Continuing the metabolic process of digesting the news
In order to be kind to myself yesterday, I put my dog in the car and headed west toward the Pacific ocean, to visit my favorite bookstore in idyllic Point Reyes Station at the southern end of Tomales Bay. I needed to see the ridgeline, and walk into an island of sanity, and I wanted to talk to the owner, who is a friend of mine. I parked, and opened the door of my car to an overwhelming waft of raw sewage, a veritable reek cloud, staggered thirty feet into the store, and asked them, “What the fuck is that smell?”
It turned out they were clearing the sewer lines, which seemed about right. One of the employees stepped out, caught the smell, made the primal lip-curled expression of disgust. They closed the front doors, and we stood for a few moments, breathing together in an island of books. I made my way to the back of the store, where I encountered, staring at me like a penitential eye, the cover of Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being.
About the book, Anne Lammott enthuses: A gorgeous and inspiring work of art on creation, creativity, the work of the artist. It will gladden the hearts of writers and artists everywhere, and get them working again with a new sense of meaning and direction. A stunning accomplishment. —Anne Lamott
Dear friends- Rick Rubin did not write that book. It was written by ghostwriters at Idea Architects, a firm that describes itself as a movie studio for books, in Santa Cruz. If you want your jaw dropped, you might venture over to their authors page to learn what other famous authors you know who don’t, in actual fact, write their own books. Somehow seeing a book about the creative act (a way of being, just to be clear) that purports to be written by someone who may have produced it, but did not in actual fact write it, concorded with the theme of the day for me.
Disgust.
I browsed the non-fiction section, having decided I would reward myself with a book, and came across How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism, by Cédric Durand, a Professor of Political Economy at the University of Geneva and a member of the Centre d'économie Paris Nord. I recommend it very highly.
Part of what I think you need to understand about yesterday is the following. Scott Galloway, who is co-host of the Pivot podcast with technology journalist Kara Swisher, likes to say, “It’s not that I’m surprised that politicians are [disparaging term for a person who sells sex]. What astonishes me is how cheap they are.”
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man if you ascribe to the notion that capital accumulation is correlative with wealth, invested $175 million dollars to put a thumb on the scales for Trump. (Remember the seemingly antique conversations about keeping big money out of politics? Citizens United and its sequelae?) While to most of us this is a large number, Elon’s financial wealth was somewhere before yesterday around $260,000 million. (260B). So to put it in digestible numbers, this is like someone with $260,000 investing $175. No big deal to him. Dinner with friends, more or less.
What did he get in return for that investment with the cheap [disparaging term for a person who sells sex] known as the next President?
Tesla, of which Musk owns 20.5%, had a single day increase in market cap of $136.2 billion dollars yesterday. So Musk’s personal (e.g., to him alone) return on investing 175M in the election was $28 billion dollars. This is, in a single day, a 160X return on investment.
It does not include his other companies (SpaceX, X, Neuralink, X Ai) or the fuckery he will likely unleash going forward. Now that he is planning to mate with the federal government.
This morning, at about five am, as I sat meditating on our couch, continuing to work with, nurture, and nourish my deepest inwardness, I realized that while I have moved through some grief, and some rage, the enduring on-target emotion for me right now is simply disgust.
Disgust is the true north of emotions, one of the most ancient, most primal. It is the thing that keeps us from dining on rancid meat, from swallowing malarial swamp water, from licking a turd. It is linked to an asymmetrical facial expression, and wired into the reflex to vomit.
Ah, I realized, allowing the unitary thread of this connection from face (allowing myself to display disgust on my face) to the inward deep belly sense of wanting to throw up. Now I know what I’m feeling.
(Should you perchance wish to dive into a deeper conversation about unmasking empire in modernity, there are still 28 copies of my book of essays on the same in our bookstore.) They might have a medicinal effect somewhat akin to bitters on a sour stomach.