Welcome to RC Roundup #3! Let’s get into it:
There are a lot of “Municipal Water employee here, and that ackshually a sewer!” replies to the tweet above, but even if that particular pipe is not a water main, I’ve seen plenty of water mains with that amount of buildup as well as oxidation pulled out of the ground regularly. I work on many water distribution upgrade projects that involve the installation of a new main coupled with the removal of the old one and let me tell you, some of the stuff that gets pulled out of the ground is from the Coolidge administration (sometime older tbh. The oldest I’ve seen removed was from 1909) and would give you some World War One disease if you brushed against it. Our tap water, at least in California, is fucked and that’s without even mentioning the added fluoride.
Psi: I have this really good friend who is the biggest coffee snob I know. I’ve learned a ton from him, he’s the type to drop a few hundred on a random coffee gadget no problem. I enjoy connoisseur endeavors myself, and quite respect a nice cup of coffee, but this guy’s on another level. However, when I asked him “what water though?” with respect to brewing, he replied “oh I just use tap water, it’s pretty good here”. He lives in SF lol.
Glen’s anecdote got me thinking about dissolving illusions book — how if just providing basic plumbing was enough to solve most diseases, imagine if we had the best of both worlds — clean water and sewer system, but actually provided clean filtered water free of fluoride or other wackiness. Humanity would probably ascend immediately.
Glen: Also if you knew your water came from a place like this, do you think the Brita water filter on your kitchen counter that you paid $24.99 for is going to get rid of all that disgusting nonsense? I don’t. In California, we have places that specialize in refillable gallon jugs of reverse osmosis water that my wife and I go to every other week. It’s kind of a pain in the ass lugging all that water around, but it’s really tough for me to drink anything else at this point and if you’re going to get picky about anything, why not the thing that you literally can’t live without and that your body is made of? I highly recommend RO water and possibly trace minerals that you can add back into your pure water (after all, if the filter works that good, then even the good stuff gets filtered out)
Side note: I understand not every state has the pure water businesses that I mentioned. If you have Natural Grocers in your area, a lot of them offer a reverse osmosis refill service. Also that store is awesome, anyways (Psi: this is literally what I do)
I’ve been listening to Roxy Music’s Avalon on repeat lately and man, what an album. One of the best things that ever happened to that group was Brian Eno’s departure. I’m a fan of Brian Eno, but I’m not entirely sure Roxy was the proper vehicle for his odd style and I much prefer his work with David Bowie in Berlin or even the Windows start up sound. Eno left right before Roxy’s amazing 1975 album Siren and it felt like some brave soul stepped in and got Monsanto out of American agriculture. Siren just sounds more natural and no one feels compelled to get weirder than a few tastefully placed synth solos and spoken word stuff. It’s just pounding drums, groovy basslines, and crooning from the great Bryan Ferry.
But what about Avalon? Avalon starts with a seminal eighties classic, More Than This, which sounds like a new wave Elvis song. It’s emotional but still has a Bret Easton Ellis Less Than Zero- like detachment and coldness to it and is such a breathtaking switch up of sounds from previous Roxy albums, especially when you factor in that it would be their last one. The Space Between is a song that is basically a Pacific Coast Highway 1 drive at dusk in a convertible personified, and The Main Thing showcases another skill that Roxy has that few bands are able to master: The voice as a texture. Bryan Ferry hardly says anything on the song and I have no idea what the lyrics are despite listening to the song over 100 times, but that doesn’t matter in the slightest. Ferry’s voice is an instrument that really ties the room together and the whole album sounds like how Jackie Treehorn looks.
Have you seen the movie Inception? Remember the part where everyone’s learning how to construct dreamscapes, and if you start acting weird all the subconscious NPCs in your dream start attacking you like they’re white blood cells? I’m starting to get this feeling living in Portland. For the record, in real life I’m pretty non-confrontational; if I get into some random conversation where it’s easier to pretend to agree with N95 masks for covid or whatever, I’ll do it. I used to be the opposite way, always speaking my mind over any red-pill topic lol. These days, I’d rather keep the peace, of course, exceptions would be being real with anyone I truly care about.
But lately, I feel like the people in this town just know I’m not one of the “good ones”. Uhh where should we move, I’m soliciting advice lol. Even when I stay silent or play the role perfectly, it works less and less these days. The white blood cells know. This town is weird, man, and yes for all the reasons most people assume, but also just the extremely judgmental nature of the average citizen. My girlfriend and I love to go on NextDoor and laugh at all the threads/comments. Don’t you dare have your dog off-leash for one second, or 65 angry people will rant about you on that app. BUT if you’re concerned about a homeless guy sleeping in the bus stop your kids use every day, get ready for an assault of comments claiming you’re actually a bad person and hate people with mental issues. Yes these are real examples.
I’ve always had a bit of a hangup with this comic that later became a big time leftist meme. On one hand, there are many things in society that are systemic and show little signs of slowing down or changing in the slightest i.e. Bill Gates reign, the technocracy, and the rapidly declining parity of cost of living and wages. But what makes me mad is when people applied the logic in this meme to issues that were clearly a matter of personal decision, like covid protocol. When the mask mandates were in place, many people didn’t want to wear the masks but felt that they should just go along with it to avoid confrontation. People also added the caveat of “Well even if I don’t wear the mask, I’m just one person and that just a drop in the bucket” which is where the harm of this logic rears its ugly head. You are one person, but you’re also the penguin that gets shoved in the water to see if the water is swimmable and safe. Once one person shows courage, the others follow and the same logic went in to the covid vaccines (“Bro first of all, the harm in the vax is the profit, not the ingredients. Also if I opt out and no one joins me, what good is that?").
People find out all the disgusting things that are in our food and still slop it up willingly because they feel that their participation in all of this doesn’t really matter. Yes it’s true that we cannot change the way food is produced by massive corporations, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t always look for ways to avoid these disgusting additives and methods of production. On RC, we have focused on things that people can change on their own like water and food consumption, screen addiction, and much more, because it seems like nothing more than a deflection tactic to point at a mammoth systemic issue that we know we can’t change and use it as an excuse to live like a scumbag. Let’s just be honest with ourselves and acknowledge our unwillingness to make a change for the better. Let’s focus on what we can control instead of the insurmountable.
Make sure you’re not missing out on any of our premium content. We just released volume 6 in our Gain of Fiction series “No Country for Old Men”. We release those every other week and we fill in the gaps with The Glen Word and bonus RC episodes.
Also make sure you listen to our latest free episode “12 Monkeys” with the King of Vibes, Eben
Everybody have a safe week