Back On The Wagon [Trenchant Edges]

Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges. The newsletter about weird stuff where I just disappear for a *checks notes* holy shit more than a month this time.

Well, that’s not great.

But I think after two years we kind of know how I work with this project: I’ll fall off the wagon and get back up.

(Maybe I should honestly schedule this process into the way we work, writing in something like seasons rather than trying to maintain a constant output that just isn’t happening; something to consider going forward)

You might be wondering what the fuck I’ve been doing over the last month so let’s talk a bit about mental health. Editor’s note: You can skip the next two sections. Things get much more interesting in the third section about Weirdness & debunking.

Getting serious about health

A couple of days after our last email I talked to a psychiatric nurse as part of my ongoing campaign to try Ketamine therapy for my decades running depression.

Reward yourself for surviving another week of our collapsing empire by searching for “Horse Costume”. You’re welcome.

Anyway, for even a shot to get insurance to cover it I need to try two treatments, by which they meant trying some drugs.

So I’ve been taking Prozac since.

I’ve never been a fan of SSRIs (back in my psych undergrad days I was kinda stunned to find many of their studies reported only 5-10% better efficacy than a placebo), but I figure it’d be worth a try.

And going into a drug without expectations that it will or won’t help seems like a pretty good place to start. I’ve heard a ton of horror stories from SSRIs, but I’m pretty immune to suicide (I’m going to live past 100 out of spite) and most of the other side effects seem to pass harmlessly after a couple of weeks.

How’s that gone?

This tab has been open for more than a month

I’ll be honest, I’m kind of bored by my mental health at this point. It’s just… tedious.

Let’s fast forward any kind of in depth discussion and get to the point: Prozac didn’t do much for my mood over two months. Doubled the dose a month in. Not really feeling continuing it. Have an appointment later this week where I’ll be switching to a new treatment for that hail mary shot at some sweet, sweet horsedrugs.

I dunno, I don’t really care to write more about it. I’d delete this except I really want to start publishing and I know if I cut 400 words that’ll take longer.

Weirdness, Ideologies, History, Geopolitics, and Debunking

This newsletter has always existed at the intersections of my interests.

I started it off trying to have a very narrow focus but that seems pretty, uh, doomed in retrospect.

Part of why I’ve been quiet is I’ve been trying to figure out what the fuck I’m doing with this newsletter. Do I want to meander between whatever topics interest me with no regard for an audience?

Hell yes.

OK, maybe some regard for y’all, especially the awesome folks who have kept supporting me even though it’s been literally two months since I’ve done anything here.

(Seriously, a thousand thank you’s for that. Every dollar helps)

I feel like the work I do is all integrated into one overall thing best summed up by James Joyce.

This is what motivated my interest in Terence Mckenna and Marshall McLuhan. And pretty much the rest of it. Lifting the cultural carpet where the weird bullshit gets swept under.

Like many people in the last 200 years I feel a deep rift between what has been and what will be. Nietzsche called it a rope stretched across a chasm between animal and overman. I like how Antonio Gramsci put it better:

I’ve wanted to avoid politics here because I was uncomfortable asking for money for my thoughts on politics. Even though that’s probably the most marketable thing I do.

There’s a sense of motion, but all the old maps of where we might be going all seem to be obviously wrong. This is why I wanted to start this project with an exploration of Terence McKenna, who’s Transdental Object outside of time attracting the past towards an inevitable future at least seemed to describe this sense of falling into whatever comes after history.

(History as understood as the linear breakout of written awareness of the development of time)

Lots of people who talk about weirdness and fringe ideas come in for cheap shots or comedy and there’s a lot of fun to be had there. But I’m more interested in exploring the lineage of these ideas & the role the serve for their believers.

I think you can get a bit ahead of the curve when you see what’s percolating on the edges of culture. In fact, that sense is why I named this newsletter Trenchant Edges: You’ve gotta dig around the edges of the map where all the doodles of monsters are.

Once you get a sense of the history of an idea you can see where it’ll go.

And I think the best antidote against propaganda is getting a broad view of a subject.

Like, once you hear one generation of nazi wannabes say the same shit their predecessors were saying in the 30s and 60s, sometimes word for word, it because really clear what you’re looking at.

Anyway, I need to run.

We’ll be on some kind of wonky publishing schedule this week. I figure it’s time to do another month or so of posting a bunch of different topics so we can see what lands with folks.

See y’all soon.