Festina lente, indeed.

 [J. Falcon, a member of the audience, writes in:]

Eisel -- your rapping has been improving, man! Great stuff. What's your current recording process? Flow is tight and compelling overall, but I think you're rushing in a few places (either when you fell behind or starting the next line too soon when a minuscule gap might suit your rhythm better.) If you're not already, recording to a metronome might help you get an even stronger flow (and then removing it from the final version of the recording). If you don't know the exact BPM of a track you're rapping over, you can try getting a free metronome app and tapping the rhythm, which can often detect the tempo pretty accurately. Hopefully I'm not telling you stuff you are already implementing! Great work in any event -- love how much passion and energy comes through in the delivery. You rap like you love life.

Festina lente.

Re: "…but I think you're rushing in a few places…" —this was recorded mere minutes after the lyrics were written, with zero rehearsal or preparation. If you watch the motion of my eyes, you can see that I'm still reading the lyrics off screen as I go and, of course, I'm interrupting myself by breaking out laughing.

I was also recording in natural sunlight, and arbitrarily challenging myself to finish the whole thing before the sun became too dim (on both days). You can see this in the second half: the color tint hasn't been artificially adjusted, it is naturally shifting from yellow to faint blue.

Re: "If you don't know the exact BPM of a track you're rapping over, you can try getting a free metronome app… Hopefully I'm not telling you stuff you are already implementing…" —nope. I never have and I never will. This is "outsider art" in every sense of the term, i.e., the good and the bad of it. I am an outsider to hip hop culture, and an outsider I will remain.

———

[HistoryReset, a member of the audience, writes in:]

This is the tightest rhyme you have dropped since bomb cyclone or [that song about Kanye West].

Yep. The whole creative process took place within two days —and I didn't even work on it "all day" for either one of those days. This was my first time rapping on camera (as opposed to "on the microphone" with the camera turned off) and I think this is now necessary to overturn the assumption that whatever you're doing is A.I. —in other words, I don't have the luxury of being a disembodied voice anymore. ;-)

[Meanwhile:] Cocaine has corrupted the Canadian police. And quite possibly every other police service on earth, at this point.

A few of you will remember (long, long ago) when I challenged the youtuber known as ModVegan on her excuses for the decriminalization of drugs: she believed (e.g.) that everyone should be allowed to use cocaine without fear of legal repercussions, but she then seemed to be unable to deal with the implications when asked how this would apply to police officers, medical doctors —anyone with any real responsibility. This is made more obvious when we are talking about positions of authority that involve life-or-death decisions (like police officers and medical doctors) but the point is the same for even the most modest of minimum wage jobs: neither a construction worker nor a babysitter can be trusted if they're using cocaine —and, on the contrary, both examples may endanger the lives of others.

This is a short news item but some of the details are telling: one police officer asks another if he looks okay —while high on cocaine— as he is about "to go to daycare", presumably to pick up (or drop off) his own child. The other police officer tells him, in reply, to keep his sunglasses on, to conceal his "cocaine eyes".

The problem is more profound than anyone wants to admit to themselves: people leading meaningless lives will risk them for practically nothing at all —for the mere semblance of purpose and meaning brought about by the pursuit of a chemically-induced high.

This is short term gratification that comes at the cost of a real commitment: anyone playing with cocaine (let alone meth, fentanyl, etc.) is aware that they will not grow old. One way or another, they will not experience old age before death.

What happens when workplace cocaine use isn't just a problem in the construction industry, but in the law enforcement industry… quite possibly in each and every industry? Everyone already knows, unless we choose not to know.

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn-4epTZEDA

Fear of Failure: the life of the body, the life of the mind.

I do not want to pester my patreon supporters with a notification for each and every "short" uploaded… HOWEVER…

It's not your fault, but it is your problem. #nepal

 

An especially poignant "short" covering the full gamut, from global warming to the breakup with Melissa.

LINK: https://youtube.com/shorts/CniEpHzKtNk

Cocaine Iceberg: Newfoundland.

 

Okay, just this once, I'm gonna say it:

SHARE THE LINK WITH ALL YOUR FRIENDS.

LINK: https://youtu.be/wi-UD3Cr8Fk

Plutarch 02: Romulus and the Rape Culture of Rome.

If the title is too shocking for you, keep in mind: they don't exactly call it "the arranged marriage of the Sabine women."

LINK: https://youtu.be/rDGURRn5kV0

Lindsay Clancy: Antidepressants Don't Work.

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7pEjjuYKBY

What Melissa had to say FIVE YEARS AGO today.

Really bizarre listening to this again today.

(It's a monologue from Melissa: aside from one sentence in the intro, I'm not a part of the video.)

LINK: https://youtu.be/hXZk6MAGy9A

Uploaded September 4th, 2021 —and today is September 5th, 2026.

Micro-Fame: all of the disadvantages of fame, none of the advantages.

