Adam > Recent Status Updates

Why did half a grass fed hog have to arrive at our doorstep the same day I read the hog slaughter chapter? #illuminaticonfirmed

Just read "Communion of Saints: The Dawn of a LLM New Age" in Harper's magazine, and realized the Techniques of Ecstasy featured in Shamanism are in fact not that Archaic.
https://harpers.org/archive/2026/11/c...

"Either you look at the universe as a very poor creation out of which no one can make anything or you look at your own life and your own part in the universe as infinitely rich, full of inexhaustible interest opening out into the infinite further possibilities for study and contemplation and interest and praise."

"There are three acts in a man's life which no one should advise him either to do or not to do. The first is to contract matrimony, the second is to go the wars, and the third is to visit the Holy Sepulcher. These things are all good in themselves, but they may turn out ill, in which case he who gave the advice will be blamed as if he were the cause of it"
-Eberhard I of Württemberg, 15th century pilgrim

This is wild:
"Several pilgrims had been drowned at Sorde, where travelers and their horses were ferried across the river on hollowed out tree trunks. Other rivers were undrinkable, like the salt stream at Lorca, where the author of the Guide found two Basques earning their living by skinning the horses who had died after drinking from it."

Getting serious Derrida vibes at different moments. Wonderful thus far, and indicative that my mental processes are still mutable.

"'Wandering is an ineradicable habit of the Irish race,' observed a ninth-century monk of St.-Gall."

I've never felt so understood in entire my life...

"When we face the vanity of our best efforts, their triviality, their involvement in illusion, we become desperate. And then we are tempted to do anything as long as it seems to be good. We may abandon a better good with which we have become disillusioned, and embrace a lessor one with a frenzy that prevents us from seeing the greater illusion."

"People are constantly trying to use you to help them create an illusion by which they live. Especially various collective illusions."

"Meanwhile I have a hard time appearing cheerful and sociable. I can't say I've tried too hard, either. Complete disgust with the stupid mentality we cultivate in our monasteries. Deliberate cult of frustration and nonsense. Professional absurdity. Isn't life absurd enough already without our adding to it our own fantastic frustrations and stupidities?"
:)

On Napoleon:
"Never to the end of his life could he understand goodness, beauty, or truth, or the significance of his actions which were too contrary to goodness and truth, too remote from everything human, for him ever to be able to grasp their meaning. He could not disavow his actions, belauded as they were by half the world, and so he had to repudiate truth, goodness, and all humanity.”

"Dear God, how was it possible? How had I, with the wings of youth and poetry, come to this? Art and travel and the glow of ideals--and now this! How had this paralysis of hatred against myself and everyone else, this obstruction of all feeling, this mud-hell of an empty heart and despair crept over me so softly and so slowly?"

Finally reading this one after years of being prejudice against Kerouac because of Bukowski, having now lived long enough to damn well form my own dislikes.