Apr 9, 2025

How to be Somewhat Aware and Approximately Awake Among the Normaltons

Jerry Bernini

I am a ridiculous man. Now they call me a madman. That would be a promotion if it were not that I remain as ridiculous in their eyes as before.
“Dream of a Ridiculous Man” by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Every discussion of what is to be done ought to begin with an agreement, if only the agreement to go on talking, after angry words or a troubled silence. So I’ll begin with the premise that I am a highly flawed person. It’s a premise with which everyone I currently know will accept. Including me. Especially me. This is no mere self-effacement, but the reality of the life I live.

I don’t know how things got to this point. It’s enough that they have and that it wasn’t my wish. A great many things were not and are not my wish or intention. If wishes were horses beggars would certainly ride.

In any case I woke recently from a dream right after the point therein at which I got fired. No, I hadn’t been fired but knew I soon would be. Since I became lost, and as a result of being both metaphorically and literally lost, I was fired from three-quarters of the jobs I had.

That’s six slices of the standard pizza.

Many of my nighttime dreams involve having a job the requirements of which were beyond my ability or even my comprehension. And a majority of them share the same theme, the aforementioned state of being lost.

A few hours ago I was on the phone with a friend in Glastonbury, England. She was sober, while she often isn’t, and therefore the conversation was more or less OK. I write this knowing that neither of us has ever really been alright, hunky-dory or okey-doke. At the time, though she was sober and reasonable but when she’s been drinking she generally tells me that she’s lost. I generally reply that this is my natural state as well. Or words to that effect.

Even when she’s sober, or in the vicinity, talking to her is a challenge, largely because she often feels the need to state, pointedly, our respective ages. There are a few things wrong with this oft-repeated refrain of hers. At least three things. Three things I know of. First, old doesn’t mean what it formerly meant or at least it doesn’t mean what it formerly meant to me.

Also, I wasn’t ever young in any poetic sense of the word. Young, if it could have meant anything significant or substantive, would mean that at a certain time all those years ago a promising future lay ahead of me, or at least the possibility thereof. But that wasn’t the case. No one believes this is true or even possible. But it was and it became increasingly more so, i.e., the word became flesh, or so I heard them say back there in St. Michael’s Grammar School. Yet, and this brings me to the third thing wrong with the proposition, I was, somehow and unaccountably, so much older then and am younger than that now. Apologies, needless to say, to Bob Dylan

My favorite place to be, even though I am generally lost when in that place, is Central America. I have several times visited Mexico and once so far visited Guatemala. Among my travel notes from a no longer recent trip is a page that begins like this: “It took only one day for me to anger one of the hosts. Worse than that, or so I think, the place is now filling to capacity with normal people.”

I remember all of them even though they neither said nor did nor apparently thought anything noteworthy. They were representative of that segment of humanity that years ago I dubbed normaltons. These samples thereof appeared to be a travel group. They seemed even to be a cult of sorts. They were my contemporaries, more or less, but meanwhile boring and predictable to the point of genius, almost as though they used the Stanislavski method to project all things normal. They were old in that other routine way, safe and secure and unbothered by logic or reason. I’m sure, for example, they’ve all been dutifully injected in recent years and they appeared in general to he blissfully oblivious, a state or state of mind I’ve never managed to acquire.

They invariably believe, for example, that the young, even or especially those designated adolescents, are innately and infinitely more intelligent now as opposed to lost, hapless and ignorant of everything including the fact of their ignorance, that state which they mistake for newly minted awareness. Such is, and forgive me for using the term, the new now, that banal and widely used phrase that now embodies mind control at its best.

Maybe it’s just part of that scenario or process by which you become more and more what you already were and yet mistake that state for something else. Most homo sapiens and most circumstances, after all is said and done, become increasingly more intense versions of what they formerly were. This is the extent of my current philosophy. I was not schooled in or skilled at that noble pursuit, although I’ve read more than my share on the subject, but sometimes I enjoy (without literally enjoying it), a certain awareness.

Because I don’t like (never liked) academia or its trappings and outpourings, I’ve become a pretty good autodidact and epistemologist. For this reason and others, I recognized instantly the utter falsity of the scamdemic as well as all the not-so-well-choreographed shooting event/movies, including the preposterous “Trump assassination attempt.” A tale for another day is how the fully compromised prostitutes of the mainstream media, or press-titutes, as some rightfully call them, now serve as a form of perverted priesthood.

Speaking of which, every week or two I perform an internet search using the phrase “experts say.” Generally the results are horrifyingly retarded or, in other words, awfully predictable. For example, it’s interesting to note, for those who still do some noting, that the whole climate emergency cult was once derided and opposed by the so-called right. But then the so-called right realized there was money to be made as well as new levels of Orwellian control to be had.

Both sides of the spectrum are of course control freaks and each side wants five or six or all the slices of the aforementioned pie, leaving therefore less and less pie and/or pizza for us little people. That’s why they compete with each other. It ain’t for the sake of high ideals or decency because they are devoid of both. And meanwhile inhabitants of North America generally strive for the standard base goals: more money and more stuff and to be famous for something or other and above all to be entertained. Even the so-called information they ingest daily long ago became infotainment. Yes, it’s a word and also “a thing.”

The ruling class, by the way, thrives on every crisis and emergency that it creates. How could it be otherwise? It’s win-win for the psychopaths and sycophants. Yay for both “sides” of the paradigm! Both are in favor of anything that advances their wondrous agendas. So I know full well, and sometimes wish I didn’t know, how this time and place in which find ourselves became what it now is.

For me, the worst part of it all is the manic depressive (as opposed to bi-polar) nature of how I move back and forth between being wildly hopeful about the long-rumored great awakening to pretty much inert and motionless like something trapped in amber. That’s a pretty good metaphor by the way. Or is it a simile? In any case, this too is a story for another day.

I recently thought of the day I visited the Museo del Ambar in Chiapas, Mexico. When you’re there you see the genuine article and the samples on display often contain small vestiges of plant or insect life. But on the way to and from the museum you see offered for sale lots of big ugly gaudy things, huge Empress Carlotta-like necklaces and paperweights containing big hairy spiders to name just two.

Those examples are easy to recognize as fake, while the tools that you would use to test for authenticity would not be welcome at the vendors’ tables.

Now, where in the world was I? I hardly know but yet I do.

We’re all trapped in the amber of this transitory epoch, enmeshed in a terrible mess, and ultimately in a real pickle. I haven’t done anything to fix it, assuming it’s even possible, after centuries or millennia of deception and violence, to fix anything in this deeply screwed up world.

But at least this perennially lost guy knows where he is.