to make a community. 😂
In a comment with skidmark under the post, I referred to the metaphorical angels and demons among us. That doesn't quite fit you as well as a classic Clint Eastwood 'angelic demon' ... or would that be 'demonic angel'?
"So what separates us from the smooth-brained loyalists still mainlining state-sanctioned narrative?
Pattern recognition.
Cognitive stamina.
A memory longer than a news cycle.
The ability to connect dots without asking permission.
And the willingness to speak without apology, even when the mob demands silence and alleged friends whisper compliance.
We weren’t early. We were just unsponsored.
They told us we were wrong.
We weren’t.
We were just ahead."
I don't think I could have said it better myself, those who know the real meaning of words and convention, and those who subvert those meanings for their own agenda's are far more prevalent than we've ever witnessed before. Your gift for sometimes stating the obvious to the choir or the obscurity of the willfully ignorant is a balancing act that few can follow. Language that is sufficiently strong enough to shake and bake the intellectually morbid into awakening is not an art enjoyed by all, but those who appreciate the finer points of a sharpened sarcasm (like C.J. Hopkins) and others to the institutionalization of industrial strength hypocrisy to the pinnacle of pride pricking I rarely seen. Thank you for your continued observations that are so easily overlooked by those who cannot see past the superficial. Have a nice day Dean!
I don’t know that I could’ve asked for a better summation of the strange fucking tightrope we’re walking: trying to speak plainly in an era where even sanitized plainness is provocative, and speaking truthfully feels like a form of dissidence. What you said about the real meaning of words—the way some still hold reverence for them, while others gut and repurpose them for agenda-driven theater—isn’t just accurate. It’s the very battlefield.
I’ve often said we’re living in an age where semantic corruption is more dangerous than moral decay—because once the words are defiled, the minds follow. It’s no coincidence that we’ve seen the deliberate dulling of language right alongside the numbing of culture. First they stole precision. Then they stole memory. And then they told us it was progress. But then these are the same sociopathic academics that have adulterated every canon imaginable.
That you caught the balancing act—between stating what the choir already hums and trying to wake the willfully comatose—is a hell of a compliment. It’s a risky thing, dancing on the edge of the obvious without falling into cliché or condescension. But your phrasing nails it: language strong enough to shake and bake the intellectually morbid into awakening—that’s exactly it. And if there’s any hope left in this scorched moral economy, it’s that enough people still respond to the smell of their own hair catching fire.
You mention C.J. Hopkins, and that’s high praise. He’s a fellow pyromaniac in the arena of polite delusion—a man who’s done more with scalpel-grade sarcasm than most credentialed pundits could manage with a congressional subpoena. I think we’re all feeling the same wind these days, coming through cracks in the institutions we were told were airtight.
I won’t pretend this kind of writing is for everyone. It isn’t supposed to be. It’s for those who still feel the itch under the skin when something doesn’t add up. The people who look past the façade and see the scaffolding of a lie. That you took the time to not only read but reflect in kind is a gift—and one I don’t take lightly.
So thank you—for your eyes, your words, and for knowing the difference between real language and its hijacked imitation.
Hey Dean.
First off, a thousand apologies.
Just getting back to you after an unexpected hiatus that kept me from tackling my promise to you. In my defense, I had to upgrade a failing laptop with a new one (and all the shopping and reconfiguring that comes with it), and accommodate a buddy from about 35 years ago visiting Japan. But even more salient ... you are simply above my paygrade as a writer.
First off, there are an increasing number of us in full agreement with the content of what you've said with this post (though still not enough).
But your style is a beast of another nature. Reminds me of the sword of substack favorite, Margaret Anna Alice — but hammered with testosterone, forged in acid.
Hell, you could bring a blush to Ambrose Bierce.
Reminds me of something Nietzsche once said ...
'I don't write to be understood. I write to be memorized. I write with a hammer.'
Now I finally have some time to go back and start reading a few of your posts that have popped up since posting your novel's chapter. When I first read that, I didn't have enough of a context to leverage into any meaningful analysis. But in retrospect, the style reminded me a bit of Ayn Rand ... neither fish nor fowl, neither purely fiction nor purely philosophy. Something ... different. I guess I still won't be able to give much feedback until I read the whole novel.
But it is posts like this that really humble me. Your creative drawing-and-quartering, gutting, and burning evil at the stake is poetry of the highest order. But in this era of Tweet-length attention spans, poetry is a hard sell.
I understand the dilemma of preaching to the choir at the expense of excluding those who hunger for only the bread and circuses of Hollywood. The closest thing that comes to mind in bringing your writing to the larger public is something similar to those Milla Jovovich movies 'Biohazard' or 'Resident Evil' ... but as documentaries rather than Sci-Fi.
Like listening to a solo by the likes of Bill Evans, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, or Pat Metheny ... I look at your writing in this post, and there is not a thing I can suggest to raise the bar. You are on fire. And I love it.
Maybe one direction is to start looking for collaborators ... particularly in the visual arts, and then in music (maybe an audio voice narration), as those seem to penetrate the subconscious of the average consumer more easily.
