Tractatus Tabico-Philosophicus

"What does it all mean?" —De La Soul

November 3rd, 2021

1.

Elijah Wood is an actor best known for his star turn in 1998’s “The Faculty” along with Josh Hartnett and a pre-Daily Show Jon Stewart, but he also appeared as some kind of agrarian Munchkin in a New Zealand adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s unbearably boring fantasy travelogue “The Lord of the Rings.” Now he’s gotten himself mixed up with an NFT project featuring art by a former Hustler cartoonist whose past work is incredibly racist (CW: incredibly racist past work)1 and whose current work includes Nazi iconography. What does this all mean? I don’t know! Are we here in an attempt to wrestle meaning from any of this? I certainly hope not because I can’t find any.

2.

Should we look for meaning in the uncut chaos of the season finale of the New York mayoral race, with Curbed staking out mayor-elect Eric Adams’s alleged Brooklyn residence in a doomed last-ditch attempt to ascertain whether he even lives in the city, while the mayor-elect himself was “headed to the private club Zero Bond in NoHo, where he stayed past midnight in a room with CEOs, models, the rapper Bobby Shmurda and actor Forest Whitaker?” Where the b-plot was Curtis Sliwa trying to bring Gizmo (one of his between fifteen and thirty six rescue cats) in to vote with him and then yelling at a poll worker who wanted him to take off his campaign jacket?

3.

We could go to the NYC NFT conference, headquartered at the Times Square Margaritaville naturally, and holler “Monkey Jizz was a rug pull!” and be reasonably sure that most of the people in earshot would understand us. Would that feel meaningful? Would we have forged a connection with humanity?

"Are you ready to enter the jungle," the honeypot's website, monkeyjizz.life, and its Twitter account read before going offline. The project promised “improved jizzing speeds…”

Do you find meaning in the prospect of improved jizzing speeds, or, conversely, in the confirmation that improved jizzing speeds were always an illusion? Let’s have a computer make up some sneakers.

4.

John F. Kennedy Jr., Kobe Bryant, Debbie Reynolds and Dale Earnhardt all failed to appear in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza yesterday, which in one sense makes it exactly the same as every other day. But in another sense the presence of “hundreds of QAnon followers from across the country” expecting them to appear marks the day out as different somehow, although I’m at a loss to explain how or why.

5.

There’s a triangular hole in the Pacific Ocean named Vostock Island, the body of a 98 year old Covid victim was sold to a private company and “ended up in a Portland Marriott hotel ballroom as the centerpiece of an autopsy and dissection before a live, paying audience,” and the following objectively true paragraph was published in Bloomberg about the disgraced founder of a chain of pizza restaurants:

He says he wanted to avoid building “an ostentatious four-story house,” which is why much of his was built into a slope and can’t be seen from the road. He has his project manager walk me around to the side, where we enter a tunnel designed to look like a centuries-old Italian streetscape. It leads to the subterranean garage where Schnatter parks his three vintage Chevrolet Camaro Z28s. There Schnatter reappears and leads me through a door back into the house. We head to his gym, a cavernous room decorated with wall-to-wall memorabilia documenting his rise as a pizza mogul, and to an old-timey movie theater where he watches football. Then we climb the circular staircase up to the foyer, the centerpiece of which is a 16-foot-tall sculpture of two eagles descending from the sky, mating. “It just speaks to me,” he says, gazing up at it. “I think it’s badass.”

Is any of this gelling for anyone? Any of this coming together to form a gestalt of any kind? You know who had the most reasonable take I’ve seen on the election results yesterday? Naming efficiency enthusiast and newsprint assassin Erick Erickson. Heartbreaking.

6.

The first pictures of the hull of the big stuck boat are out, and Georgia O’Keeffe could never:

7.

So what does all of this mean?

Today’s Song: Green Day, “Good Riddance (Time of your Life)”

~ you open up the tab, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to ~

What means the most to me is you, reading this newsletter. But what means a close second-most is you choosing to subscribe to this newsletter. Whereof one cannot tweet, thereof one must be silent.

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