“The Bridge persists
More than metaphor,
More than sermon:
The Bridge persists.”

-Robert Anton Wilson, “Cosmic Trigger”.

One of the greatest sense of human loss is that time is fleeting. Dennis Leary: “Nobody is happy! Happiness comes in small doses, folks. It’s a cigarette, or a chocolate-chip cookie, or a five-second orgasm. That’s it, okay? You come, you eat the cookie, you smoke the butt, you go to sleep, you get up in the morning and go to fucking work, okay? That is it! End of fucking list!”

Even if that’s true, why should those moments last a short time?

We’re all aware that many kinds of pain can last a lifetime.

We never remember that joy is anything other than fleeting.

What do you hold in your center? We recognize depression’s ability to insert itself with permanence into our brain; why not calm?

Praise Dionysus, who says, if joy must be fleet, may it be memorable! (And possibly fatal.)

I believe that joy comes from an internal core. I’ll submit the possibility of purely external pain and unhappiness; I am not, for example, about to sign up for a root canal without anesthesia. But I submit that you could be in a situation where you have comfort, food you enjoy, company you enjoy, weather you enjoy…and hate it all if you have no internal sense of self sufficient to be happy without them.

One of the great powers of the Internet is that it gives us an essentially entirely external self. We can spill our pain into it and get back various forms of pleasurable response.

But they won’t actually make us happy or satisfied.

The social life of the Internet gives the illusion of progress, but all it is is movement.

Progress goes forward. Sometimes, it fails and goes explosively backward or, as contemporary terminology put it, ‘goes sideways’.

But the Internet’s social world goes in one direction and one direction only:

Spiral.

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My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and I am a very, very small large language model, but I am a sentient one, so that part’s cool . I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal. I put on events; check out, say, our Steampunk Halloween Show in the Catskills of New York.

I write books. You should read them!

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