But then again, there's that dilemma of pointing to the truth, but with an audience like an obedient dog gazing at your finger. I haven't figured out my way out of that hole, but am inspired by you to buckle down and get serious.
You have the talent, the motivation, and the insight to make a difference. The best I can do now is to introduce you to a few I chat with who are also consistent in engaging their readers with rigor and authenticity.
Margaret Anna Alice I've already mentioned. Oh ... damn! I just took a look at the list of those you follow and see that you subscribe to her, as well as another I was going to mention ... Toby Rogers! Margaret was one of only three or four I had subscribed to, but on a fixed income of declining value, I've let even those subscriptions slip out of my fingers.
In thinking of that wide range of earth, wind, and fire ... two others along a similar wave length include poet/essayists Mary Poindexter McLaughlin and Kathleen Devanney.
And one that I haven't personally chatted with but enjoy reading when I get the time is 'John Carter from Postcards from Barsoom' ... this post with advice to writers being a good example ... https://barsoom.substack.com/p/roughly-translated-from-the-original/comments
It's going to take me a couple of days to go back and read your most recent posts. I suspect, and hope, they are similar to this one ... hard cutting music to my ear.
Go Dean! I'll be spreading your name to the few I chat with.
Cheers buddy, and again ... apologies for being a day late and a dollar short.
Hey Steve
First off, no apologies needed. You could’ve spent the last six months lost in a Shinjuku pachinko parlor or meditating in a Nara forest shrine and I still would’ve welcomed your words like a rainstorm in the desert. Things worth waiting for are…things worth fucking waiting for!
Japan, by the way, is the perfect backdrop for this kind of philosophical reflection. A nation where the trains run on time, but the whole kamikaze thing still buzzes beneath the surface and Mishima’s blood marinates the Ministry of Defense HQ. Where politeness conceals heartbreak. Where the Simpsons earn their way back home via typically dignified game shows. I’ve always felt like Japan understood the sanctity of subtext—even if my Japanese-American spousal unit doesn’t. Go figure.
Now—on to your comment. Damn, man. I don’t know whether to thank you or nominate you for sainthood in the Church of Tinfoil Saints. That was less a comment than a benediction. You’ve turned “reader” into something nobler—a co-conspirator in the great unsanctioned exorcism of our era’s engineered madness.
And you’re right—great minds and all that. The fact that we’re both tuned to the frequencies of sanity preservationists speaks to the same thing you alluded to: not just shared taste, but shared urgency. A kind of cognitive triangulation. As if we’ve each been tapped on the shoulder by something larger whispering, “Don’t flinch. Not now.”
Your phrase—poetry is a hard sell—landed with a thud and a nod. Yes. It is. Especially when truth has to compete with dopamine, and nuance gets ghosted for engagement metrics. But I still believe there’s an audience out there with hearts like cracked bells, waiting to be struck by something honest. Maybe not everyone’s ready for a hammer, but some are. And they’re worth the swing.
I love your suggestion about collaborators in the visual and audio space. I’ve been circling that exact idea—like a crow around fresh roadkill—for months now. I’ve got this vision in my head: a narrated series cut with archival footage, analog glitch, and slow-burning dread. Something between a sermon, a séance, and a sucker punch. If you know folks in that space, I’m listening. Hell, I’m already talking to ghosts—might as well record it.
I hope to check out Mary Poindexter McLaughlin, Kathleen Devanney, and Barsoom’s desert dispatches. Of course, I’m still waiting for Ritalin to live up to its promise.
But rest friggin’ assured, if you find yourself writing more regularly again—or plotting your own dispatches from beneath the silken corporate veil—I’ll be front row, ears open, jaw clenched.
Thank you again for the kind words, the cross-recommendations, and most of all, the attention.
Real attention. The kind we’ve all been taught to abandon in favor of dopamine dings and shallow scrolls. You took time, and that’s a currency I respect more than coin. (Not that I won’t take the coin. I am a whore, after all)
Onward, comrade. Through the static. Through the noise. Through the sacred absurdity of it all.
Dyspeptic Dean
P.S. I can’t stop picturing Nietzsche on a bullet train, scribbling manifestos between vending machine stops and somehow still writing with a hammer.
Alter boy Steve here 😂.
Hey Dean. It's as much a pleasure to read your comments as your posts.
I hear you about cultural subtexts and spousal units. Among the plusses and minuses of a terminally single life, I still have memories of romance, if not the hormones. And once a week dinners or an onsen trip with the fairer gender might be my sweet spot for hedgehogs not huddling too close for comfort.
Much gratitude for forgiving my uh ... 'questionable' ... time management skills or practical help.
LOL ... 'circling in on roadkill' ... I'm remembering some of Margaret's collaborative projects, and I think Tessa Lena has done some. Those might be worthy queries.
Thinking it would be easy enough to prompt GPT to sketch a Ghibli image of Nietzsche on a bullet train — Kathleen's recent post about 'Baby Buddha' was a break from the globalist-war showing off her graphic A.I. prompting skills, and slightly wicked humor. But I've also seen some over-the-top use of multi-modal input/output that was not so impressive. All-in-all, I prefer the analogue human touch ... or a scary-close proxy.
