The Artemivsk-Bakhmut Radius

I can prove quite conclusively to you, within about an hour or two, less if you are a bit less brainwashed, and if you can do basic math, that the lives of the so-called “rich and famous” are a complete and utter pit of despair.

All you need to do is browse CDAN (Crazy Days and Nights) and scroll down the blog, reading the entries. If after about an hour or so of doing that and doing a quick mental guesstimate of the number of glitterati there are in the pool from which that litany of despair is taken, you will soon realise that the toll one needs to pay to enter that club is —literally— at minimum, a piece of your soul, and in many, even most cases, the entirety of it.

What CDAN does, above all, in my opinion, is list very clearly, the resulting human wreckage that a life dedicated to hedonistic materialism produces.

Most of those people are so far gone, so utterly lost, that a homeless guy who is not a drug-addict has a better shot at making a happy life for himself.

I knew this at a relatively young age, and then confirmed it when I was offered certain “tickets” to do with being involved in a tv documentary-series at various points and/or a film, both based on my book The Face on Mars. I was 26 at the time and even before these “offers” came in, I had already seen the effect of being an author with books on the shelves of the local bookshops had on “friends” and acquaintances.

The interviews I did for television and radio were absolutely geared to turn the whole thing into clickbait, and since I’m a pretty quick study and I realised the interviewer was trying to take the approach of letting me run my mouth to then edit things in some tinfoil hat fashion, I very quickly reverted to one word answers and mini-sound bytes. the result was they could not make me sound crazy, so they did what a friend of mine at the time suggested they would do, jokingly.

I explained to him the interview was a hit piece and they would try hard to make me look insane, and he laughed and said, “yeah they may morph you into an alien on TV! ha, ha, ha.”

Well, that is exactly what they did, I kid you not. When the interview aired, at one point they fade my face out and gradually faded a gray alien head over it. My friend and I couldn’t believe it and laughed ourself to tears. I was 26 and I didn’t care for these people or their lies.

An outfit that was supposed to do a 13 part documentary had only to produce an outline of the 13 part documentary, I had already lined up an investor for them and this was all they wanted. They had 2 months to do it. They produced 2 pages of incoherent A4 where they had also screwed up the major premise. I advised the investor to not deal with these clowns.

Graham Hancock plagiarised large parts of the book as well as its main concept and still got the basic premise wrong. It’s like… steal Ferrari’s plans for a fast engine and still build a crappy Mini Morris one. They aren’t even good thieves. The guy who wrote the original comics on which the film The Matrix is based more than a little, will tell you the same thing.

Elvis didn’t write his songs, though I like how he sings them, and so do many others. Everything in the entertainment world is basically a lie. And usually also very gay; when it’s not also pedophile infested.

Graham Hancock certainly made a lot more money than I ever will from my work, with “his” stolen, then half-assed-executed ideas. And sure, that can irk a person somewhat, but you know what, when I confronted him face to face on it in Cape Town, his demeanour was the one of an apologetic, scared, cardboard-cut-out of a “man”. He apologised, blamed his ghost-writers and “complimented” me on my astonishing and brilliant work. He was a middle-aged journalist of supposed world-renowned fame, I was I think 27 at the time, had little or no money and did karate on an almost daily basis and worked as an armed bodyguard/security specialist and sold computers now and then when I could.

And I wouldn’t have traded his life for mine for any amount of money on the planet. I could then, and I still can now, look in the mirror and know that whatever errors I made in life, they were honest ones, and that despite all my faults, and they are many, I, at least, did not become whatever subspecies of cowardly, underhanded, sneaky, slithering animal people like that become. My brother and others were more enraged than I ever was by such occurrences. Which makes sense. They saw only the surface loss of what generally gets perceived as money, fame, and glory.

But I got to see the people that supposedly had or created this money, fame and glory. And this is what I saw, time and again:

The fame was a net negative. People wanted to be with you, whether as friends or sex partners, based on your fame. They had no idea, who you are, nor cared. the scary thing about this was that it wasn’t limited to gold-digging whores. In fact it was something that affected roughly the same percentage of people that decided to take the genetic serum or buy into the lie of the rona. Men wanted to be my friend and women wanted to bear my children, because I had a book on the shelves of the local book shops and did signing events. Or because they heard me interviewed on the radio or saw me on TV in the UK or, the USA, or in one case, saw my book briefly on CNN apparently (I never saw it myself but several people told me they had in a brief mention).

What becomes absolutely obvious then is that most human beings do not live, love, or care about the person they are with, perhaps marry and even have children with. No. They do not. They care about the idea about them they have in their head of them. Or they later end up hating the idea they have about them in their head. It is absolutely rare that they even glimpse the reality of who or what you are even if you spend decades with them.

In the modern era, this “disease” is a lot worse than it ever was in the past before television, the internet and mobile brainwashing and attention destroying machines we call “phones”.

