On Fire

Hey everyone,

If you follow this newsletter, you’ll know I haven’t exactly been on fire as far as my writing goes. In the last few weeks, I have managed to do an interview with It’s Going Down, “Heating Up,” a look at whether or not we are in fact passing a tipping point after this summer of record heat waves, record wild fires, record tropical storms, record floods, and a discussion of what’s true and what’s not around how the mainstream media and how social movements are talking about the so-called climate crisis. You can check it out here:

“Heating Up” https://itsgoingdown.org/heating-up-peter-gelderloos-interview/

I was also on fire in the only two newsletters I’ve been able to publish in the last month, absolute rants that were, I hope, at least amusing if not theoretically useful.

How I Learned to Love the Bomb

And a rant about linear time, fake months, and civilizations that can’t count to one hundred:

The Blue Moon is Roman Propaganda

My head has certainly been on fire as a side effect of radiation, even though two weeks have already gone by since I finished that part of the treatment. I have a few more weeks to rest up though before I start chemo, and in that time I’m really hoping to get more newsletters out, while I’m also working on my next book, navigating the Medicaid bureaucracy, and hoping to clock some hours with a power washer, since I’m still not legally allowed to drive my garbage truck.

Some teasers: I’m working on essays about inner emigrations; (false) consciousness around trauma and how the patriarchy and other oppressive systems reform themselves; suicide, survival, and who owns the future; the Fermi Paradox and extraterrestrial revolutions; disability and collective health; whether social architecture controls our behavior or whether the prisoners run the prison; what happens when land is both a commodity and a conquest; the robotic class war; and what today’s dominant technologies steal from us. And a lot of this is flowing towards a big piece I want to write on compartmentalization as it relates to both social control and unhealed trauma.

So yeah, I’m not running out of steam, just shifting my limited capacity to healing, to surviving, to taking care of myself and those I care about, because our productivity won’t matter when we’re dead. What will matter is whether our kin and our comrades are better off for having had us in their lives.

Just wanted to let you know I’m still here, still kicking, and there will be more soon. In the meantime, especially for you new subscribers, here are some older essays you might find worthwhile. And to everyone who has kept their paid subscriptions despite my plummeting productivity, it means a lot. What I earn on here makes a big difference, after all the hours I lost since the seizure and the tumor diagnosis.

These are the two Arguments to Go Around I’ve written so far, shorter essays intended to help intervene in hot button polemics that often get misrepresented in movement debates or in society at large.

Why Green Energy Won’t Help Stop Climate Change

and…

Finally, here’s one about the speculative fiction writing I do:

Until next time, take care,

p