PREGNANT #1

CULTS, DUNG, JUNGLE SURVIVAL, GOD

Hey, welcome to PREGNANT #1, thanks for subscribing!

I’ve been lazily cataloging and posting content I happen upon through my work and other research I do outside of it on my Instagram account for a while now, but there’s so much I find that I want to share but don’t really feel like IG is the correct venue for it. 

After kicking around ideas of how to contain and present all of the assorted shit that I happen upon, I landed on doing a newsletter so I can round up all the fragments on a regular basis - maybe the format will mutate in the future but who knows. 

So without future ado, thank you for subscribing and I look forward to birthing some of the stuff occupying my brain for you guys.

CULTS

I stumbled on a post yesterday that hit pretty different on R/Qanoncasulties The gist of the post was the person has long suspected her dad of becoming a QAnon truther because he was always saying stuff like “everything’s going to be ok” whenever she’d talk about world issues with him until she broached the subject and he let her have it with Frazzledrip and Michelle Obama is trans and so on. In a ballsy move, she had now just told her dad that she was worried about him because he was in a cult and he just smirked and said “I’d love to know who brainwashed you”.

I'm still in the suspecting but not yet confirmed point with my dad, I haven’t spoke with him about it but he’s been dropping hints that he's a "baker" for years now. My mom offhandedly mentioned a podcast he listens to which I looked into and their podcast has a dedicated “Q Drops” section of the site with live Twitter updates. So even if he is ignorant of QAnon (I doubt it) the content he is constantly consuming (wears headphones like 10 hours a day) is at very least Q-Adjacent.

From the apocalyptic and suicidal pro-Zionism of 2000s Evangelicalism all the way to the modern day QAnon digital soldiers, I think is a direct line you can draw from one to the other. They share a lot of members, and that’s pretty unsurprising as they both have a sense of community, the lightest touch of religious content, and constant practice of moving the goalposts as prophecies fail to materialize while internal contradictions undermine the narrative.

My dad becoming an evangelical at the end of the 90s was definitely the beginning of all this as his intensity and dedication to protecting Israel so the end of the world could start there, distaste for secular media (aside from Skinny Puppy, strangely), and his sudden decision that celebrating Halloween was sacrilegious all mirror the brand of intensity and dedication I see in his defense of the forbidden knowledge he now holds.

I happened upon an @IAMDUNG - the social media of Delena Christ through browsing the #diarrhea hashtag on TikTok because I’m a mentally healthy person. The posted video featured a super cheery woman excitedly talking about putting hot sauce on a piece of shit and eating it.

After I laughed for a bit, I looked more into Delena’s IAMDUNG project and I’m glad I did because there’s quite a bit to dig through. 

Quoting the about page on the site:  
“Welcome to IAMDUNG.com a site christened by God to establish the Ministry of Dung and the teachings of The True Gospels The Great Teachings as dictated by Delena Christ. It is through the unified body of all Active Reciprocal Elements as exemplified by Yeshua who perfectly demonstrated the crucifixion without judgements of others or himself and performed an absolute example of NO EGO be it sustaining or absorbing. We are all a humble mudslide of IAMDUNG representatives magnified through the one IAMDUNG mouthpiece on earth and together we form one body to promote Gods Commandments and message of SALVATION.” 

So basically Delena eats poop, makes literal shit sandwiches on a George Foreman grill, and rubs feces on her face with the end goal of killing her ego and reaching some kind of transcendence. 

I’ve been reading up on Bataille in preparation for a class coming up in July taught by Justin Murphy and Nina Power on the subject so maybe it’s just fresh in my mind but this practice strikes me as a limit experience insofar as eating poop seems like one of the most boundary destroying practices one could take up and I think it's interesting that Delena is ingesting poop as a means to reach an ecstatic state. 

So who knows, maybe my brain is atrophied from quarantine but I feel like there’s something there. Also, check out Delena's interview with the ghosts of Steve Jobs and Michael Jackson.
I also enjoyed this Cuck Philosophy video on Hellraiser and limit experiences and think you might as well.
 

JUNGLE SURVIVAL

Not to be mental illness guy online, but quarantine has definitely ramped up my millennial-style anxiety to hecking chonker levels and has in turn caused me to search out new ways of soothing my fried brain. The most recent, and effective way I’ve found is watching the “Jungle Survival” genre on YouTube for hours at night, off a couple edibles. 

Now I’m not referring to the Man VS. Wild genre, I’m referring to a specific strain of videos that are coming out of SE Asia and feature fellas creating fanciful homes, tunnels, and swimming pools in jungle environments using basically just their hands and stuff they find in the jungle. 

Here’s a collection of my favorite videos in this genre for you to soothe your quarantine brain with.

I’m not a particularly religious person, but I grew up in the episcopal church and I’ve been toying with the idea of participating in religion in some capacity again, especially over the last few months. I’ve really enjoyed Chat for God because it talks about Christianity and faith from a much more honest and relatable place than any religious content I’ve experienced before. 

I’ve been a fan of Justin Murphy’s body of work for a while now - Based Deleuze and Other Life podcast are both great and I think his larger project of creating community across various online niches - specifically highlighting weirdos and heterodox voices is admirable. But in Chat for God, the other host - Ashley Christlover is the standout for me. I really appreciate her views on faith and life as a self described “invalid” who has lived very near death with serious health issues for an extended period of time. 

The second episode How We Found God (Retardedness is Next to Godliness) centers around Justin and Ashley’s very different paths toward faith, but also focuses a bit on the “demonic” culture of podcasting and social media - always-on, always quick witted, and always having a take on everything. Religious terminology aside, I think their assessment is correct and the alternative they advocate for: “retardedness,” or the rejection of this dominant mode of self presentation in favor of a slower way of relating to information, the world, and faith rings true. 

Everyone is so preoccupied with having a stance at the speed of the internet, but it seems like in the rush to formulate their takes they end up with very similar conclusions and thought feels pretty homogeneous online as a result.