Seeing this firsthand, noticing a girl you might have thought of as attractive and even intelligent if you had met her under different circumstances, and then noting how she is so transparently offering herself as some kind of sacrificial sex toy, purely in order to have the “thrill” of having had a “famous” person inside her, well… I know I am the minority perhaps in this, but I assure you, it is depressing. It destroys a certain aspect of innocence that makes life easier and more beautiful, and is hard to live happily without.

And that’s just the “fame” part.

And if you did sleep with such a girl, chances are, that after a while (or maybe only after minutes if you’re no good in bed) she would too feel empty, and disappointed, and lacklustre, because her fantasy of who you are and how her life might become is a fairy tale. As much as the one you might have told yourself if you’d met her as a nobody at a party and saw how pretty and quick-witted she appeared. Only to realise later it was just a facade, she is not smart, or quick-witted, she just learnt a routine of things to do and say at parties.

That, right there, the shabby feeling of mild despair that grows on you if you do take the ticket, if you do reach for the “glory”? That is the real “glory”.

The fame makes you a cartoon caricature and the glory turns out to be dust and emptiness. I at least was wise enough to not indulge in either.

The money sure can be useful, but it invariably comes with those two strings attached, and no amount of money on the planet is worth that. Not to me anyway.

It is possible, to get at least some of the money and dodge the “fame” and the “glory” and if you are smart, you can even manage a certain level of “fame” in a way that it doesn’t harm you, but it takes uncommon firmness of mind, courage, and not a little luck, or fate, or divine providence, whatever you choose to call it. In short, it is very rare, and probably has a cost anyway, as all roads do.

All of these despairing things, are made a thousand or a million times worst if you are alone in it all. Even family and close friends can turn, like zombies in a horror movie, becoming infected and turning on you with those soulless, dead eyes. Imagine your own parents or children becoming swallowed by the despair and materialism of “fame” and “glory”, or, much more often, your wife, or husband.

And where, in a world like the one of today, do you find a wife or husband that is not ready to jump neck-deep into the mire of “fame” and “glory” given a half a chance? Especially for those who grew up with the internet as a done thing?

There is no easy answer, but I assure you that whatever difficulties I faced or will face in life, I would always choose them over the ones that come with Hollywood level “fame” and “glory”.

I made my life an exercise in living between the cracks and not getting caught by what Vadim Zeland calls “Pendulums”, and just to be safe, I never tried to “transurf” the waves more than a tiny little bit here or there, (long before I read anything Vadim wrote) because in this game of life, one big wipeout is enough to reduce you to shark-food. And even as it is, I took my wipeouts, and they were hard enough, and perhaps many would not have survived them, but I did; again, by my will, but also a lot of divine providence and grace, which the lost often call luck or fate.

My problem has always been the same one.

My DNA, as far back as I can find information on my ancestors, has the curiosity of the explorer in it, and the fearlessness of the fool. It is a dangerous combination, and I do not advise it to anyone. I certainly hope my son is wiser than I was, but already, I see in him, the brutal honesty he has with himself, the fearlessness in the face of danger, at times due to innocence, and other times due to calculated observation. And the calm, considered, approach to things that might be dangerous, which he has not yet investigated.

How to guide such a boy?

There is no simple or clear path, because these are the qualities of a man, and ultimately, as men know, we are born alone, and we die alone, and every choice we make, every effort, every despair, every victory and every crushing defeat, is ours, and ours alone, no matter who loves us and may help us, or who hates us and may try to destroy us. All we can rely on is providence, God’s grace and our tiny, but eternal flame of faith inside ourselves, regardless of if we know it exists in there or not. He has it, and perhaps all I can do is try to make him aware of it consciously. Maybe, if I can help him be less mute than I have been to myself, he might be able to more readily rely on that fire in the centre of his heart even when he is alone and tired and scared, and I am no longer around to do what I can.

Maybe, if I train him even as I play with him, he can learn to roll with the punches of life and pop up nearby and unexpectedly, and turn things to his advantage then too.

And above all, I hope I can do a good job of showing him the decay and deceit and lies and illusion of “fame” and “glory” and instead choose the real Glory of, and for, God, and Honour, and the ones you Love. And to know fame is a lying whore riddled with disease and fancy clothes, and make-up; and real fame is the trust and loyalty of your friends and your loved ones, and nothing else compares.

And hopefully, in the Fake New World that is being prepared for him, either we are able to collapse the shit out of it before it gets off the ground, or there will in any case remain a way for him to navigate the “pendulums” and “surf” the “waves” remaining as best as possible, untouched by the filth of the sewage from which they are formed.

The lives of the “rich and famous” are a preview of the Hell that awaits us all if we don’t wake up and return to what really matters: The virtues of Truth, Honesty, Honour, Fortitude, Courage, and Faith.

Except it will be worse for you will not even have the villas and the retinue of concubines and the drugs, because you will not even have the money to distract you from the despair.

So.

Choose your path wisely, friend, and support that which is real, and see through that which is fake, and gay, and Satanic.