Leave it to the U.S. Department of Justice to bury the lead in reporting a story like this: Farhan Jami will spend 46 months in prison after setting fire to a car… https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdoh/pr/new-york-man-sentenced-prison-possessing-incendiary-device-he-ignited-near-victims

…the car in question having been parked in the front driveway of a "Twitch Streamer", i.e., a woman who records and uploads herself while playing video games in revealing attire.

I am sure it stretches the limits of credulity for you to imagine, dear reader, that this woman chooses to live under the name JustFoxii.

There are some women who are so beautiful that they effortlessly receive more male attention than they can manage their whole lives long: it is significant to observe that JustFoxii here is not one of them. She is a woman who is, instead, putting in a huge amount of effort to create a barely-convincing illusion of natural beauty. If I met her at the gym, I would honestly consider her to be Hoyle's Rules ugly, with or without that makeup on.

Alas, ugliness is no defense against the savage instincts of intellectually unsophisticated men: Farhan Jami drove 700 miles, lit this fire, and then --exhausted-- fell asleep in his own car immediately afterward, just to express his jealousy after discovering that this woman had a boyfriend. His defense lawyer attempted to make this seem reasonable by claiming that Farhan had sent her a significant amount of money and then, in retrospect, after the existence of the boyfriend was revealed, regarded this transaction as a scam. https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/butler-county/monroe/man-who-tried-to-bomb-car-in-monroe-was-jilted-by-woman-he-met-on-internet-attorney-says

Gone are the days when such a man might be expected to write a poem, I suppose.

I would remind you: unbeknownst to me, Melissa gave Abhishek our home address so that he could send gifts to her. Melissa was hoping to receive lavish gifts from him, although not strictly speaking (quid pro quo) in exchange for the nude photographs and videos she'd been sending to him. She got a Kindle Paperwhite out of it. And, yes, at various times, she had the paranoid fear that Abhishek would somehow use his knowledge of her address to harm her. Of course, he could have used his knowledge of the address to harm me. He didn't.

Nobody with a brain wants fame: whatever it is you want to accomplish, fame is either an obstacle separating you from it or an unintentional consequence along the way. Fame does not enable the accomplishment of anything —not even the playing of video games.

I have talked about this with some of the local comedians: if what they want to do is write comedy, etc., this whole business of becoming famous (on the internet or in real life) is a massively counterproductive digression from the task at hand. It may really prevent you from doing the very thing you'd imagined you'd become famous for.

However, what the internet offers most people is not fame, but micro-fame: a situation in which they suffer all the disadvantages of fame with none of the advantages. That was my situation before I'd met Melissa, and now, again, after we have parted company.

The world begins with you and ends with you as well: instinct, evolution, nihilism.

[A reply to a message sent in from a member of the audience.]

Well, I've got bad news for you: (1) you're insane and (2) you're probably always going to be insane.

There's absolutely no advice I can offer that would help you.

Human beings are "the creation of" evolution: you need to deal with the implications of evolution as a biological process over millions of years.

And you have to see the uncomfortable reality of human beings living in apartments and animals living in zoos within that million-year-spanning context.

Whatever you imagine ancient philosophers would say on the subject doesn't matter much at all, does it?  That's just something you've made up in your own mind to suit your own interests --even if (paradoxically) it is merely in your interest to make yourself feel guilty about aspects of your own instincts that you cannot control.

The world's history begins again with you: every man's birth is the year zero --and there is nothing Anaximander or Aristotle could say that would help you with your struggles against human nature in any way whatsoever --not even if an archaeologist could now dig up a (heretofore unknown) text that answered precisely the question you've been asking me.

You can hate yourself for being an animal (for being a product of millions of years of evolution) or you can learn to make the most of it: you're an animal, but this doesn't mean you're limited to being an animal only.  You can be far more than a mere animal, but the "more" that you accomplish (through self-discipline and the creative use of your imagination) doesn't make you any less of an animal than a marmoset or a mandrill.

You are not a fictional angel: you are not a fictional character from an ancient (and idiotic) text.  You are not a soul trapped in a body made of flesh, nor are you a good person trapped inside a bad one.  There is no rational core surrounded by irrational impulses: everything you despise as an instinct is who and what you really are.

You cannot become some philosopher's ideal of what human nature could be or should be: you will never be half-man and half-hallowed-abstraction --you will always be entirely a man and entirely an animal.  Entirely: not half of one and half of the other.  In your own experience, in one lifetime, you will exhaust the remit of human nature and exhaust the remit of animal nature as well, leaving nothing undone or unknown in the remainder.

In this sense, the world begins with you and ends with you as well.

The divine mystery is human laziness: where people stop thinking, stop living, stop learning --beyond that unmarked barrier is god --and his power consists entirely of your ignorance, your lack of curiosity.  The more diffident you are the more sacred this world seems: your unthinking conformity to the accumulated idiocy of past generations is the consecration of that darkness --and my nihilism deconsecrates the world with an unwelcome dawn --a dazzling and discomforting light.