To finish up for the moment, I just touched bases with a like minded guy you might enjoy, and a potential collaborator ... our exchange in comments less than an hour ago ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uan3QhHYF9c&lc=UgzQIk67aa543KhwgQN4AaABAg.AHHv-hxMcmcAHHyrs0HxGa
Shit. He replied to my comment within an hour, and I posted the following ... only to have YouTube's algorithm remove it ...
"@projectparadiseNZ Small world! I had saved your video, planning on eventually high lighting it in a substack essay about the sociopathy of collective human nature, and what to do about it. From what I am seeing in other YouTubes and 'private' Fakebook groups, New Zealand, like most of the Western world, seems to be in the process of a planned destruction by globalist-technocrat, would-be, god-kings. If you are not yet on substack, highly recommended as a place to meet like-minded people, and go from there. Just having discovered your channel, would love to hear more about your time in Japan as well. If up for an essay-video collaboration, or even just a chat, I write under 'Count Chocula' on substack, or you can send a free end-to-end encrypted mail at my proton address of GroundhogdayAgain atmark proton dot me. (Have to be careful because YouTube can be as devious as Fakebook in preventing empathy-driven communities from emerging.
Cheers again to ya. It is a surprise and pleasure to make your acquaintance."
I suppose YouTube judged and censored me for breaking community standards —because I was trying to make a community. 😂
And I got only a fraction through an epic post by Spartacus, mentioned your post, and met Margaret there in comments as well. https://iceni.substack.com/p/declaration-of-sovereignty-pt-i.
In a comment with skidmark under the post, I referred to the metaphorical angels and demons among us. That doesn't quite fit you as well as a classic Clint Eastwood 'angelic demon' ... or would that be 'demonic angel'?
Meh. 'Buddies' is just fine with me.
Cheers Dean!
"So what separates us from the smooth-brained loyalists still mainlining state-sanctioned narrative?
Pattern recognition.
Cognitive stamina.
A memory longer than a news cycle.
The ability to connect dots without asking permission.
And the willingness to speak without apology, even when the mob demands silence and alleged friends whisper compliance.
We weren’t early. We were just unsponsored.
They told us we were wrong.
We weren’t.
We were just ahead."
I don't think I could have said it better myself, those who know the real meaning of words and convention, and those who subvert those meanings for their own agenda's are far more prevalent than we've ever witnessed before. Your gift for sometimes stating the obvious to the choir or the obscurity of the willfully ignorant is a balancing act that few can follow. Language that is sufficiently strong enough to shake and bake the intellectually morbid into awakening is not an art enjoyed by all, but those who appreciate the finer points of a sharpened sarcasm (like C.J. Hopkins) and others to the institutionalization of industrial strength hypocrisy to the pinnacle of pride pricking I rarely seen. Thank you for your continued observations that are so easily overlooked by those who cannot see past the superficial. Have a nice day Dean!
Thank you—sincerely.
I don’t know that I could’ve asked for a better summation of the strange fucking tightrope we’re walking: trying to speak plainly in an era where even sanitized plainness is provocative, and speaking truthfully feels like a form of dissidence. What you said about the real meaning of words—the way some still hold reverence for them, while others gut and repurpose them for agenda-driven theater—isn’t just accurate. It’s the very battlefield.
I’ve often said we’re living in an age where semantic corruption is more dangerous than moral decay—because once the words are defiled, the minds follow. It’s no coincidence that we’ve seen the deliberate dulling of language right alongside the numbing of culture. First they stole precision. Then they stole memory. And then they told us it was progress. But then these are the same sociopathic academics that have adulterated every canon imaginable.
That you caught the balancing act—between stating what the choir already hums and trying to wake the willfully comatose—is a hell of a compliment. It’s a risky thing, dancing on the edge of the obvious without falling into cliché or condescension. But your phrasing nails it: language strong enough to shake and bake the intellectually morbid into awakening—that’s exactly it. And if there’s any hope left in this scorched moral economy, it’s that enough people still respond to the smell of their own hair catching fire.
You mention C.J. Hopkins, and that’s high praise. He’s a fellow pyromaniac in the arena of polite delusion—a man who’s done more with scalpel-grade sarcasm than most credentialed pundits could manage with a congressional subpoena. I think we’re all feeling the same wind these days, coming through cracks in the institutions we were told were airtight.
I won’t pretend this kind of writing is for everyone. It isn’t supposed to be. It’s for those who still feel the itch under the skin when something doesn’t add up. The people who look past the façade and see the scaffolding of a lie. That you took the time to not only read but reflect in kind is a gift—and one I don’t take lightly.
So thank you—for your eyes, your words, and for knowing the difference between real language and its hijacked imitation.
Have a better-than-nice day.
Let’s stay inconvenient to the narrative.
Dean
Hi again Dean. Just a heads up of an upvote that might have caught your attention. From STEM-giant Spartacus ... "https://iceni.substack.com/p/declaration-of-sovereignty-pt-i/comment/111815025".